Passover, a Blood Moon, and a Debt

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Passover, a Blood Moon, and a Debt

On Passover, we will see a (gasp) Blood Moon in the sky, and so the world is coming to an end again. On the ‘net there’s a picture of a real big Blood Moon behind the Moscow Kremlin, so it must be so.

Yes, the End Times are back, according to Reverend 1-800-501C3 on the Orwellian telescreen, so send him money. The End Times are always hanging around, leeching onto you like that fellow who approaches you in the parking lot and tells you he ran out of gas on his way to his mother’s funeral in Waco. The next time you see him he’s taking his child (cue the sad child who knows darned well to keep his mouth shut or else) to the hospital in Houston and the car’s transmission went out, and brother, can you spare a twenty God bless you sir?

The year 1999 was an especially profitable season for End Times, what with mysterious glowing chupacabras in the sky spelling out 999 (which is even worse than 666) in Babylonian hieroglyphics, coded signals from Fred Phelps’ basement, and crudely-illustrated Jack Chick pamphlets telling you that you’re going to (Newark) anyway, so don’t even bother trying.

Hey, why read the Bible when you’ve got Jack Chick, eh?

When the sun rose on 1 January 2000, some folks climbed down from their roofs, consulted The Voices, whapped themselves on the forehead (“Wow, I could have had a Julian calendar!”), and said, “Oh, wait – we miscalculated. 2000 is the end of the millennium, so, like, the end of the world is coming next year. Really!”

Anyway, on the ‘net this week somebody said that somebody said that somebody else said that we’ve got a tetrad coming. Whatever a tetrad is. And so with the tetrad comes the End Times, and this time – or end time - they really mean it, okay?

And yet – and yet Easter will come again this year. The Altar will be set right after the grim Triduum, and on Sunday morning spring flowers and morning sunlight will supplant the darkness of Good Friday. Local ministers and priests (Chaucer’s “parsouns”) will tell again a 2,000-year-old story because they look to God, not to Hi-Def images of Reverend 1-800-501C3, for the truth.

After the liturgy there will be merriment, dinner on the grounds (which really isn’t on the grounds, but in the hall), and an easter-egg hunt (which really is on the grounds, unless there is rain, in which case it will be in the hall).


The nice man who mows the church lawns will mutter for months (for this now is effectively a part of the liturgical calendar) about the lawnmower blades finding undiscovered plastic eggs and, worse, real eggs in an advanced state of malodorous decay.

But it’s all told much better in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture (except for the undiscovered eggs ripening through Ordinary Time), the sequence from Good Friday through Holy Saturday to Easter morning, followed by a happy feast.

In the evening we can again watch Charlton Heston lead the children of Israel out of the brickpits and into the desert, still fascinated even though we know how it ends. Great stories are like that.

Easter – or Pascha, if you prefer - beats superstition, including the laughable blood moon, all hollow. And you don’t have to send money to anyone – in every way, the debt has been paid.

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