Tonight we gather to do as the people of God have done for millennia. We come together to tell our family stories. These are the stories that make us who we are.
Tonight we begin with the story of Passover. We hear how God chose to save us from slavery in Egypt and bring us out into freedom so that we could worship him. We tell the story of the “passover” of the Angel of Death, and how we were protected by the blood of the lamb. The Jewish people have gathered to tell this story every year since that first Passover. Tonight, it is our story as well.
Next we tell the story of how Jesus took this ancient story of the Passover and transformed it, establishing the New Covenant. On this night, Jesus himself becomes the lamb that protects us from death. Taking the bread and wine of the Passover, he transforms them into his body and blood. He gives us the two-fold gift of the Eucharist and the priesthood. Finally, he gives us the “new commandment” of love, represented by the washing of the feet of the apostles. We tell this story and even make it present visually.
Finally, there is the story that each of us are living right now. We know the end of the story of the Passover. We know that the story of Jesus’s passion and death ends with the story of his resurrection. But we don’t know exactly how our own stories end. As we continue our journey, the very first words of the Mass tonight from St. Paul offer us good advice:
We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
through whom we are saved and delivered.
We can glory in the cross because we know that what looks like an instrument of torture and failure, actually becomes our source of life and triumph. We may not know exactly how our stories end. But, if we conform our lives to Jesus, then even as we take up the difficulties our lives, we can glory. We should glory in the cross. If we take up our cross and follow Jesus, then we do actually know how our story ends.