7 Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
The concrete reality of the Passover lamb is lost in our culture of prepackaged meat and sterile church altars. For the Israelites, getting into right relationship with God required blood, lots of blood. As you read the First Testament, you can read of hundreds and sometimes thousands of animals being slaughtered in a single day. Thousands of gallons of blood flowing over stone pavement, or turning the hard dry ground into a reddish mud sticking to feet and clothing. The priests would have been knee deep in sacrificial reminder. People bringing their sacrifice would have witnessed and experienced this messy business. I think of the rescuers of September 11, 2001 as they ran headlong into smoke and flames at the Pentagon, wading through dust, smoke, and concrete at the twin towers, grass, wreckage, and trees in Pennsylvania. The events of those days became absorbed into their being. The images they saw and the smells they experienced, the sound of shovels, the cries for help, the eerie silence, all went with them as they went home to loved ones and carried on with their lives. They were changed by the events. So our lives can and should be changed by the Cross. The groans of pain, the gasping for breath, the smell of blood and sweat, the quiet whimpers of grief, the mocking shouts, the innocent dying, all reminders of the love demonstrated there. All that love for us. For us! That is the reason for cleaning house in our lives. Those sins that we cling to so desperately are just reminders of the sacrifice made for us. Payment has been made in full. Their power over us has been broken. Removal is just obedience away!