Greetings from Pastor Khader:
Recently, I had a visit to my dentist for my annual cleaning. This dentist is a
friend of mine. We used to do karate together.
My dentist is funny—she loves to talk, ask questions, and answer them. This is what most dentists do when you are sitting in the dentist’s chair, opening your mouth and unable to talk or express yourself. I call this freedom of speech.
Once, my dentist asked me this theological question: “What is redemption?”
She asked it while she was cleaning my teeth. But as I thought about her question throughout the week, I was surprised to find redemption everywhere:
• Going through my mailbox, I was commanded, “Redeem this coupon today for the Disney Adventure of a lifetime!”
•Then, I passed a car dealership advertising “Tire redemption!”
•And then there was this article headline: “Alabama Throttles Duke: But No True Redemption!”
These experiences left me wondering how we might redeem the meaning of redemption in our lives. So, what is redemption?
The verb redeem has a strangely diverse range of meanings, including rescue, deliver, save, recover, and atone. To make sense of this, let’s first look in the book of Exodus:
• Redemption meant rescue when God promised the Israelites freedom from the bonds of slavery.
• Redemption meant deliverance as the Israelites fled across the Red Sea, and God parted its waters to allow them safe passage.
• Redemption meant recovery as God claimed those who had suffered powerlessness as “his people,” and as the humiliation of enslavement was soothed by God’s compassion.
• And redemption also meant atonement. As a central part of the Exodus story, the ten plagues brought down upon the Egyptians are celebrated in the Passover Seder.
The cup of redemption reminds us that redemption also involves responsibility and atonement. During the Exodus narrative, each person removes ten drops from their own third cup of wine as the ten plagues are read aloud. Each drop symbolizes the wine-red blood of the innocents who too often bear the cost of struggles for the redemption of peoples and nations. As the wine runs into our meal later, we are reminded that redemption is not clean and neat. And as we drink less than a full cup of wine, we are reminded that, in many ways, redemption remains incomplete.
This message of the complexity of redemption rings especially true to us Christians as we prepare to commemorate the Feast of Holy Cross Day on September 15 during our worship service.
The Last Supper began as a traditional Seder, yet when Jesus raised the cup of wine, he gave new meaning to the covenant of redemption.
This cup is the one to which Jesus was referring when the sons of Zebedee asked to sit in glory at His right and left, and he responded:
You don’t know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I experience?
It was this cup that Jesus pleaded for His Father to take from Him during His agony in the garden, saying:
My Father, let this cup pass from me!
And it was as he lifted this third cup that Jesus said the words that now begin our celebration of the Eucharist each week:
This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, drink this, in remembrance of me.
The suffering of the Egyptians brought about Jesus’ ancestors’ redemption. And Jesus’ own suffering, and his blood, brought redemption for all of humanity.
With this bittersweet cup, let us recall both suffering and salvation as we enter a new covenant in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who is our Redeemer and our salvation.