After Pentecost Devotional - Day 15

“But if any of you refuse to celebrate Passover when you are not away on a journey, you will no longer belong to my people. You will be punished because you did not offer sacrifices to me at the proper time. Anyone, including foreigners who live among you, can celebrate Passover, if they follow all the regulations.” Numbers 9:13-14

Passover is an essential Jewish celebration of belonging. It was and is a celebration as essential to Jewish faith and identity as Easter is for Christians. Passover is more than simply a celebration, as it is a reenactment of the seminal event in the formation of the nation with its exit from bondage in Egypt.

The celebration was designed to involve the entire family with a focus on teaching the children about their origins and helping them to assume their identity with redemption form Egyptian bondage. Various streams of Jewish celebration yet today focus on the individual finding a sense of belonging, meaning, and participation in the exodus and event of God's redemption.

This is the only festival for which there is an established make-up date. If one were unable to celebrate Passover on the proper day, the option was given to celebrate a month later. The reason for this was that one could not belong to the nation of Yahweh without going through the Passover festival celebration. To fail to celebrate Passover would mean for the people that they were no longer the people of Yahweh.

The centrality and significance given to Passover, then, makes verse 14 all that much more exceptional. While this was a celebration of belonging to the nation as the people of Yahweh, foreigners are allowed to join in the festivities. They would only need to follow the regulations.

While the passage here does not stipulate this outright, the meaning of such participation is that those foreigners who joined the celebration were becoming part of the nation as they participated in Passover. That is because the celebration of the festival calls on the participants to identify themselves individually with the Exodus story and find themselves redeemed by Yahweh along with Moses' band.

Should the Israelites fail to celebrate Passover, they would be effectively removing themselves from the rolls of Yahweh's people. The flip side is that as foreigners did participate, they would gain entrance, becoming full participants in the nation of Yahweh.

For all the Jewish traditions excluding foreigners as unwanted, unclean, and undeserving, this passage in Numbers opens the door wide for their inclusion in the life of Israel. It paves a path of belonging, of being grafted into the nation, just as other passages speak to the children of immigrants participating in the redivision of the land every Jubilee.

Rather than a message of exclusion, we find here God's desire for redemptive inclusion. All are welcome to participate. All are welcome to belong. All are welcome to God's table.

Who are those you would exclude from God's family? God desires to include all.


"Lord, make your desire to redeem flow unhindered in my life, that I might fully accept all those you have chosen to accept."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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