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As Easter approaches and Passover fades away this week, I offer to you, dear readers, and your families, a two-word prayer to help each of us gain a measure of hope in these troubled times by taking the true meaning of our sacred stories into our lives.

A story from my tradition. The rabbis asked, “After the children of Israel saw the plagues in Egypt and after they passed through the two walls of water at the splitting of the Red Sea and after they were free to journey toward freedom, they complained. They complained about water and about missing the food of Egypt. How was it possible that the people who had seen the greatest miracles could still complain?”

The answer given by the rabbis was this, “In their crossing of the Sea, all they saw was mud because they never looked up and so they missed the miracle.”

They only saw mud because they never looked up. That is my prayer, “Look up!” Look up and you will see all the miracles around you. Look up and you will see the faces of people who love you. Look up and you will see the sky and light of our good earth. Look up and you will see the cascade of blessings that God has showered upon us, despite our sinfulness. The eyes that can see miracles do not open until we look up.

And for my Christian readers and friends, the lesson of looking up also may bring you some Easter joy.

The despair on Good Friday as Jesus’ disciples saw his agonizing crucifixion bowed their heads. How could the son of God suffer so terribly? Easter is about that agony just like Passover is about the bitterness of Egyptian slavery but neither story ends with despair. That is the miracle. The miracles for Jews is the Exodus and the miracle for Christians is the resurrection and ascension of Jesus into Heaven on Easter Sunday.

The stories end with looking up and what is seen when one looks up is a new story of liberation. It is a hope that wipes away all tears and offers a new path to life everlasting.

Looking up is our reaching out to God as God has reached out to us.

This is the Easter miracle for Christians. This is the core of the Christian faith. So pray on these verses and you will look up.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”

The story is not only about death. The story is about the conquering of death through the miracle of a resurrection after death. The story dies on Good Friday unless the Christian looks up to see its culmination on Easter Sunday.

Romans 6:5-6, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.”

Paul has taught Christians in this profound verse that the story of the Passion of Jesus is not a story about some ancient character in an ancient book. It is a living story that embraces every Christian who, like Jesus, faces death but now with the hope that death is not the end of us. The resurrection of Jesus is more than a story, it is a living hope for all believers. Death will be overcome and our journey to God will not be stopped at the grave.

The Bible offers the same hope to Jews in the Exodus story. It commands the listener to imagine that he or she also went up out of Egypt. Some stories – some rare, sacred stories – are like that. They reach out and pull us into the story of our life and faith, but all of them require one simple act … they all require us to look up and see the miraculous gifts all around us. The alternative is to live our lives mired in mud.

So, I pray for us all that we might, during this season of redemption and stories, look up. That’s it. For the sake of God just look up.

Happy Passover.

Happy Easter.

God bless us, one and all.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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