LENT 2026

      The Jewish celebration of “Passover” commemorates the comfort, protection, and freedom that come from God’s watching out for us, letting the bad stuff “pass over” us.  They celebrate that God leads them out of slavery and into the Promised Land.

      Because this is a dangerous world we’ve live in, outside of the Garden of Eden.  Passover is comfort and protection for us vulnerable people in the midst of a dangerous world, full of hazards, peril, uncertainty.  It is the joy of being rescued from all sorts of evils that regularly threaten us.

            But that evil still touches us, and touches even God.  Jesus, though suffering the consequences of a broken world, and not the cause of the brokenness, willingly submits to it.  It takes the form of Crucifixion.  When the disciples came with Jesus into Jerusalem at Passover, enjoyed the Last Supper with him, and even went to the garden with him, they did not fully understand where he was going, the route he was going to be taking.  He had to pass through the most difficult of circumstances: false accusations, a rigged trial, abandonment by friends, mockery, execution, death.  The disciples didn’t realize depths he was going to pass over to, nor also the heights he would pass over to, from death to life, to glory!

      All of us have to deal with the evils of the world.  They don’t spare God, they don’t spare us.  We know that these circumstances, and more, afflict our world, globally and locally.  But as Christians we have confidence!  We have faith that what afflicted Jesus, though it afflict us, will not destroy us!  We will pass over it, or through it, and enjoy the resurrection.  Without this celebration, without remembering Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection, and without God’s help to live out these truths in our daily lives, despair, desperation, and depression could reign in us.  But instead we must live as people infused with the life of God that is won for us and shared with us through the Resurrection, through Easter!