Passover vs. Holy Week
April 2, 2010
On 3/28, several Transmissioners attended the Interfaith Seder, sponsored by Faith House. It was quite a lovely event, well-attended and well-prepared. One thing came to me upon reflection that I wanted to discuss with you, a fundamental difference between the traditions that I hadn’t realized before. In the Jewish tradition, the Exodus is a story of the Jewish people, and it seems to unify as it reminds the people of their history, and of the God who delivers them. Holy Week varies in that we are not celebrating the history of our people. We are remembering the history of ONE person, and it is not a history that we can exactly share. When rabbis tell the story of the exodus at synagogues, they are telling the people their own story, but when priests get up at church this week, they’ll be telling the story of a far more enigmatic character. Although Christian, I don’t feel like Christ’s death is MY history.
So there seems to be a fundamental difference in the sentiments being created by these two remembrances. One tells a people their shared history of survival through the will of God. The other tells a people of the survival of their God, in SPITE of the will of the people. Strange, huh? Both reveal that God is more powerful a force than death and oppression, but in very different ways… Anybody else have any thoughts on the difference between these two?
2 Responses to “Passover vs. Holy Week”
I think it’s important to remember that the early Christians understood Christ’s death in relation to the passover story and told the two stories alongside each other. When Christ was portrayed as the Paschal Lamb, it was as the sacrifice of joy made each Passover for deliverance from oppression. Both stories are about the little guy (moses, hebrew slaves, jesus, the disciples) going up against an overwhelming power (egypt, rome) and winning through trickery.
Moses: Hey, Pharoah, let us go out in the wilderness for a few days for, you know, a religious festival. We’ll come right back, honest. Wink wink.
Jesus: You can kill me, but you can’t keep me in the grave! Ha ha, joke’s on you.
I think it’s very interesting, of course, that the Passion and Resurrection story was seen as a Passover story, not a Yom Kippur story. Notions of sin and atonement didn’t get layered onto the death of Jesus until later. A lot of the Protestant individualism Ula is talking about comes from the refocusing of Christian theology on personal salvation for personal sin, but this is certainly not the only way to read the story.
Jews tend to read the Passover story while identifying with the Hebrew slaves. For Christians, I think the analogy is to read the Easter story while identifying with the Disciples. From the Disciples’ point of view, this story is all about hope, loss, struggle, and joy.
By Isaac on Apr 2, 2010
Dan, what you wrote is really fascinating, and brilliant, I think.
I will say that one year I attended a Catholic Good Friday service where the congregation was informed by the priest that they were the ones who killed Christ. So, I guess that in that way one might call it the history of a people. (In that case, an on-going history, as we did something that happened 2000 years before we were.) In a way, that may be similar to the seder, where we are told it is as if each of us left Egypt.
In general, though, the rap from Judaism that I was taught, was that traditionally Judaism is about the group, while Protestantism is about the individual. (I was often told that I held ideas that were too Protestant, although more liberal branches of Judaism have more tolerance of individuality.) My “new member” classes before I became baptized bore this out. They emphasized the role of individual conscience in being a Protestant. Becoming a Protestant as a Presbyterian also emphasized the importance of democracy (although a slightly elite one.)
I was quite shocked to find out that many Protestant church movements are not very democratic (I mean not even democratic on paper.) And that I often found myself afoul of “the group” – but not really THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION – rather the rules and mores of an individual church. I sometimes feel betrayed by this – as if these churches did not read the textbooks on what they are supposed to be… but of course, it sometimes was a Jewish idea of being Protestant that was being denied.
By Ula on Apr 5, 2010