Passover. Why do we observe the strange reverse-feast and partial fast? Much like a number of other feasts, this one is in memoriam for something that was done long ago, but explained much later. This is a way that God shows his knowledge of past, present, and future, and can accomplish his will over generations and terrible people through our eyes.
Passover was first given as a command to the Jews in Egypt. We call them slaves, but have changed the meaning. You yourself are the very same kind of slave. A free-agent with a blank contract, but a necessity to have someone's name on it. You can't be something that isn't a slave, but we were given a choice of whose.
The firstborn children of the Egyptians died on passover; if you care for the science of it, there were a few reasons. People observing the commands were not eating sourdough, and were not sleeping upon their beds. According to what it looks like from a physiological stance, there was a sudden outgassing of the nearby river causing those on beds to suffocate, actually having little to do with the bread being used as the symbol of what's really going on.
God doesn't care about bread, in the same way we do. He cares about the perfect allegory that IS the bread, the grain the bread is made from, and the yeast that rises the bread.
An arrogant man such as myself has become puffed up, leavened, through the yeast that is Sin and an over-fed ego. In the ancient times, all bread dough would be leavened by simply leaving it out to rot. We like to think that's gross now, but it's still what we do. A sourdough Mother, or one for vinegar, for wine, for beer, for anything. Al of these things are the product of purification and disease. The signs are in the fruits - the products - of the work done on behalf of the thing that is leavened. IE; in this case, death. And in the case of myself, nothing. Fruitless endeavors for decades of frustration; a far kinder punishment for ignoring all of the plagues thus far.
And so, far later, Jesus was born. He took upon himself a number of the old ways, but not the ones that were dedicated to other gods. Instead, he took things like the passover, the exodus, Abraham's binding of Issac, and a number of other mysteries, and told the reasons to his friends. Even then, he told them in a manner that only raw faith can comprehend entirely.
So my dumb ass is going to make an attempt to say what I see, to tell what I hear. Jesus brought together the twelve people who he needed to know these things. Not that they were good people - they were all largely agreed not to be. Including by themselves. And they weren't! They were like you an me - all evil, all the time. And he accepted that from them, and saw in his eyes that they were already trying their best, and failing only because they weren't yet in the faith fully. Knowing they needed a few more steps first.
He gathered them to a feast, for passover. And at the time that we would today pray; or if horribly confused pretend that your meal is your God's dead body; he picked up the bread and water and spoke. And that's where we just figure "Oh, God's confusing". I recall reading that God is not the author of confusion. And so I try to unravel what we have done to the languages, rather than change the words on the page to fit today.
"This is my body", was all that need be said about the bread. Because they remember passover. If you are to understand Him, it helps a lot to understand the way he parties. That bread is today painted as loaves, which is sacrilege. He broke a flat, hard piece of matzah. Entirely unleavened, nothing at all but wheat and water and fire. Entirely pure, untainted by leavening. The leavening that puffs up posts like this, and makes the writer look better than it is. Makes the loaf seem more filling than it is. My lies are all pretty, as any of ours. And so I warn, there is necessarily a bit of leaven within these very words. Because they are words from a man. And so you look to Jesus and the scripture First, and Last. And give it no arguments.
He had a glass of water; and to show a number of things. Firstly, that there is to be a new covenant, not of the law but the blood. And again, we have perverted this so badly. Blood is thicker than water is the point here; and even THAT we have destroyed. Here is the full sentence; "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". You were born of the thin nothing that is the water from the womb. And now, you are taken into a covenant of blood that is unbreakable. The given family is circumstance only; the chosen and kept family is the Family. And that is why you call no man on earth Father; but only your Father in heaven. Again, those eating the bread as if it was human flesh do tend to refer to the one feeding them as Father, for whatever draw that must hold. I do not pretend to grasp that one.
And so, he took that water, and it was wine. But not of the vine. This is very important and overlooked. This wine was something he turned a lesser thing into. By his own doing. There was no yeast involved; this was not a counterfeit made from the ill-gotten takings of the first fruits of a vine. This was itself the pressing of the first fruits of God's own vine, sacrificed just to You. The same way you are not to take the products of your own labor, until your first fruits have been sacrificed.
That is, work hard and work true, but understand, you do not ever work for You. The feasts are not for no good reason, they aren't for simple celebration, they are not weakly adapted pagan rites. The feasts are the times that God needed to make sure we had ingrained and habituated long before he could actually explain to us what happened. And so today, these are indeed observances. Ones that show that we remember what he taught us.
Even those of us who learned it, loved it, and ultimately used it to draw others astray and harm them. Satan himself is the greatest of Bible scholars and singers. Of course he is. If you had the enemy's playbook, and knew the world knows its true, you'd have a nice weapon in that truth. But you'd have to add in a little leavening, wouldn't you?
So today, as you note that passover is a thing; also note its reasons. Whatever you eat, even if it doesn't go along with the rules for the date, think about what it is and what's going in you, and what the products are. Think about the tiny aspects of what's going on in your existence. And remember that sourdough is delicious - but delicious because it's rotting. We don't comprehend our own very attractive rot.
Does the story make sense this way? Do you grasp what it all is getting at? And do you understand why it is good to be so simple as to never even ask? Learn, that we can simply have faith that when God asks something of us, he knows exactly why he did that. And while it may be for us, and generally is ... he will also use us for far later lessons, or to confirm far earlier ones. He will also use us as any parent would - example lesson for another child for better or worse, a way to show the other children what compassion and love mean ... and the one we forget most - a laugh. He does so frequently joke, and those jokes fall flat if you don't pay attention to the common humor of every Father.
I'll leave on a silly note that has its setup in Genesis and its punchline in Revelation. God gave a name to Moses when he was a burning bush. First off; he was a burning bush. That's funny enough. BUT, when Moses asked to see his face; he showed him his ass instead. The book is very very funny if you read it in a language closer to the source. BUT, more importantly, this odd flame sitting on a bush that didn't seem to bother burning up was just plain absurd - and would you listen to a bush if it wasn't burning? See something that strange talking sense to you, you're going to listen.
So he gives him the name. Kinda. "Ya Ha Wa Hah" - or, "I am.", "I exist", "I live", "I am He who Is", and a number of other similar meanings. The same thing Jesus said of himself. Less a name, more a fully descriptive word. And if you take that word and stack it vertically, you get a little picture of a man. If you take that man's rib and separate it out, you wind up with the punchline.
"You what?" "HAHAH!"
Happy passover. Observe in faith.
