"And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the Lord's passover." - Exodus 12:11

Providence forearms us for dangers ahead. Therefore it is wise not to be overly elated in prosperity, hut humble and grateful. And it is equally wise to try not to be dejected when things go wrong, but rather to maintain confidence. The afflictions of the present will in due time be turned into consolation, comfort and blessing by God's infinite love. If we will but recognize it, we all may see this enacted numberless times in our lives.

Looking back in history, the events of our text are a case in point. The Israelites were near the end of their long period of bondage and distress. They were now about to begin their journey to Canaan, the promised land. There were to be many dangers, many untried paths, many new experiences which would bring unusual troubles.

And so they were provided by divine mercy with a preparatory feast - one which was to become an unending tradition for them. They were commanded to provide in all their homes a feast to the Lord. They were to have a joyous gathering of their families in every home. But they were to realize that the feast was to strengthen them emotionally for the great task that lay ahead. They were to eat the paschal lamb with loins girded and staff in hand - ready to meet the trials ahead.

Notice the similarity to the account of our Lord's eating the last Passover supper with His disciples immediately before He was taken from them. Note His words: "With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you, before I suffer." Or as the modern translation of Phillips puts it, "You do not know how I have longed to eat this Passover with you before the time comes for Me to suffer." Can we not assume that Jesus looked to this Last Supper as a source of strength for His humanity in what lay ahead?

In the same way, if we are perceptive, we will find we never have a burden but what the Lord has provided us with the means of bearing it. Our part in this preparation may often be an active one. It is, for example, reasonable to expect that the strength we gain in attending worship services, and especially in partaking of communion, may be intended by the Lord for some special purpose. For in every act of worship the Lord gives us inner comfort, help and strength, that are seen by Him to be needed for dangers which we, at the time, are unaware we are going to have to face. There is no such thing as chance in the operation of divine providence.

This thought grows readily out of reflecting on the preparatory feast that God appointed the Israelites to observe at the close of that period of slavery in Egypt, and just before they began their march toward Canaan. In addition to this, there arc many other points of present-day interest to us that grow out of:

(1) the ancient account of the first Passover;

(2) the closely related account of the last Passover supper of our Lord; and

(3) the transformation Jesus made of this Hebrew feast into the Christian sacrament of the holy supper.

Let us look briefly at some of the significant details and try to assess their meanings for us. First, and not to be overlooked, is the fact of the feast itself. For well over 3000 years, the feast of the Passover has been - and still is - celebrated annually by Judaism. To devout Jews, the miracle of deliverance is as real today as it was in the days of Moses. It would be hard to conceive that such a persistent memorial could be based on anything other than fact. Fancies or legends in time either die out or are clearly recognized as legend rather than fact. This is not true of the Passover, and all Christians as well as Jews may confidently believe in the truth of the account as it is found in the book of Exodus.

This assurance is particularly important to the Swedenborgian or New Churchman, because in this church we are repeatedly concerned with drawing a deeper or spiritual meaning from the literal sense of the Sacred Scriptures. But at the same time we are warned against denying the veracity of the letter for the sake of the spirit. For the spirit or soul of the Word rests on and depends on the literal sense as being trustworthy.

With that broad, general principle as a basis, we may go ahead to explore the Christian significance, that is, the significance for the Christian today of the Biblical account of the Passover. In the highest sense - and this is always a good place to start - the sacrificial Passover feast signifies or stands as a symbolic forerunner of the Lord Jesus Christ and His sacrifice and consecration of His humanity. The apostle Paul sensed this when he wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians (5:7): "Christ, our Passover is sacrificed for us."

But this means much more than the fact that Christ died upon the cross - as our New Church teachings amply illustrate. There is a danger of oversimplifying the correspondence of Christ to the Passover lamb. Any student of the Bible is aware that Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God. And one might hastily conclude that the greatest similarity of Jesus with the paschal lamb is that both were put to death.

There is a much higher and deeper lesson than this. The lamb is a symbol of innocence. And Jesus was primarily the Lamb of God in this sense - that He embodied the divine innocence of God Himself, that which forms the soul or basis of spiritual innocence in any one of us. And innocence in this sense is not a childish thing. In its mature form, and in the mature human, this is an accomplishment involving much effort. It is a state of mind which is free from guile. This is the divinely human quality which every aspiring Christian should be seeking.

Notice how it is defined in a Gospel reference of John the Baptist to our Lord: "Behold the lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world," (John 1:29). Do you see the significance of that? Why in this case the lamb quality - innocence - is a divinely human quality rather than a merely human quality? Men ask that punishment should be taken away. Our Lord takes away sin, and in doing so also takes away grief and pain and sorrow. When the true lamb-like spirit descends into your heart, it does something far greater than take away the deserved punishment for our perverse ways: it takes away anger, and envy, and resentment, and the desire for revenge, and makes these callused old hearts, of ours more tender, more God-like, more inclined to heavenly goodness.

