Easter | Experiencing Christ in Everyday Life by Pete BriscoeSample

Don’t Pass Over Passover

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it. — C.S. Lewis

My guess is that you, like me, have had some awkward moments at meals. You know, spilling red Jell-O on your white shirt in front of the curly-haired boy/girl in elementary school. Or “meet the parents” moments with your fiancé’s family!

I want to take you back to that fateful Passover night. Jesus was going to celebrate the Last Supper with His disciples. I’m sure that some of the disciples had some wonderful, high expectations. It was the Passover. Jesus had just come into Jerusalem, with all the crowds adoring Him, and this was like energy; there was electricity in the air. So now they were going to celebrate Passover with the most popular guy in Jerusalem… so it seemed. But do you know what? Everything went wrong during that meal. There were plenty of awkward moments described for us in John’s Gospel:

“It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

“The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” (John 13:1-3)

In this picture of the last meal, as the disciples shared with Christ, we see realistic images of what it means to be in Christ. Snapshots of life with this Jesus. It’s a meal full of moments of misunderstanding, selfishness, and betrayal. Yes, AWKWARD, but the evening meal was just getting started…

Lord Jesus, as I look at the awkward meal that You shared with Your closest followers, open my eyes anew to the realities of being with You, being in You, and You living through me. Reveal to me new aspects of my identity as Your child. Amen.