Expecting Miracles

Three times a year, every Jewish man was supposed to come to Jerusalem to give thanks. Their Thanksgiving, like ours, was in the fall. They called it the Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths, though, because people built temporary shelters out in the fields to sleep in overnight, that is if they slept at all. Things could get pretty rowdy; there were usually a lot of weddings right after Tabernacles. But it wasn’t the most important religious feast, any more than our Thanksgiving is. The biggest feast of all was the spring Passover, when they celebrated God’s rescue of Israel from slavery in Egypt. But this year it hadn’t been an occasion for thanksgiving, not for Peter and James and the others; in fact, the worst days of their lives began the night they celebrated the Passover feast with their beloved Master. For a while they thought they would never want to celebrate anything ever again.

But things were different, now. Ever since Jesus started appearing among them, talking to them, even eating with them, and they finally grasped that he was really alive, they had shared a sense of dizzying expectation. They didn’t know exactly what it was going to be, but since God had raised Jesus from the dead, anything could happen! Since Jesus - their rabboni Jesus - really was the Messiah, everything they had longed for was just around the corner! Something was going to happen, Jesus said so, God would give them power and Israel would be restored and Jesus was going to come back and rule, he was going to be king just as they had thought he would and they just had to sit tight in Jerusalem for it all to happen. Jesus said so.

So they all stayed in Jerusalem, just as Jesus had told them to. It wasn’t just the Twelve, either, Jesus’ mother Mary was with them all the time, ever since Jesus had told John to look after her they had been practically inseparable. All of his brothers were there, too! That was really astonishing. Everybody could remember how skeptical they had been when Jesus was preaching and healing around Galilee in the beginning. But they had seen him alive, too, so there they were. All in all there were over a hundred of Jesus’ followers right there in Jerusalem, and even though they couldn’t stay together all the time - after all, no one had a house big enough for that many! they gathered every day on the temple steps to pray and sing, to talk over all that had taken place and to speculate on what was going to happen next, and how soon Jesus would come back.

Of course they noticed the hubbub going on around the city as it prepared for the onslaught of visitors for the third pilgrim festival. And of course they would all go to the temple to give thanks by presenting their sacrifices of two loaves of bread, commemorating the wheat harvest. It was celebrated 49 days, seven times seven, a week of weeks after Passover, so it was called the Feast of Weeks. The Greek-speakers called it Pentecost, though, which means 50th.

And of course the disciples knew that this was also the day on which Moses had brought the law down from Mt. Sinai over a thousand years before, the very day the 12 tribes became a nation belonging to God. So when they brought their loaves to the temple, they would celebrate the renewal of the covenant - of course. That’s what they did every year.

But - wait a minute. Hadn’t Jesus said, on the night before he was crucified, “This is the blood of a new covenant“? [Luke 22:20] What about the old covenant? What a time this would be for something to happen! Because after all, Jesus changed the meaning of the Passover - when the blood of the lamb on the doorposts was a sign to the angel of death to pass over those households - when he became the Lamb that was sacrificed to give God’s people life. Now his blood was the sign for the angel of death to pass over God’s people. But what new kind of celebration do you suppose it could be? How could Jesus change this festival into something new? What would happen? It could be anything!

...When God called Moses, he spoke from a bush which burned with a fire that did not consume...

...When Moses gave God’s law to the tribes, some rabbis taught, all the nations of the world heard them...

...And when the hand of the LORD brought Ezekiel into a valley filled with dry bones, the breath of God blew like wind upon the multitude of the slain, and “a vast multitude lived, and rose to their feet...” [Ezek 37:10]