For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast.
There was an awful lot of smiting going on in the Old Testament. From the time of Cain and Abel onwards, it seems that there was scarcely a period when people were not smiting one another. Perhaps some of the most distressing occurrences of smiting are those when one set of people have smitten another set of people because they believe that God has told them to do it, and the scriptures, at least in many places, seem to bear out their belief. God is God, and I guess that he can do what he likes, but when he declares the intention to do the smiting, then I hold my head in my hands and long for the coming of the New Testament.
And yet our text is one of the most famous verses in the Old Testament, which is at the heart of the story of the escape of the Children of Israel from Egypt, and provides the foundation of the Jewish festival of the Passover: For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast.
It was not just on that night that all the smiting happened. There was another lot of smiting when Pharaoh's chariots were engulfed in the Red Sea, pursuing the fleeing Israelites through waters once parted. If Ramesses II was the pharaoh of the Exodus, then this is even more historically remarkable, because Ramesses and his charioteers were the best in the world and were the victors of the famous Battle of Kadesh. How are the mighty fallen – or, in this case, drowned (both man and beast)… and most definitely smitten!
History tells us that this is an oft-repeating pattern. Percy Shelley took the case of Ozymandias to prove the point…
…as surely as the waters closed over pharaoh's dead with barely a sigh.
More than one thousand years later, a young carpenter was celebrating the Feast of the Passover with his closest friends, with the traditional evening meal before the dawn of the Passover day. He would have recited the Exodus story, as scripture commended, and would have noted (no doubt) the poignant irony of the fact that he was Joseph's firstborn son and, according to subsequent Christian tradition, his heavenly Father's only-begotten Son. Then he would come to the crux-point – God said: The blood shall be a sign for you… and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you… But he added something new to the recital of the Passover and to the sharing of the Passover meal as he lifted a cup of wine and said, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many."
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Does God feel emotions? If he does, then his words prior to the Exodus would have returned to him and wracked his very being: I will smite all the first-born in the land… Of course, the Early Church Fathers, influenced by Greek philosophical concepts of perfection, denied that God could feel emotions, because emotions are tokens of human weakness, and thus proof of imperfection. They even defined a heresy called Patripassianism that they used in order to convict those who claimed that God could feel emotions. So I must skate on the borders of heresy when I meditate upon the reality of John 3.16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son… Is not that love the greatest emotion that the world, if not the universe, has ever known?
God did not smite his only-begotten Son. We did that, just as we have done so much smiting down all the generations of human history. The death of Jesus was not what God required, because it was what we brought about, but some Christians have noticed the remarkable paradox that spans the Old and the New Testaments of the bible, which give us such a different picture of the nature of God.
In Holy Week, Christians usually remark upon the contrast between the death of Christ and the story of Abraham and Isaac, the ram in the thicket saving the son's life by being the replacement sacrifice. However, I should like you to ponder upon a different contrast. In the story of the Exodus, it was the mark of the blood of an unblemished lamb smeared on the doorposts that saved the firstborn from death. In the story of Good Friday, it was the blood on the cross of the unblemished firstborn of God that saved the rest of us.
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He then took the bread in his carpenter's hands
So used to the adze and the saw
The hands that were soon to be broken by nails
The blows of the hammers
The cries of the crowd
The arms that would soon be stretched wide to the world
And able to break bread no more
It seemed to part easily there in his hands
And hands all reached out for their share
Of the body so soon to be rent by a spear
For the wine in the cup
Foretold of the blood
From arms that would soon be stretched wide to the world
And a soldier stood wondering there
I stand at the edge of Gethsemane's tears
I kneel by the fire in the chill
The remains of the meal still lay in the room
As broken as promises
Parted as friends
As they stretch out his arms full wide to the world
On that lonely and sorrowing hill
Do this and each time you proclaim to the world
The death you have witnessed out there
So take it and bless it and break it for all
All of you take it
And all of you eat
For my arms have been stretched out wide to the world
So that all may be able to share
We are parted by mystery dogma and fear
But not by the Christ on the tree
And if not at the altar then come to the cross
And kneel down beside me
And share there the joy
That the arms that are still stretched wide to the world
Can fully embrace you and me