Passover and Hametz

For many years we have used a Seder service in our family and church life. Darlene did a careful study of Passover and the relationship of Jesus to the seder and to the concept of Passover. After we began the street ministry in Nairobi, we have continued to do a "Christian Seder" with the street kids in our lives. One of the fun things we do is put some packages of "bread with yeast" around the room where we do the Seder, then we have the kids hunt them down and throw them outside. There are many other parts of the Seder that are great fun as well as filled with meaning.

We remember Jewish friends in California who also had to prepare well for Passover. Some of them had large amounts of liquor in the house. Before Passover, they would gather all of it up and take it to the house of a friend who is a Gentile, because it is "hametz" (fermented, thus unclean). They would leave it there until the Seder service was over, then the next day collect it and bring it home. This meets the requirements of the letter of the law, for it is out of the house, unavailable.

I've been thinking about how being in Christ and following the way of Christ has made "hametz" a daily reality for us. In Christ we have a new and different life. Passover is every day. Every day we have to wake up and clean out all the unclean things in life, in the house, in the physical body, in the body of Christ. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and Christ is the Passover every day. The unclean is not only certain foods (and actually Christ has pronounced foods to be clean), but the unclean is in the heart, as Jesus makes clear in Matthew 15. So every day clean out jealousy, impure thoughts, hatred and anger, desiring what is another's and so on, all that which the Gospel teaches us is not for us on a Passover, especially when we sit down to eat a meal with Jesus present in the middle of the family.