In Remembrance by Jill Carattini

Take approximately 5 minutes to read this shortened version of yesterday's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Post comments to the blog for spiritual collaboration. Please email your prayer requests too.

The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.

"This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD -a lasting ordinance. (Exodus 12:13-14)

Israel's history is wrought with commands to remember. God told the Israelites that they would remember the night of Passover before the night had even happened. From that day onward, celebrating the Passover was nonnegotiable, and with good reason. God had spared his people by the blood of a lamb. From that day onward, the command was passed down from generation to generation: "You shall remember this day as a statute forever" (Exodus 12:17). And so they remembered the Passover each year.

But just as we recall more than the wedding itself on an anniversary, the act of birth on a child's birthday, or the grave events of a tragic day in history, the Israelites were remembering far more than the act of Israel's exodus from Egypt; they were remembering God Himself--the faithful hand that moved and moves among them, the mighty acts which indeed shout of God's timely remembering of God’s people. They were remembering God among them.

Centuries later, the disciples sat around the table celebrating their third Passover meal with Jesus, an observance they kept long before they could walk. Everything perhaps looked ceremoniously familiar. The smell of lamb filled the upper room; the unleavened bread was prepared and waiting to be broken. Remembering again the acts of God in Egypt, the blood on the doorposts, the lives spared and brought out of slavery, they looked at their teacher as he lifted the bread from the table and gave thanks to God. Then Jesus broke the bread, and gave it to them, saying something entirely new: "This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19).

I have always wished that Luke would have described a little more of the scene that followed. Did a hush immediate fall over the room? Were the disciples once again confused at his words? Or did their years of envisioning the blood-marked doorposts cry out at the Lamb without defect before them?

They had spent their entire lives remembering the sovereignty of God in the events of the Passover, and on this day, Jesus tells them that there is yet more to see: In this Passover lamb, in this the broken bread is the reflection of me. As you remember God in history, so remember me. For on this day, God is engraving across all of time the promise of Passover: “I still remember you.”

From this day onward, the disciples celebrated Passover with a new call to remember. Might we similarly be ready to remember, and wary to miss, all that weights these days with hope. For to be sure, to forget what was witnessed in the upper room on that Passover in history carries the force of forgetting so much more.