This is a big weekend in the Judeo-Christian tradition: it is the season of Passover and the Holy Week leading to resurrection Sunday (aka Easter). The two holidays don’t just overlap on the modern calendar, the latter is inextricably woven into the former, and tells us more about that story of God’s redemptive love. It is spring in the northern hemisphere and so we are also confronted with the natural truth of resurrection; what we thought was dead bursts forth in life and the promise of something more.

On Good Friday in churches we often sing “Were Your There?” A powerful hymn that takes us back to that day on Calgary Hill where an itinerant Rabbi from Nazareth was crucified because he was preaching about how love could change the world, how love was the most powerful thing in the world, how God’s love was not available to be bought or sold but was for everyone, free, all the time. A message that did not work for the people who used power, influence, and exclusivity to control the environment. “Were you there when they crucified my lord?” goes the hymn. It places us there emotionally and challenges us to think about where exactly we would be on that day, who exactly is the Lord we worship. It asks us to think carefully about where we are standing then and now.

The Passover Seder does the same thing. Scripture commands that we celebrate the Passover every year as a way of remembering that we were slaves, that God freed us, that once free God invited us to be partners in living in a new way. Another story about redemption that reminds us there is hard stuff we have to walk through on the way to something new.

Certainly God could have just smote the Egyptians and put the Israelite slaves in their place. God could have kept Jesus off the cross and given him the power to rule from a place of directed love, imposed compassion. But that is not the message of either story. That is not the point we are meant to learn. It could not have been any other way, than a way of complete and utter change that is beyond imagining.

The Israelites fled Egypt and wandered in the desert for forty years so they could get to know God, get to know themselves, learn a new system for being in the world than the system of control, extraction, and abuse they had some from. Jesus went up on that cross to show us that the fear that drives a need for power cannot bear to face pure love, and that love is not stopped even by the meanest display of power.

I was not there. I did not suffer under the whip of imperial power, I did not suffer to see my hope in a new way of being crucified. I did not walk through the water, and I did not run from an empty tomb surrounded by God’s active redemption. I was not there. But for thousands of years we have told these stories every year, reminded ourselves of the pain and the miracles, taken the time before we jump to joy to sit in sorrow because ultimately that teaches us something about faith.

I cannot imagine the pain of that Saturday, lost; I cannot imagine that fear as God tore apart the waters and said you cannot stay where you were, you cannot remain who you have been. But I do the work to consider every year. I do the work to remember that God is there every year in the bud that bursts forth from the branch I was sure was dead.