Yesterday at our family-type service we taught on the link between Passover and Communion and then told the story of Good Friday.
I’d done a story type piece about the lead up to the Passover with all the plagues – all the water turning to blood, loads and loads of frog, then loads and loads of gnats followed by flies followed by the Egyptians all getting covered in sores, then covered with boils, then there was a plague of locusts, followed by the daytime turning pitch dark. [Exodus 7-11]
As we were all watching the Lego version of the Crucifixion I had thought.
Jesus is crucified and when the sky goes dark he is recorded of crying out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” [Matthew 27:46].
Common teaching is that Jesus was in so much pain that he felt God had forsaken him. Or that God couldn’t look on what was happening to Jesus and so God did look away. Or that because Jesus was carrying the sins of the world God looked away because they couldn’t look on all that sin. But what if it was connected to the Passover?
In Exodus 10:21-23 if says that God would cover the land of the Egyptians with a darkness so thick they couldn’t see each other but that there would be light where the Israelite’s lived. It was after these three days of darkness that the whole Passover happens with the blood on the lintels and the Angel of death taking the firstborn of all those who didn’t have faith in the blood of the lamb.
At this pivotal moment of what we now know as Holy Week God makes all the sky turn dark and it stays that way for three hours [Matthew 27:45]
We will never know for sure if Jesus really did say these words or something similar. Or maybe they were added by Matthew for part of the narrative he wanted his readers to hold on to. By using these words the Jewish reader will be remembering the Passover story. It is said that Matthew was writing for a Jewish readership. It would remind them that after the sky turned black the lamb was killed and it was the blood of that lamb that brought their salvation from slavery in Egypt.
But here was an even bigger release from an even bigger slavery – from those things within us that keep us from knowing we are loved by the Creator of the Universe, that we are forgiven and that we can trust even when the sky turns black.
We are not forsaken no matter what happens around us.
Aspirational Adventures 