On Wednesday children in Vacation Bible School heard the story of the Passover.  They painted blood on the door frames of their houses, just as the Israelites did.  The houses were card tables, and the door frames were grocery bags filled with crumpled newspapers.  The ‘blood’ was red paint, which each child applied in turn.

After they crawled inside their house, each group waited for God’s angel to see the blood stains on the door and pass over them.

The Passover story was hard for me to share with children, as was Tuesday’s about the first nine plagues.  These stories raise much moral discomfort.  Even ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters struggled with the moral implausibility of these stories, which fueled their project of interpreting them symbolically so as not to stain God’s hands with blood. For Christians a symbolic reading of the Passover naturally leads to Jesus, the focus of Thursday’s Bible story.

Children think concretely, though, not symbolically.  For them, blood means blood.  Which is good in its own way.  As Kathleen Norris notes, blood imagery in the Bible points our attention to the concrete reality of the Incarnation, the eternal Word made human flesh, bone and blood.