The Curious Incident

Have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes stories? Remember “Silver Blaze?” The mystery is solved by Holmes and in the dénouement he recaps the case for the Scotland Yard detective, a Mr. Gregory.

Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

Tim Dally dropped a little one-liner in his sermon last Sunday. It was a footnote, a by-the-way. He pointed out that the roast lamb, which we think would be central to the Passover meal that Jesus and the twelve were eating in Luke 22, was missing. The Lamb is AWOL. Jesus made comments about the unleavened bread and he mentioned the various rounds of wine that were drunk, but no lamb.

I draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb in the Last Supper. What’s that you say? There was no lamb mentioned in the Last Supper of Luke 22 – or of Matthew 26 – or of Mark 14? Well, that was the curious incident.

We who are Goyim (gentiles) generally don’t know squat about “Seder” or the Jewish Passover meal. I certainly knew nothing but now I know as much as you can learn from nosing around various websites for a couple of hours. Bless you, Wikipedia. It was interesting to me to find the lamb AWOL from all the websites too. The Seder meal apparently has several variations and permutations but there is one thing that is common to all forms, namely that the Passover Lamb is represented by a lamb bone on the Seder plate. It can be old – the same bone year after year. From what I could gather from the sites I visited nobody eats lamb, at least there is no requirement to eat lamb. Most eat gefilte fish and matzo soup. Some eat beef brisket. Chicken and turkey is okay too.

So lamb-eating is not central to the feast. But there is a central feature to the feast. The Pesach celebration is referred to as “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” The feast is all about ridding the bread, the house and the camp from the taint of leaven (yeast). What’s so bad about yeast, you ask? I don’t know. Ask God. My point is that the point of the feast is about yeast, not lamb.

So, apparently, it is a Gentile misconception that assumes the feast of Pesach centered around lamb. Well, we may be excused our ignorance because the first Passover lamb meal did revolve around a rather weird lamb dinner, the instructions for which lie in Exodus 12 for all to read. The people were commanded to roast the lamb (not boil) with all its entrails and hooves and eat it quickly and eat it all. No leftovers allowed. And even though the entire feast happens because God is about to deliver Israel from slavery and spare their first-born from the Death Angel because of the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the lintels of their doorways, despite all that, the people were not commanded to eat lamb each year after that. They were commanded to drink certain cups of wine and to eat certain servings of unleavened bread and to ask specific questions and to recite, remember and rehearse God’s deliverance from Egypt. Each phase of the Passover meal had its significance and its explanations that are carefully laid out and choreographed in Torah, Talmud, and Midrash. And so the matzo is important and the bitter herbs and the wine and the bowl of salt water and all are important. But the eating of lamb does not appear in the ritual.

Go figure.

All of this adds mind-boggling (at least it boggles my mind, which isn’t hard to do I’ve heard) context to the Last Supper story as related in Matthew, Mark and Luke. We Goy need to grasp that the meal is scripted. Jesus & Co. are following the script as all of them had since they were children. In fact the meal is designed to teach children the story of the Exodus (the “Exit” from Egypt into the Promised Land). Everything from the first cup of wine to the hymn sung at the end is scripted. The meal centers around having children ask four important questions around the theme of , “Why is this night different from other nights?” The questions set the parents up to recite the story of deliverance.

And so there are several breaking of bread and giving of thanks ceremonies in the script. Additionally, the thank-you prayers are scripted and there are four rounds of wine, each one focusing its meaning on an aspect of the story. The fruit paste represents mortar I read. And the bitter herbs (romaine lettuce and horseradish) represent hard times. You see, it all has pre-scripted meaning and significance.

And here’s the mind-boggling part: Jesus is following the script. They all knew it by heart. He takes the unleavened bread and says the scripted thank-you prayer and breaks it as he is supposed to…but then he adds, then he ad-libs, then he steps outside the script and says, “This is my body…”

And it’s like he ruins the moment. He’s not thinking about Egypt fifteen hundred years previously, he’s thinking about this night, his night. This is what he came for. This is his life they’re talking about. No doubt the disciples are a little confused.

Then they go back to the script. Things settle down. The youngest person present (John?) would have asked the next question. Jesus would have explained the answer, “This night is different because we all recline and no one sits.” At some point they dip their vegetables in salt water. At some point they are required to dip their unleavened bread into the salt water too, it appears. Was this when Jesus might have said “One of you will betray me…the one who dips his bread in the bowl with me…?”

Then comes round three and four of the wine. Jesus follows the script but again as he is passing the cup (in Matthew we are told they all drank from the same cup) Jesus strays. He does not explain that this is how God delivered his people from slavery. No. He says “This is my blood, which is poured out for you.”

Whoa. Kind of creepy. Jesus is getting weird. What is he talking about? He is talking about his death, he is talking about bleeding to death. He is talking about flogging and crucifixion. He is not about Passover. Passover is about him.

And by saying these things, by adding to the script, Jesus co-opts, steals one of the three most important annual feasts in the culture of Israel (the other two would be Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). He steals the story from the Exodus and claims it for Himself. In so doing he declares that “It is the Exodus that points to me. The Exodus is the metaphor. I am the reality.”

Funny. All I wanted to do in this blog was talk about how we get the metaphor confused with the reality. We mistake the symbol for the truth. We tend to view the reality of Christ (his life, his death, resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit, his soon return, the resurrection of all) through the lens of the type. But I’m going to stop here and try to pick up the metaphor angle next time.

Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb during the Passover dinner.

Happy Easter!
The Gospel Crank