Loading...Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna!
I have always liked this service. The physical movement from one part of the building to another makes it feel like we are a part of the story, still. We celebrate Jesus coming into Jerusalem for the annual celebration of the Passover with palm branches, shouts of Hosanna, and the electric pulse of anticipation.
There is joy, celebration, and expectation in this Palm Sunday worship, perhaps because we know what is going to happen at the end of the week. Maybe because we sense this is a party. I mean, Passover is something to celebrate. It remembers the beginning of the freedom walk out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
According to many stories, Jesus was always in Jerusalem for the Passover, which is also known as the Festival of Unleavened Bread. It includes a celebratory meal that recreates through smells, tastes, textures, and prayers the time the angel of death passed over the homes of Israelites whose doors were marked with the blood of a lamb. This was the final plague in Egypt that forced the hand of Pharaoh to let God’s people go.
Passover is a time of reflection, renewal, and appreciation of freedom and blessing. Ever since that first Passover, Jewish people eat what is called a Seder meal, which includes symbolic foods and retells the Exodus story. They eat unleavened bread as a part of this meal[1] because there simply wasn’t enough time to bake any leavened bread before they would escape Egypt.
Think about that for a moment. When you think about making any kind of food in Biblical times, can you imagine how long cooking anything might take?
But it is specifically bread that is the centerpiece of the Passover, because when it is also known as the Festival of the Unleavened Bread, it means something.
I was given this book for Christmas from the family that visited here a couple of weeks ago. Bake & Pray: Liturgies & Recipes for Baking Bread as a Spiritual Practice. The author, Kendall Vanderslice is the Founder of the Edible Theology Project. She is a professional baker with degrees in both food studies and theology. Only three pages in, and I was drawn to the way she shows the importance of bread in scripture from as early as the third chapter in Genesis.
After Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, God exiles them into a life where food required preparation. This would be the punishment for not trusting God to provide them with everything they needed. Food would no longer simply grow on trees. They would forever be required to work for their food. And one of the most universal and nutritious foods of all time has been some form of bread.
Vanderslice writes about the process of breadmaking this way: “In order to have bread, you need to grow wheat, harvest it, thresh it, and then grind it into flour. It requires you to mix up dough and let it ferment and grow. You need to chop wood to maintain a fire and then bake the dough before finally being able to eat. The production of bread” she goes on, “requires an incredible amount of labor and a long series of transformations.” (p. 3)[2]
On the day of the first Passover, going through the full process of baking bread would not be possible. There were more important things to do to pack for the journey. They were lucky to have enough time to follow the requirements of eating lamb that day.
The bread, however, was important to the meal, so they made unleavened bread with two ingredients: flour and water. A batch could be made, start to finish, in less than 20 minutes.
On their 40-year journey, there was little time, and likely little access to ready-to-use flour, so bread was scarce. Until God provided manna each night. They could be easily fed enough each day with this miracle.
Bread is found in many stories. Perhaps the most familiar is when Jesus feeds the five thousand with the miracle, again, of God’s provision.
I love the idea that bread symbolizes the promise that God doesn’t leave. That God will always provide.
In today’s first Gospel reading, Jesus is entering Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover at a table with his friends, full of all the foods that represent the beginning of the Exodus. That is where our story will continue when we hear the Passion from Luke’s Gospel at the end of today’s worship. We will find Jesus taking his place at the table, addressing the apostles with eagerness, for he knows this is the beginning of the end…before the next beginning.
And while Jesus does not eat with them, it is at this meal we will hear how Jesus broke bread for his followers. The words are familiar to each of us:
Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:17-19).
In her book’s introduction, Vanderslice wrote, “The bread Jesus offered his disciples in the upper room, and the bread we are offered every time we celebrate Communion, echoes God’s miraculous provision of manna and bread for the five thousand. It serves as a sign of God’s presence … it is also a promise that God will complete the work begun in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”
She goes on.
“… bread also serves as a promise that God is at work making all things new. For now, we remember this promise in the bread broken at the Communion table, the bread that makes us one as the body of Christ. This Communion bread offers us a taste of the Kingdom of heaven that spreads like leaven throughout the earth.” (page 5)
God provided for the Israelites. God provided for the 5,000. God provided for the disciples. We, too, receive this provision each time we come to the rail, hold out our hands and accept the promise of God’s presence in the bread.
Take, eat. This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.
Amen.
[1] Google search on Passover.
[2] Vanderslice, Kendall. Bake & Pray: Liturgies & Recipes for Baking Bread as a Spiritual Practice. Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, IL. 2024.
