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Holy Thursday, Batman!
Apr. 21st, 2011 09:42 pmI'd talked myself out of doing this post. Really. Too touchy this time of year. Yet the Holy Spirit intervened about 24 hours ago, when I was dispatched to read the actual passage in question before three congregations tonight- joining in our sanctuary, for the first time and with multi-ecclesiastical blessing, to conduct a joint Holy Thursday communion service. (Too bad Holy Thursday didn't fall on 4/20, or we could've had an even more meaningful joint service;)
The reading I refer to is the original Passover commandment from the Torah, which can be found at Exodus 12:1-14, but is perhaps better summarized in a more modern translation by the prophets Taggart and Hedley, here (sorry, it won't embed):
Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.
Hedley Lamarr: How?
Taggart: We'll kill the first born male child in every household.
Hedley Lamarr: [after some consideration] Too Jewish.
Yahweh did seem to have this Thing for first-born males, didn't He? From Abraham and his kids on the altar (Isaac and/or Ishmael, depending on your religion), to this passage, to the brises(white with foam), it's a wonder God didn't wind up on some pre-Christian-era sex offender registry. By Christ's time, the trick had been turned around and handed over to the forces of evil, as King Herod tried to eliminate his future competition by pulling a similar mass infanticide on all the little boys in Bethlehem. Fortunately, Mary and Joseph had friended a "Herod Sucks" page on the first century Scrollbook, and therefore knew to get over and join the protests in Egypt before that could happen.
It's not that I believe any of these mass murders ever actually happened; there's certainly no non-Biblical historical text that confirms them. No, it's more a sense of confusion over why our faiths continue to honor them as a good thing without stepping back and going, Ewwwwww! throughout the eight nights of the Jewish observance or the eight Sunday-to-Sunday days of our own. (Never mind that the Christian tradition is just as brutal, featuring all of the worst features of human weakness: betrayal, denial, fearful abandonment of your principles, with the occasional bit of Van Gogh violence thrown in right before the dramatic Crucifixion conclusion.)
And yet somehow, in the midst of all this agitas, we filled a sanctuary on a Thursday night, joining the voices of three choirs and the liturgies of three spurs off the same Protestant Interstate (Lutheran, Anglican and our own) into something that turned out to be far less gruesome than the passage I read from. It included prayers for forgiveness for the stupid things we've both done and left undone. I'd like to think that God, too, is both omnipotent enough and humble enough to include His own outdated origin-stories in those prayers, and to let us go forth and do good things for the world in His name in spite of, and not because of, His past homicidal tendencies.
The reading I refer to is the original Passover commandment from the Torah, which can be found at Exodus 12:1-14, but is perhaps better summarized in a more modern translation by the prophets Taggart and Hedley, here (sorry, it won't embed):
Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.
Hedley Lamarr: How?
Taggart: We'll kill the first born male child in every household.
Hedley Lamarr: [after some consideration] Too Jewish.
Yahweh did seem to have this Thing for first-born males, didn't He? From Abraham and his kids on the altar (Isaac and/or Ishmael, depending on your religion), to this passage, to the brises
It's not that I believe any of these mass murders ever actually happened; there's certainly no non-Biblical historical text that confirms them. No, it's more a sense of confusion over why our faiths continue to honor them as a good thing without stepping back and going, Ewwwwww! throughout the eight nights of the Jewish observance or the eight Sunday-to-Sunday days of our own. (Never mind that the Christian tradition is just as brutal, featuring all of the worst features of human weakness: betrayal, denial, fearful abandonment of your principles, with the occasional bit of Van Gogh violence thrown in right before the dramatic Crucifixion conclusion.)
And yet somehow, in the midst of all this agitas, we filled a sanctuary on a Thursday night, joining the voices of three choirs and the liturgies of three spurs off the same Protestant Interstate (Lutheran, Anglican and our own) into something that turned out to be far less gruesome than the passage I read from. It included prayers for forgiveness for the stupid things we've both done and left undone. I'd like to think that God, too, is both omnipotent enough and humble enough to include His own outdated origin-stories in those prayers, and to let us go forth and do good things for the world in His name in spite of, and not because of, His past homicidal tendencies.