Now the Passover
and Unleavened Bread were two days away; and the chief priests and the scribes
were seeking how to seize Him by stealth and kill Him; for they were saying,
"Not during the festival, otherwise there might be a riot of the
people."
This is the beginning of the last major section of
Mark. Jesus doesn’t teach much more, nor
does he offer another parable. The next
two chapters describe the couple days of Jesus’ life, when his prophecy of
rejection and death comes true. Studying
this passage, we will focus more on what Jesus experienced, and how we can be
like Jesus in situations like his.
There
is a festival of the Jews called Passover, and it is sometimes called the feast
of Unleavened Bread (or bread without yeast).
This is because the feast celebrates, recounts and partly relives the
events of Israel when they left their slavery of Egypt forever. On that date, they had to cook their meals in
a hurry, thus they had no time to cook bread that had to rise. So they always baked bread without yeast at
this time of the year. This provides
the context for Jesus’ death, as we will see later.
Meanwhile, the priests and scribes, the
leaders of the Sanhedrin, were plotting against Jesus. They were angry at his assertions that he is
king of Jerusalem and that the temple would be destroyed. They were enraged at his defeat of them in
the public debates in the temple. So
they decided that they needed to get rid of him, to kill him. But they didn’t want to do it publicly, for
fear that the crowds might defend him.
Rather, they wanted to capture him with a hand-picked crowd so they
could control the situation.
Even as Jesus used the Passover celebration and the event of the Exodus to provide an example for how he envisioned his last days to be like, even so we use traditions and stories to be an outline for our lives, establishing principles for living... or dying.
Traditions form the foundation of our lives, stepping stones from one season to the next, providing meaning for us even when we do not hold to the original meaning. More importantly, traditions can be used by God to stretch us, to go to places that we might never go. Jesus used the Passover to sacrifice himself in a manner that was never done by any other prophet. Even so, God can use Jesus' life-- even the gospel of Mark-- to stretch us and make us new people doing new things never seen before.
Tradition forms the basis of novelty.
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