During Lent this year I’m thinking a lot about Jerusalem in the year 30 or so. I’m meeting once a week with a small group to talk about the last week of Jesus’ life and the events leading up to the crucifixion, and it turns out you can hardly make sense of the stories without knowing something about Jerusalem and the practice of Judaism. A good map and some background information on the city’s history and politics helps. A book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan called The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem is also a good resource.

Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover. Everyone did. The city of 80,000 swelled to a population three times its size during the festival. But why was Passover so important?

Some of us learned the story as children, but as an isolated and fantastical tale. To appreciate it we need to see the story within the bible’s overall narrative. In brief, God insisted that Moses lead the Hebrews out of their enslavement in Egypt. As Moses confronted Pharaoh, he brought down plagues on Egypt, demonstrating God’s power over Pharaoh and making the point that God’s people must be allowed to leave. There were frogs and locusts, boils and flies, and water turned to blood—ten plagues in all. Yet none convinced Pharaoh to allow the Hebrew slaves their freedom until God sent the final and most horrible plague.

The event that finally changed the fate of the Hebrews occurred with the final plague, which was the Passover.  The Hebrews were instructed to kill a lamb and ritually mark their door frames—the doorposts and lintel—with its blood. They were to roast the meat over a fire and prepare a meal to eat in haste. With no time for the dough to rise they were to bake unleavened bread, and be dressed to leave at a moment’s notice.

While the Hebrews were making their preparations, the Angel of Death was passing over the land, claiming the lives of the first-born sons throughout Egypt. Only those homes marked with the blood of the lamb were spared. As the cries rose from Egyptian households during the night, Pharaoh demanded that the Hebrews be gone.

The exodus that ensued was when Israel became a people. As they wandered in the wilderness they threw off their identity as slaves and formed a new nation. The Passover was an act of power that marked the Hebrews as God’s own people, singled out from those around them, and destined for their own unique place in history.

The celebration of Passover became a remembrance of what it meant to be God’s people, the heart of their religious identity. It remains such to this day. Perhaps the violence of the story is why we don’t dwell on it. We don’t want to think of God as sending an Angel of Death to anyone. Another discussion is the evolution in our understanding of how God operates.

What we have to remember if we’re trying to understand Jesus’ last week on earth, is that he was a faithful Jew. The scriptures he studied were the Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures. The practices he followed were shaped by Jewish law and liturgy. The religion into which he tried to breathe new life was Judaism. He was called Rabbi—a teacher in the Jewish faith. His actions in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his death show his love of, identity with, and vision for God’s people.

If we care about the events leading up to Easter we need to understand that they are entwined with Passover and the practice of Judaism.