A lamb for every house, blood on the door, a judgment that passed over, and the night Paul said had happened again
The Passover Lamb
The lamb that every Jew at the Jordan knew best was the one their family had eaten a few weeks before. Exodus 12 is the oldest liturgy in the Bible: choose a lamb, keep it four days, kill it at evening, put its blood on the door, eat it dressed for a journey. Nothing in the chapter says the lamb died for anyone’s sin. It says that a judgment was coming through the land, and that where the blood was, the judgment passed over.
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Lesson 3 of 12 · The door
On the last night in Egypt every household in Israel killed a lamb, painted its blood on the doorframe with a bunch of hyssop, and stayed inside. God said what the blood was for in one sentence: when I see the blood, I will pass over you. The lamb was not a payment for the household’s sins; the chapter never says the household had sinned. It was a token, a sign placed between the house and a judgment that was coming through the land whether the house deserved it or not, and the family inside did nothing but trust that the sign was on the door. That is the shape the rest of the series will keep finding. Israel was told to keep the night forever, and did; Jesus kept it on his last night; Paul told the Corinthians that Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed, as a fact everyone knew; and John timed the crucifixion to the afternoon the lambs were killed and quoted the rule about the lamb’s bones over the body on the cross.
A lamb for a household
The instructions come before the event, and they are the instructions Israel kept for the next fourteen centuries.
Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth day of this month, they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; and if the household is too little for a lamb, then he and his neighbor next to his house shall take one according to the number of the souls. You shall make your count for the lamb according to what everyone can eat. Your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old. You shall take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at evening. They shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel, on the houses in which they shall eat it. — Exodus 12:3–7 · WEB
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On the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb, a lamb for a household; your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old; you shall keep it until the fourteenth day, and the whole assembly shall kill it at evening; and they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel. The lamb lived in the house for four days before it died, which is the kind of detail a liturgy keeps and a legend forgets. Without defect: the word will be said over every offering in Leviticus, and Peter will say it of Christ. A lamb for a household, and a household too small for a lamb shares one with its neighbor: the Passover was not a temple rite but a family one, and the unit it saved was a house.
פֶּסַח peçach H6453
from פָּסַח; a pretermission, i.e. exemption; used only techically of the Jewish Passover (the festival or the victim); passover (offering).
The passing over — the name of the festival and of the lamb, one word for both, so that "kill the Passover" in verse 21 means kill the lamb. The verb behind it means to pass by, to skip, and in one passage of Isaiah to protect, as a bird hovers over a nest; some readers hear that in the night as well, Yahweh not only passing by the house but standing over it. Either way the word names what God did, not what the lamb was: the lamb is called by the name of the mercy it secured. The Greek Old Testament took the Hebrew word over as pascha, and that is the word Paul uses when he says Christ is ours.
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When I see the blood
The chapter says what the blood does, and it says it as God speaking.
For I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and animal. I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. I am Yahweh. The blood shall be to you for a token on the houses where you are. When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. — Exodus 12:12–13 · WEB
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I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, and will strike all the firstborn. The blood shall be to you for a token on the houses where you are. When I see the blood, I will pass over you. The judgment is on Egypt and its gods; Israel is in Egypt; the blood is what marks a house as not to be struck. Notice what the family did not do. They did not see the blood themselves, being inside with the door shut. They did not argue their innocence. They did not add anything to the door. They ate a meal in traveling clothes and trusted that what they had been told to put on the doorframe was there, and that the one passing through would see it and do what he had said. The series has already met that shape in Abraham, believing a promise in the dark. Here it is a whole nation, behind painted doors.
“Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said to them, “Draw out, and take lambs according to your families, and kill the Passover. You shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two door posts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For Yahweh will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and when he sees the blood on the lintel, and on the two door posts, Yahweh will pass over the door, and will not allow the destroyer to come in to your houses to strike you.” Exodus 12:21–23 · WEB
Take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two door posts; Yahweh will pass over the door, and will not allow the destroyer to come in: the elders’ instructions, with the hyssop that will appear again at the cross.
“It will happen, when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of Yahweh’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians, and spared our houses.’” The people bowed their heads and worshiped.” Exodus 12:26–27 · WEB
When your children ask you, what do you mean by this service? you shall say, it is the sacrifice of Yahweh’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel: the night made into a question every child would ask, forever.
“It must be eaten in one house. You shall not carry any of the meat outside of the house. Do not break any of its bones.” Exodus 12:46 · WEB
It must be eaten in one house; do not break any of its bones: a rule about the lamb that no one would have thought to quote at an execution, until John did.
“He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,” Luke 22:15 · WEB
I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer: Jesus at the table, on the night the Gospels place the supper, naming the meal.
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Christ our Passover
Twenty-five years after the crucifixion Paul writes to Corinth about a matter of discipline, and reaches for the night in Egypt as something they already know.
Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place. — 1 Corinthians 5:7 · WEB
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Purge out the old yeast, that you may be a new lump, even as you are unleavened; for indeed Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place. He does not argue it. He uses it, the way one uses a fact both parties hold, to make a point about something else; the Corinthians are told to clean out leaven because the lamb has already been killed, which is the order of Exodus 12. The last words of the verse in this reader’s text, "in our place," are the translators’ gloss on a verb that means simply was sacrificed; the older versions stop at "sacrificed for us." The gloss is not wrong about Paul, but a reader should know where the verse ends.
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The hour of the lambs
John’s Gospel does what Paul’s sentence does, but with a clock.
For these things happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled, “A bone of him will not be broken.” — John 19:36 · WEB
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For these things happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled, a bone of him will not be broken. The soldiers have broken the legs of the two crucified beside Jesus and left his, because he was already dead, and John says why it mattered: the Passover rule, from Exodus 12:46 and Numbers 9:12, was being kept over a body. He has already dated the day as the preparation of the Passover and the hour as about the sixth (John 19:14), which is when the temple began killing the lambs for the evening meal, and he has put hyssop at the cross (19:29), the plant that painted the doors. The fourth series marked the question of whether John moved the day to say this; whichever way that question is settled, what John is saying is not in doubt. The Lamb of God, announced by the Baptist in his first chapter, dies in his last as the Passover lamb, with the rules of Exodus 12 kept over him.
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What the door asks
It asks the reader to stand inside the house. Not at the altar, not in the temple, but in a family’s front room on a night when a judgment is going through the street, with a sign on the door that you were told to put there and cannot see from where you sit. The Passover is the oldest picture in the Bible of what it is to be saved by something done outside you, and trusted. Israel was told to explain it to its children every year, and the explanation was never "we were good." It was "he passed over our houses."
Read Exodus 12:1-14 and 1 Corinthians 5:6-8. Write down, in two columns, what the lamb did for the house and what the house did for itself. Then write one sentence on what Paul asks the Corinthians to do because the lamb has already been killed.
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