Wednesday
Preparations for Passover begin on the 14th day of Nissan. No matter where you are, it is a special time of year, but we were in Jerusalem that year. Everyone who can, comes to the city at the centre of the world, and the world is there to greet them. Passover is one of our three pilgrimage festivals together with Shavuot and Sukkot, and we are expected to travel, leaving behind only those needed to watch and guard or who are too infirm to make the journey. In Jerusalem Israelites gather from the four corners of the earth, drawn by the Temple and its Holy of Holies built for us by Herod.
But it is not just the ceremonies that draw us in. The markets flourish when there are so many people to buy. Merchants come from all over the place to hawk their wares, from Arabia to China and by ship from all around the Great Sea. You can buy everything from the vegetables, matzos and bitter herbs for the feast, through to cloth and metal work, pots and pans, wooden items of all kinds, in fact anything saleable can be found somewhere in the city. The colours; red and yellow woven into carpets and exotic fabrics, stacks of oranges, lemons and pomegranates raise the spirits and are such a change from the white of the rocks, the dull green of the olive trees and the blue of the sky. The smells are particular to a city. So many bodies living close to each other in the hot temperatures. The excrement, human and animal. Offal from the slaughter of the animals required to feed so many people. Rotting vegetables left over from the markets. The stray animals eating what they can scrounge from the streets. The smells of exotic herbs and spices layered over the other less pleasant smells, and around every corner food for sale, being prepared in doorways and on street corners, fresh fruit and olives, bread and fish, wine and fresh clean water from the city well.
Added to the other smells on this day in particular is the smell of burning. Moses was commanded by Yahweh that we should eat lamb and unleavened bread before the escape from Egypt, so to make sure the ritual cannot be contaminated, all leaven is burnt. Every uneaten bit of bread or anything made from flour that can possibly have risen, even just a little bit, is burnt. We keep bits of bread specially to make sure we have burnt all leaven. This day is also the Fast of the Firstborn. Jesus as a first born, and a son always observed this as a Fast day. I am not, so I didn’t need to, but somehow we all usually ended up fasting until sunset, no matter where we were at the time. It would have been difficult moving around the food markets, but Jesus was insistent that we join him in the portico of the Temple. He seemed possessed by an energy that we had never seen before. It felt as if he was somehow running out of time, to teach us, to teach the people. And he was, though we still did not see it, we still could not read the situation around us.
God's stories 