IN MEMORY OF DELIVERANCE
Recently I read a travel book which told of an indigenous people on the
Indonesian island of Sulawesi, called the Toraja. They count as only about
half a million, they are mostly farming, grow cotton and weave colourful
fabrics and cultivate rice fields with the help of their water buffalos. They
have been Christians only in the third generation. Missionaries from the
Netherlands convinced them that of all the religions in the world, Christianity
suited them best. This is, because here we are dealing with the questions of
Life and Death, how life and death are intertwined, and what influence death
has on our lives.
In their early animistic religion, the Toraja lived almost entirely orientated on
death. The animistic beliefs were known as ‘aluk’, the way of the ancestors,
which required elaborate funeral rites. The Toraja believed, that man could
only get into an afterlife, if he was accompanied by white water buffalos, as
many as possible, which were ritually slaughtered at the funeral. Then the
deceased would not linger in a pre-hell state, but proceed to paradise
straight away. The funeral with the slaughter would be a festive meal for all
the village and also a magnet for tourists. The difficulty was, that the entire
family had to save for the funeral all their life, since a buffalo was as
expensive as a house, and the lifelong toil on the fields was only for the
provision of the dead. Only very slowly these customs are changing. Still
there are large funeral festivities, but gradually there is understanding about
Christian beliefs, that there is a life before death and that Hell is not a god-
less place and that there is a hope for a future free from the shadow of
death.
This is what we are remembering during Holy Week, a future free from the
sin and death of the past. When Jesus asked his disciples for the Passover-
meal at the evening before his crucifixion, they remembered the deliverance
from a life dominated by death. God’s angel of death walked through the
towns on the Nile, and the children of the Egyptians died, but the Hebrew
children stayed alive. The sign of the lamb on the door meant freedom from
death, and the festive meal of the Passover was a memorial of that freedom.
With one important difference: Jesus, in breaking the bread, meant that the
lamb which was to be slaughtered was himself, that he was the last sacrifice
which was made, and that his death meant that hell and death were
vanquished.
There is quite a bit of very ancient fear contained in our celebration of the
Last Supper, the Eucharist. It reminds us of suppression and pain and that
the knowledge of death can overshadow life, and the need for deliverance
from the rituals of death which we, too, in our modern world have not
eliminated. Yet in the Eucharist we celebrate a festival of life, we celebrate
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