Good
Friday really begins the evening before with Jesus gathering with his disciples
over their last meal. It’s not clear in the Gospels if this was meant to be the
Passover meal, but there are a number of connections made to the Passover meal.
Jesus is in Jerusalem during this Passover week and it’s a very noisy place.
Not only were crowds of pilgrims in town milling around in the temple courts,
but large numbers of animals were being slaughtered for the sacrifices that the
people had come to make. Because the Passover was a pilgrimage feast, the streets
and homes were extra crowded and the lambs for the sacrifices were being
brought into the city from the fields around places like Bethlehem, creating an
ear-hurting clamour wherever you went, especially in the area around the
temple.
People
were busy on the Thursday slaughtering the lambs, many then
putting some of the blood on the doorposts in memory of the first Passover. In a
typical Hebrew home, the mother is busy preparing for the celebration, there is
food to cook, a specific meal with many symbolic foods reminding everyone of
the taste of slavery and freedom, of the journey Israel went through due to
unfaithfulness, but then there are the tastes of the Promised Land and
blessing. To begin the meal, the father leads the family around the table. As
they sit around the table the youngest child is prompted to ask “What does
this ceremony mean to you?” The family and guests then hear the father or
grandfather tell the story of Israel’s slavery in Egypt, the plagues, the meaning
of the Passover lamb with blood on the doorposts of the house, and of God’s
great deliverance.
With
all of this history and meaning in the Passover meal, we’re able to
better understand what John the Baptist is saying when he sees Jesus at the
beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In John 1 we read, “The
next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who
takes away the sin of the world!” The Passover lamb points us to God’s
protection and deliverance from slavery, not only physical slavery, but also
our slavery to sin. This lamb reminds us that God remembers us, he hears our
cries for help, he responds with salvation, and guides us on our way through
life, providing us with what we need. This is a sacrificial lamb, a lamb whose
blood protects the people from the anger and punishment of God, just as Jesus’
blood protects us from the anger of God towards our sin by washing our sin away.
This
is what we see at Calvary as Jesus hangs on the cross. Jesus has
willingly, out of his love for us, become the sacrificial lamb for our sin,
protecting us from the penalty for our sin. We see the people’s cruelty toward
Jesus, the intensity of his suffering, his willingness to endure it, and the
sacrifice it involved. Sin brings pain and suffering and this is all reflected
on the cross. But on the cross we see another image, there is the lamb
sacrificed for sin on the Day of Atonement, and this takes us back to the
temple again. But there is another animal that is part of the Day of Atonement.
After the sacrifices had been made, the priests laid their hands on the
scapegoat and sent him out into the wilderness, carrying the sins of the
people. Jesus was taken outside the city, like the scapegoat with the sin of
the people on himself, taking our sin out of God’s sight and presence. Jesus
does this all to wash all our sin away so we can be right with our Father one
again!
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