Elisabeth Adams

Passover arrived on Monday night at sundown.

I arrived at my hostess’s home several hours earlier, just as she was in a nearby park, burning leavened items from her home. Just in time, too for an afternoon of cooking: three generations compounding matzo ball soup and tzimmes (the Jewish answer to sweet potato casserole), steaming green beans, roasting salmon and turkey breast, washing romaine lettuce and parsley sprigs, grating horseradish (which can be even more tear-inducing than onions), boiling eggs, mixing salt water and running last-minute to buy gefilte fish, setting the long table and arranging the Seder plate.

This flurry of preparations was followed by an extended-family meal, much like our Thanksgiving — at least for the groaningness of the table and the fulness of our stomachs. The meal was also accompanied by a skit retelling the Exodus story, questions and answers about its meaning to us, reading from the ancient commentary called the Haggada, chanting Psalms 113-118, and singing some rollicking songs. All this took about four and a half hours!

I watched young parents taking pains to teach the Bible story, and a grandmother provoking deeper thinking among the adults. A boy about eight years old held his own in the discussion about what might constitute slavery in our own lives…and his two-year-old sister piped out the words to the question-song: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

On Tuesday night, I attended a second Seder meal, this one larger, and a little more offbeat, as far as traditions go. Imagine a table, gorgeously set for twenty-six people. We had live music: accordion and guitar and violin, and  a song for every significant part of the meal, tying the Exodus story to Jesus’ redemption — culminating in singing along to the old hymns. There was just one child at the meal, a curly-headed four-year-old, and she was just right for sparking some joyful folk-dancing.

I’ve been pondering what I’ve gotten so far from this Passover, and I’d say it’s this: longing. The older I get, the more brokenness and injustice I encounter. And yet I continue to find bad news surprising, as if I was designed for a world full of justice and redemption — which I firmly believe I was.

Did you know that less than 100 miles north from where I sit, an unspeakably brutal civil war has been raging for several years? I don’t know what the word is for a government that seeks to annihilate its own people. Shall I call it genocide?

That would be tragedy enough, but there’s more in our very own hearts.

Consider the behavior of the Israelites, barely out of their slavery in Egypt — and already longing for cucumbers and melons, as if they’d just exited a resort, instead of a genocidal society that chucked their baby boys in the river Nile and chained their adults (men and women, old and young) to a treadmill existence. Do you suppose they had a sort of collective Stockholm syndrome, in which the captors became the beloved, and living death was preferable to liberty? It seems ludicrous from where we stand, but how often do we embrace the things that hold us captive too?

So this Passover prompts me to longing. There’s so much redemption needed in the world, and I find myself asking, “O Lord, how long?”

But if He sets me to the task of longing, I know (knowing Him) that I won’t have too long to long for what He’s already promised to bring:

Redemption!

It’s real, friends.

It’s already here — and there’s so much more to come. That’s why there’s another thing that Passover has set me to do – and that’s telling.

Telling and singing and living the tidal wave of love that’s found in our Redeemer.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)