This year, due to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, Passover and Easter (and Ramadan) occur only a few days apart from each other.  As you may know, Passover remembers and commemorates how many centuries past God liberated the Hebrews from a four hundred year captivity in Egypt, delivering them, eventually, into the promised land.  To remember, around the world, millions of Jewish families gathered for the seder meal, the meal whose various components point to the elements of captivity and liberation.  The structure of the seder has not changed since Moses instituted it over three millennia ago.  Passover is central to the Jewish tradition.

     When Moses laid out the instructions for Passover, he specified that it begin with the sacrifice of a lamb, a lamb whose blood would be spread on the doorposts of every Hebrew home in Egypt.  When God subsequently executed his final judgment on Egypt and its enslavement of the Hebrews, he "passed over" the homes on which a lamb's blood had been placed.
      

    Now, however, Passover and Ramadan have been eclipsed.  Though they remain critically important in any spiritual perspective, the weight of their point has been overwhelmed by an event few could foresee:  the Resurrection.

    New Testament scholar N. T. Wright characterizes the resurrection as "the life after life after death."  We all die.  And if, as Passover, Ramadan, and Easter remind us, there is existence after death, what remains to know is what this life looks like.

    And that's the point.  Death is far more than what we in this life suppose it to be.

    It's new life.