Matthew 26:2 “As you know, the Passover is two days away–and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.”

The days God asks his people to remember and celebrate are always meaningful. You know that the Passover was all about God’s deliverance. For hundreds of years the people of Israel lived as slaves in Egypt. Because the Egyptians came to fear them, they began attempts to kill the Israelite boys at birth and reduce their population. God sent Moses to lead the nation to freedom, but before that could happen the Lord had to deal with the Pharaoh’s refusal to let the people go. God sent plagues to convince the Pharaoh of his power and demonstrate that resistance was futile. Still the Pharaoh refused.

Finally, God instituted the Passover. On that night all Israel would sacrifice a Lamb. The blood was painted on the frames of their doors. The meat of the sacrifice was eaten by each family. That night God sent the angel of death throughout Egypt, and where the angel saw the blood on the door, he passed over. When he came to the homes of the Egyptians, he killed the firstborn in the family. Finally, the Pharaoh got the message, and the Egyptians practically drove the Israelites out of their land. God had delivered his people from slavery. He had rescued them from death. This was the Passover that they celebrated for the next 1450 years.

As much as the Passover looked backwards, the Lord had always intended it to look forward as well. It foreshadowed the work of the Messiah, the Savior, and the Jewish people understood this, too. Perhaps they didn’t get all the details, but to this day when they celebrate the Passover, their celebration includes rituals that remind them someone is coming to save them.

Of course, we know that someone is Jesus, and he has already come. Like the Passover lamb he was sacrificed, and the family of God gathers to eat the body that was sacrificed, and to receive his blood through their mouths, the doorway to the temple that is their bodies. Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes away the sins of the world. This is the slavery from which he rescues them, the slavery to sin. His death defeats the ruler who held his people in their slavery to sin, the devil. He rescues his people from death, and leads them to a better Promised Land, a heavenly one.

With God, holidays aren’t just opportunities to gather with our families and friends, wear our best clothes, eat some fantastic food. We may do those things to celebrate, and rightly so. But that is never what the holiday means.

They aren’t primarily about doing something kind for your neighbor, either. His festivals, his holy days, are always about the gritty, painful, even violent work of delivering a lost and sinful world from sin and death. They are the story of love so great that our God gave up the comforts of heaven, lived in the world we had trashed, and let himself be tortured and killed by the people he loved, in order to forgive and to save the people he loved. They mark his rescuing us from that which is most wicked, most painful, and most ugly in our lives.

Jesus’ sacrificial death completed the meaning of one holiday God’s people celebrated. It forms the basis for another one we continue to celebrate today. Let that meaning continue to be the reason for our celebration.