on the Passover

The anger passed over us.

For all these years we’d held the Passover festival. What was it for?, we’d ask. The Lord had taught us long before, that his anger had come on to sin-soaked Egypt. The only way his people there had escaped the anger was to smear the blood of lambs onto their doorposts – the only way the anger would pass over them. Because though the anger kills, it could be satisfied by innocent blood.

After that, for generations afterward, the Lord had taught us every year to kill a lamb so that his anger would pass over us, soaked as we were in sin. For hundreds of years, so many lambs, so much innocent blood, we remembered.

And then he came, that man who was called the Lamb of God. How were we to know who he actually was? But it was him. He was killed at the Passover festival. He was the Lamb, his innocent blood made the anger pass over us.

But that was the last Passover festival we ever celebrated. No more lambs, no more blood. Because now the anger has passed over us. Forever.