Christian storytelling is rooted in the ancient Jewish tradition of telling stories. In telling the story, its reality and power are made present to the hearers, so that by entering into the story they experience its significance and power to shape their perspectives and the living out of their own stories of faith.
The Old Testament Background of Jewish Storytelling
Jews have always loved a good story. The Old Testament itself embraces hundreds of stories of every kind, and, almost without exception, they are told well. Plots are carefully worked out, there are surprises and clever turns, there is a relish for description and for fine points of psychology and motivation.
The story of stories was the Exodus, Yahweh’s liberation of Israel from Egypt. Many books of the Old Testament (and the New Testament, for that matter) recount or allude to this central event in Israel’s constitution and self-understanding. The rescue from Egypt and the crossing of the Sea was the great saving act of God that made Israel a people. It was an event through which all subsequent acts of Yahweh would be understood and reflected on, and it would affect Israel’s own response to God as his covenanted people.
The story of the Exodus and what Israel’s response to such salvation should be was to be repeated from generation to generation with loving fidelity. No detail of the story was to be lost. “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them” (Deut. 4:9). “In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees, and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?’ tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes, the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household’ ” (Deut. 6:20–22).
The Role of Anamnesis: The Remembered Story
Deuteronomy: A Biblical Paradigm of the Remembered Story. This retelling of the story constitutes one feature of anamnesis (Hebrew: zikkaron, “remembering”). There are many elements to anamnesis. The Exodus was not conceived of as only a past event. It was somehow an everlasting event that continued to operate in Israel’s history, and each succeeding generation was called on to “witness” for itself this event as a living reality.
The book of Deuteronomy is the best Old Testament example of this reality. In an atmosphere of growing despair, the Deuteronomist preached reform and renewal to the people. The book says, in effect, that the covenant made in Sinai with Yahweh after the passage through the Sea never really took hold, that the promises of the covenant had not been fulfilled by Israel. Instead of asking the people to return to remembrance of the Exodus and to the fidelity that should have sprung from that experience of Yahweh, the author brings his hearers directly into the events themselves, saying that it is now happening in their midst and that they must respond to an activity of God that is present, not past. The Deuteronomist takes his listeners up Mount Nebo in Moab, on the border of Canaan, side by side with Moses, looking down into the Promised Land and demanding a response.
The words he puts into the mouth of Moses are not necessarily meant to record Moses’ preaching to the Hebrews of old. They are his own preaching to these people about their own lives, and he means to strike a response deep in their hearts to stories that he and his people really believed were the words of Moses. When the Deuteronomist has Moses speak to his people about being eyewitnesses to the Exodus, he also means for the people of his own time to see themselves as eyewitnesses of, and participants in, this saving event, since for him the redeeming power of Yahweh in the Exodus remains a present and urgent reality (Deut. 11:2–5, 7).
Present and Future Reality of the Remembered Story. Part of anamnesis, then, is not just a recollection of the past, but a drawing of past events into the present as still effective. As Johannes Betz puts it, “Anamnesis [in the biblical sense] means not only the subjective representation of something in the consciousness as an act of the remembering mind. It is also the objective effectiveness and presence of one reality in another, especially the effectiveness and presence of the salvific actions of God” (“Eucharist I,” Sacramentum Mundi [New York: Herder & Herder, 1968], 2:264).
One sees something similar in Joshua 24. When Joshua meets the Hebrews in Shechem who had not been in captivity in Egypt, nor experienced the Exodus as Joshua and his people had, he draws them into the covenant by making them acknowledge that the Exodus is an event for them, too—not just a thing of the past that they must accept as part of their own history, but an ongoing event that they now profess to, and witness in, their own lives. They become, by free choice, the dramatis personae of the constitutive saving act whereby Israel draws its being as a people. “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods! It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our fathers up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes” (Josh. 24:16–17).
This pulling up of the past into the present takes on greater definition in Isaiah 40 and the following chapters. While bringing the people the message of consolation that there will be restoration after the terrible experience of the Exile, the author tells the people that they must not think about the Exodus as merely a remembrance of the past. No, they must realize that the power and reality of the Exodus is still present and working in their midst and is forging their restoration. The coming restoration is but an extension of the Exodus itself. “This is what the Lord says—he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland’ ” (Isa. 43:16–19). He is not telling the exiles to forget the Exodus—he is urging them to see the Exodus as still working in their present. Indeed, he goes on to describe the return and restoration precisely in terms appropriate to the Exodus.