This is one of the ways in which our Lord went before us. For our sakes He sanctified Himself that we might be sanctified by the truth, (cf. John 17:19). The way in which He perfected His human - which we can learn by reading the Gospels - made Him the perfect personification of everything that the Passover stood for. This is how He became the spotless Lamb of God, and from this, His spirit flows forth and enables all His people to become "lambs" - If they will.

Now let us look further at the details of the Passover: in God's prescription to the Jews, the Passover lamb was to be selected by households, one for each household. This selection had nothing to do with punishment - it was not a sacrifice in the sense of giving up anything: it rather meant dedicating, consecrating - in the true sense of the word "sacrifice" making sacred. Can we not see, as we interpret these symbolic rituals, that all the animals offered up can represent for us all the different feelings of the heart and mind that should be consecrated and dedicated to the divine being from which they came and which they should serve? And it is a direct, personal thing - by households, something you can do by yourselves.

And we learn more by considering what was done with the paschal lambs the blood of the lamb was to be taken and painted over the door-posts of each house. Blood is the great active element of the body; it flows through the flesh performing many important services. It clears out worn-out cells, brings in new nourishment, tones up body tissues, and is, in general, the "messenger" or "Word" of the Creator in our bodies. On the mental levels, it is symbolic of that which begins in new life and thought, and washes away worn-out or useless ideas.

All of this takes place in the reception area of our minds - the doorway of our minds, if you will. Every home has a door, just as every mind has an entrance-way. The entrance-way of the mind is the place of communication with the world around us. Or at least this is the most obvious entry. This "door" of the mind should be protected - just as the doors of the Israelites were protected - back in the time of Moses - by the blood of the lamb, that is, the truth of God's Word - but there is also an inner door to our minds that we are not so often conscious of. This is our means of communication, not with the world, but with heaven. This is the portal of which our Lord says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man will open the door I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with Me," (Revelation 3:20). This, finally, is the door we must learn of, and learn to open. But in the meanwhile we must have especial care of the outer door - that which connects us with the world around us, the world which we see by means of our physical senses. The world we see and feel and touch and taste and smell. This door must be so fortified by divine wisdom that no destroyer, no destroying evil, can enter in. It must be strengthened so that we will be ready to resist every fallacy, every falsehood that the world can hang before our senses to tantalize us.

The blood, the fortifying truth we gain from God's Word, is a basic ingredient to accomplish this end; but if we will return in thought to the details of the Passover, we will gain further insights. After the blood was used for its specific purpose, the lamb itself was used in further ways: to quote, "Ye shall eat the lamb roasted with fire, and with bitter herbs shall ye eat it," (Exodus 12:8).

The lamb of heavenly innocence - guiltlessness - offered to us by our Lord, "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world," is to be accepted into our lives with the fire of holy affection, that is, roasted with fire, or received with fervent love. It is a wholesome food for the mind that will help cause the many beckonings of evil desires to pass over us, so that we may receive instead all the sincerities and virtues of goodness and truth.

But it is not unalloyed sweetness. The Israelites also had to "eat the Passover with bitter herbs." While we might wish that our path toward the true spiritual way of life will always be smooth and clear, there are obstacles within our own beings that are opposed to Christian perfection. These faults are hard to give up. The process involves pain and bitterness of spirit. When divine truth enters our souls, it requires that these disorders be corrected. And while this is healthy, it is not particularly pleasant. It is like the bitter herbs.

The wisdom of the Psalmist may help us here; he says, "Purge me with hyssop (a bitter herb), and I shall be clean." (51:7). He further says, "Create in me a clean heart, O God," (51:10). Is this not, in the final analysis, the goal of the seeking Christian? Turning again, finally, to our Biblical account of the Passover, we learn how all this is to be accomplished. It is one thing to know what is to be done with our lives, to make them successful in the sight of God; it is another, although related, to know how to go about it.

How should we approach the spiritual way of life?

(1) With our loins girded, that is, with our purposes fully determined;

(2) with shoes on our feet, that is, prepared with truths necessary for daily life;

(3) with our staffs in our hands, that is, with the promises of God's Word as we find them in the Bible to sustain us; and all this - we do how? With haste, that is, receive the saving goodness into our hearts without delay, or hesitation.

Then we may go forth as children of God, taking with us in every circumstance of life the salvation that God in Christ has wrought for us.