Carl, a Jewish Christian
Rabbi, loves the Feast of Unleavened Bread. His family spends the day
before the feast cleaning the entire house of anything that might have yeast in
it. He and his wife wrap a tiny bit of yeast in a white linen cloth and hide
it, and the child who finds it while they are cleaning, gets a prize. After the
house is all swept out and cleaned, they sit down as a family and talk about
being clean for Yahweh, being pure for Jesus. Carl reminds his family that
Jesus went to the cross because our sin makes us dirty inside and God cannot
have sin in his house, so Jesus takes our sin to the cross and it’s then buried
in the grave with Jesus. They now have a clean house, just like their hearts
and souls are clean and Jesus calls us to keep them clean.
The Feast of Unleavened Bread is one of 3
special feasts where everyone is supposed to show up. Moses tells the people in
Deuteronomy 16, “Three times a year
all your men must appear before the Lord
your God at the place he will choose: at the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the
Festival of Weeks and the Festival of Tabernacles. No one should appear before
the Lord empty-handed.” This
is about sacred, soul shaping, God remembering events for God’s people to
participate in every year, a holy rhythm where God reminds us of who we are and
who we’re called to be.
Jesus is
the bread of life, and God provides us with
the true bread of life. The
Feast of Unleavened Bread is about
remembering God’s deliverance from Egypt and became about purity. In Exodus 12, we are told, “For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On
the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with
yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel.”
God’s not fooling around here. Jesus reminds us of how yeast works in a parable
in Matthew, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a
woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all
through the dough.”
In Matthew
16, Jesus warns that the teaching of the Pharisees is like
yeast, teaching that focused on keeping the Law more than on loving God. It
only takes a little bit of yeast to make hundreds of loaves of bread rise, and
when yeast is used as a symbol of sin, it’s points to how sin spreads through
our hearts and minds, changing us. As one pastor writes, we tell ourselves
that greed, lust, addiction, or even something like persistent perfectionism
where you can’t accept anything without criticism is no big deal, yet these
things continue to grow and grow in us, slowly poisoning our hearts and minds,
breaking relationships. Most of our sin is hidden in our hearts, it’s
secret from others and yet the secretness of it makes it dangerous because it
affects our relationships with each other and God and yet our friends, spouses
and family often wonder what’s going on, not seeing the secret sins we wrestle
with.
Porn leads men and women to see others as
things to be used for our pleasure. Cheating others or the taxman feeds the god
of greed inside ourselves that puts our wants above everyone else. Envy or
jealousy makes it hard to have positive relationships. Anger, lust, and deceit
are all used by Satan to make us feel better about ourselves at the cost of
others, sometimes even to the point of deliberately hurting others. Sin slowly
destroys us from the inside out. This is why having a godly friend or mentor
you can share with is so important.
The Feast
of Unleavened Bread points us to a deep trust
in God to protect us, reminding the people to be ready to respond to God
quickly, but over time, the focus changed. The meaning moved from trust and
readiness to respond to God to pointing us to a life free from the chains of
sin. Yeast became a symbol of decay. People would take a small lump of today’s
dough to use to start tomorrow’s bread and this would continue for quite a
while until the yeast in the dough finally lost its strength to help the dough
rise. The baker would then start with a new batch of yeast. After the
Israelites left Egypt in the Passover, God wanted his people to have a fresh
start spiritually. This is that changing identity thing again from last week.
Being free from slavery is a call to get rid of the decay in our lives that sin
brings. Jesus’ blood washes away our sin on the cross, but that doesn’t mean
that we don’t have a role to play. We’re called to work hard at identifying the
sin in our lives and working to clean it out.
Even a
little sin draws us away from Jesus. The
Feast of Unleavened Bread is a reminder of how even a little sin has great
influence over us. It takes Jesus coming and becoming human just like us to
break down those walls of sin. The cross and the empty grave reminds us of the
heavy cost our sin to Jesus. He knows how helpless we can be in the power of
our sin and this is why he not only washes our sin away, he also sent us the
Holy Spirit to give us the wisdom to recognize our sin, but also the strength
to fight it, to do our role in keeping our hearts and lives clean of sin.
Sin’s
like mold. A little water damage will start small but
steadily grows until mold has crept into multiple places and spores of mold
begin to float in the air creating health problems. We noticed that in our
first home in Stony Plain which had mold. As soon as we moved, our grandson’s
breathing problems began to go away. When we minimize the sin in us, it has the
ability to change us, to break our relationships.
This feast is a call to action on all the stuff that we allow to pollute our minds, hearts and relationships. What we
put into our heads and hearts affects who we are. Fill your head with violence,
lust, or greed through what you watch or read; it shapes you. Surround yourself
with people who are greedy, arrogant, selfish, crude, angry, bitter, sarcastic,
users of others, and guess who you’re going to become like. Jesus is buried on the
Feast of Unleavened Bread, a
reminder of how our sins are buried with Jesus in the grave and how our sin is
left there when Jesus rises from the grave into new life.
The Feast
of Unleavened Bread is a call to us to clean up our act. We start by coming to God and asking him as King David did, “Search me, O God and know my heart.” You’re asking God
to show you the sin the sits inside your heart. We so easily fool ourselves
into thinking we’re a whole lot better than we really are. It about being
honest with ourselves and the influence of sin in us and inviting Jesus into
those places of our hearts and lives we don’t really want him to be or see.
This is confession, but saying sorry isn’t enough, it needs be followed up by
repentance, changing the stuff in our hearts, heads and lives. This is
something we do; just like Carl’s family searches through the house for the
hidden yeast and cleans the entire house, we do the same thing in our lives.
This takes humility.
We don’t
do this by ourselves; the Holy Spirit’s in our
hearts to shape our lives and root out the sin in us. This involves filling our
minds with what is good and beautiful, with Jesus and his words and examples,
it’s about inviting others into friendships and relationships of accountability
where we give them permission to tell us straight out where we are walking against
Jesus and going our own way instead. It’s about looking at our friends and
seeing if they help us be more kind, more generous, more forgiving and
grace-filled and then looking for friends who will help us look more like
Jesus. It looks like being a mentor to someone else, helping them become who
God has created them to be, who Jesus carried their sin into the grave for.
God calls
us in Leviticus to be holy as he is holy, this is what this Feast of Unleavened Bread calls
us to. It sounds strange to many of our ears to shape our lives around
holiness. Yet this is what many people are looking for even if they don’t
recognize the word anymore. So many people want to be different, to be better,
even if they don’t know Jesus yet. This is why we’re here, to help them know
they can have a clean heart again, to know good, to help them become beloved
saved children of God follow Jesus with us.
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