The Incarnation of the Remembered Story. There is one final aspect of biblical anamnesis, the reenactment of the event, a bringing of the past into the present, not just in memory but also in ritual, a sort of reincarnating of the event in symbol—or better, allowing the event to continue its incarnation forward in space and time. “You shall observe this as a perpetual ordinance for yourselves and your descendants. Thus, you must observe this rite when you have entered the land that the Lord will give you as he promised. When your children ask you, ‘What does this rite of yours mean?’ you shall reply, ‘This is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord [Yahweh], who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt; when he struck down the Egyptians, he spared our houses’ ” (Exod. 12:24–26, nab).
This ritual reenactment of the Exodus was gradually built on an earlier agricultural festival, which was then given a new meaning—the idea of “transignification,” which is used in contemporary eucharistic theology. This ancient feast was called the pesach in Hebrew and originally, apparently, was an ancient celebration that marked the spring yeaning, or birthing, and in which a lamb was killed as a sacrificial act.
This ritual was taken over as a structure to celebrate all events of the Exodus, and the individual rites were modified and given new meaning such that their original meaning was lost from consciousness, and they became symbolic reenactments of different facets of the great story. They were made into an anamnesis of the Exodus. The word pesach, which seems to have meant “leaping” and which possibly referred to a liturgical dance, now was given the meaning of “leaping over,” the “passing over” by Yahweh of the houses of the Hebrews when he visited the firstborn of the Egyptians with death.
The killing of the lamb no longer was a yeaning sacrifice, but a symbolic substitution for the firstborn of the Hebrews, who were spared. Similar embodiments of the Exodus story were attached to the ancient symbols of the unleavened bread—“there was no time to make leavened bread in the flight from Egypt”—the bitter herbs, the wine, etc. Anyone familiar with the contemporary Passover service will instantly recall the questions “Why is this night different from every other night” and “The unleavened bread which we eat, what is its reason?”
The Passover service is called the Haggadah, “the prayerful recital,” or the Seder, “the ritual order.” The ritual is an anamnesis, a zikkaron. It involves not just a recital of a past event, the Exodus, but brings it into the present, symbolized through liturgical reenactment. We read in the Haggadah, “In each and every generation, it is a man’s duty to regard himself as though he himself went forth out of Egypt.… Wherefore we thank him who performed all these miraculous deeds for our fathers, but also for us. He brought us forth out of bondage.” At the raisings of the second cup, this is recited: “Blessed are you, Lord God, king of the universe, who redeemed us and redeemed our fathers from Egypt, and enabled us to reach this night whereupon to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs.”
Thus the saving will of God, prototypically incarnated in the Exodus, reached into the present day as an ongoing saving reality. What is more, it will reach into the future: “So also, God of our fathers, may you enable us to reach holidays and celebrations to come, when we partake again of the Passover offerings.”
The Exodus reaches upward in history and expands its effect by further realizations in changing circumstances—the restoration after the exile, the rebuilding of the cities in the Promised Land, liberation in any struggle or darkness. These are all the Exodus at work in the midst of Israel. By ritual reenactment of the event and by the remembrance of it, the partakers of the Passover feast celebrate the continuance of Yahweh’s saving grace.
Jesus’ Use of Anamnesis/Remembered Story. In the New Testament, Jesus’ passage from death to life in his passion and resurrection are not only frequently described by means of Old Testament paschal typology, they are explicitly called an exodus. In the Transfiguration scene, Moses and Elijah appeared in glory and spoke of [Jesus’] exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem (see Luke 9:31). In the Last Supper, Jesus, of course, celebrates precisely the Passover service with the disciples. One by one he takes up the elements of the exodus-anamnesis and proclaims that his approaching passion, death, and resurrection are the renewed exodus, just as the return from exile was for Isaiah. As the earlier Hebrews transfigured an earlier rite, now Jesus takes the exodus-anamnesis and makes it his own story. The tale is not of what has happened; it is the story of what is now happening. He himself is the paschal lamb that is killed so that others might live. The wine is no longer the sign of the sprinkled blood to seal the Sinai covenant; it is his own blood in a new covenant.
This thanksgiving of Haggadah, or Eucharist, becomes for the covenanted people formed by Jesus’ death and resurrection the celebration of the Exodus from Egypt precisely as this grace from the Father was at work in Jesus, leading from bondage to freedom. But as the Jews celebrated the Exodus as a continuing event in their own time, so Christians celebrate the passion and death of Jesus not as a past reality, but as the Passover of Jesus, as a present reality, extending from Jesus to the believer through the power of Jesus’ Spirit. Those who partake of this paschal banquet celebrate Jesus’ exodus from death to life as working in their own lives, and they proclaim his death until he comes again in glory. They confess that it will reach its fulfillment even in the future when they sit with the Lord at the heavenly banquet.