Remember and Do Not Forget
Communion, September 7, 2014
Exodus 12:21-28
In our Old Testament scripture for today, Moses is telling the Israelites how to remember something that hasn’t even happened yet. God is going to do something terrible and something wonderful. God is going to kill the firstborn of the Egyptians, the people who have enslaved the Israelites and whose King will not let them go. That’s terrible. It’s awful. It’s hard to understand. Even though the Israelites have suffered terribly—even though Pharaoh had murdered the firstborn of the Israelites himself—somehow it’s different when it’s God who instigating it.
On the other hand, God is about to do something wonderful. Through Moses, God has given Pharaoh chance after chance to free the enslaved Israelites, and he hasn’t done it. Pharaoh’s time is up, and the time for freedom is now. God will let God’s people go. While the Egyptian firstborn will be killed, the Israelite firstborn will be spared; and in the chaos, the Hebrews will escape. The army of Pharaoh will be defeated. Though terrible things will happen, a couple of messages trump all others. Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, is the all-powerful God of all people and all things; and that all-powerful God is on the side of the oppressed, the enslaved, and the suffering.
That’s the Passover as Jews remember it today, when they celebrate it once a year. They eat the bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of the life of slavery; they eat unleavened bread to remember that they had to leave Egypt so quickly they didn’t have time to wait for bread to rise. They remember that God is great and God is loving; that God is terrible, and that God liberated them.
Rabbi Israel Spira, a Hasidic rabbi and concentration camp victim who survived the Nazi Holocaust and found a home in Israel, once wondered out loud why sometimes in Scripture, we are admonished not simply to “remember,” but to “remember and do not forget.” He answered his own question: “There are events of such overbearing magnitude that one ought not to remember them all the time, but one must not forget them either. Such an event is the Holocaust.” (Eliach, Yaffa. Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1988. Quoted on Title Page.)
The Holocaust; the Passover; the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 9/11; the crucifixion of God upon a cross. Those events, and others, are events of such overbearing magnitude that they are too terrible to remember all the time. They’re too heavy. They could crush us.
But we should not forget them, either. There’s a big concern among modern Jews that with the passing of the Holocaust’s victims that a new generation has arisen that has forgotten the concentration camps and the genocide. They don’t literally mean “forget.” The present generation can read history books. But there’s a deeper meaning to forgetting. Have they forgotten what it means to be oppressed? Have they forgotten what it means to put life above all else? Have they forgotten that life is precarious and that their survival is always threatened? Have they forgotten that it is as wrong to cause suffering as it is to suffer?
It’s easy to remember history and forget its deeper meaning. We wrap it up in platitudes like, “But it all worked out in the end” and “God was on our side.” We say, “Well, we learned a lesson and we’ll never do that again.” But we find it easy to dismiss deeper meanings and complexity. The Passover isn’t just about God’s freeing the Israelites, but also God sending the Angel of Death to kill the Egyptian firstborn. Stories of freedom are often tied to stories of suffering; stories of great victories are also stories of great loss.
That’s why Rabbi Spira says we shouldn’t always remember them. They’re heavy, fraught with meaning. But we also must never forget them. Because they are also the stories that give our lives meaning.
Our own personal stories are the same way. Most of the most important memories of our lives combine the good with the bad, suffering with healing, fear with hope, downfall with redemption. We shouldn’t remember them all the time, but we must never forget them. Those are the memories of the things that shaped us and changed us, for good or ill. To forget them is to forget ourselves.
The Lord’s Supper is that way for us Christians. In a minute I’ll break the bread and bless the wine, and then I’ll say, “Whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup we remember His death until He comes again.”
His death—the cosmic cataclysm at the center of history—when human beings took it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner to God. His inevitable return—the cosmic hope at the center of our faith—that this amazing, just, merciful, forgiving man, Jesus, is God in flesh, and He will certainly come to rule over the world, and all flesh will see it.
It’s one of those events of overbearing magnitude that we cannot always remember, but that we must never forget. It’s at the heart of our faith. It’s at the core of our lives as Christians.
Remember and do not forget.