Christians and Passoverby Dr. John Garr
Passover is a perpetual memorial of two seminal events that are foundational to Judaism and Christianity. Each time a Torah-observant Jew or a Bible-believing Christian celebrates the Passover, he is calling to remembrance one or both of history's greatest events, the Exodus experience and the Calvary event. Without the Exodus, there would be no Jewish people. Without both the Exodus and Calvary, there would be no Christianity. As Anthony Saldarini has rightly observed, “Passover lives on in both the Jewish and Christian communities as a central ritual which expresses each community’s identity and nature” (Jesus and Passover, p. 4). Passover marks two of the momentous times in history when the rectilinear path of divine providence intersected the plane of human need, times when the Eternal took the sovereign initiative to solve the woefully twisted enigma of human suffering. In one divine miracle of Passover deliverance, God brought forth a nation of perhaps two million Jews from one of history’s most onerous slaveries, establishing for all succeeding generations the hope of the divine imperative: “Let my people go!” In another Passover miracle, the all-loving, all-knowing Father provided his Son as a Passover Lamb whose death on the cross provided the atonement by which human sin could be passed over in love and mercy. Immediately after the Passover event which produced Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, God commanded the Israelites to celebrate the Passover each year forever (Exodus 12:14). He considered remembering the details of his miraculous deliverance so impor tant that he established as the penalty for the nonobservance excommunication from the company of Israel and from the presence of God (Exodus 12:15). For Israel’s first fifteen hundred years, both the linear descendants of Jacob’s sons and the unknown multitudes of Gentiles who chose to embrace God’s covenant with Israel observed the commandment. It was entirely ordinary, then, that Jesus and his disciples shared the Passover meal in the evening before his death, and it was natural that Jesus would partake of the elements of that meal, during which he established a New Covenant Passover ritual for all those who would come to faith in his name. “No other religious ritual better reveals the organic relationship that exists between Judaism and Christianity,” says Samuele Bacchiocchi, “than the Passover meal partaken of and transformed by Jesus into the very symbol of His redemption” (God’s Festivals in Scripture and History, Part 1, the Spring Festivals, p. 32). PASSOVER AND THE EXODUS God commanded his chosen people to observe Passover throughout all their generations so that they might remember that their very existence as a people was wholly dependent upon his gracious act of deliverance. Every Israelite in subsequent history was to declare on each annual celebration of the Passover, “I was a slave in Egypt,” maintaining the indelible impression that not only were his ancestors delivered from slavery but in a very real sense, he himself was likewise liberated. Individual freedom is not the result of an accident of history: it is the product of God’s lovingkindness and the miracle of his deliverance. The enslaved Israelites’ ancestors had come to Egypt as celebrities when Joseph was so positioned by divine providence as to save not only the chosen people but all of Egypt as well. As a result of a divine gift that gave him insight into Egypt’s future, Joseph was exalted by Pharaoh to be Egypt’s prime minister and was given the charge of devising and implementing a plan to prepare for the seven years of famine which he foresaw and of administering the distribution of the stores of food during that time. As time progressed, the seventy family members who came with Joseph into Egypt multiplied to the point that the Egyptian authorities began to fear the power of their numbers. A Pharaoh “who knew not Joseph” began to enslave the Israelites, forcing them to work in deplorable conditions to build the architectural wonders of Egypt. Faced with no prospect for relief, the Israelites cried out to God for deliverance in an agonizing petition for liberation from the bitterness of their oppression. In order to underscore the miraculous provisions of his providence, God purposed to send a deliverer with a divine plan to liberate his enslaved people. At a time when Pharaoh had ordered that all male Israelite infants be drowned in the Nile River, a resourceful daughter of Israel hid her son Moses for the first three months of his life. Then she placed the infant in a basket of reeds and with faith in God placed the boat in the Nile. The small craft floated directly to one of Pharaoh’s daughters who “coincidentally” was bathing nearby. Pharaoh’s daughter immediately had compassion on the baby and adopted him as her own son. Thus, a slave baby was positioned in the imperial house where he acquired the world’s best education, political power, and personal wealth. Despite the riches of Egypt that were lavished upon him by a doting stepmother, Moses could not escape his true patrimony: he was a son of the very slaves who were being exploited by Egypt. After a time when Moses was forty years of age, his suppressed anger erupted as he witnessed one of his people being severely beaten by an Egyptian taskmaster. Enraged with indignation, he killed the taskmaster. When Moses realized that his actions had been observed, he fled to the remote Sinai desert. For forty years Moses passed his time as a shepherd in the arid, lifeless landscape. One day as he passed the barren slopes of Mount Sinai, out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a bush that was burning (not an unusual sight in this desert of scorching heat where bushes of this type often undergo spontaneous combustion). What riveted Moses’ attention to this bush was the fact that despite the intense flame that encompassed it, the bush was not consumed. When Moses “turned aside to see” this phenomenon, he positioned himself directly in the path of God’s voice that called to him, “Moses, Moses.” The Eternal God commissioned Moses to return to Egypt with a fateful message for Pharaoh: “Let my people go.” Moses was not to secure Israel’s liberty through his skills in diplomacy. By this time, he suffered from a “slowness of speech.” He was to be equipped with divine authority to call forth miracles to attest to the divine authorship of his commands for Pharaoh. His shepherd’s staff became “the rod of God” which produced many miracles. God’s plan was simple: speak to Pharaoh the words of the divine imperative and then be a channel for the display of awesome power. Ten plagues were devised by the hand of the Almighty to bring progressively more painful suffering to the land of Egypt to punish the obduracy of its leader. Interestingly, each of these plagues was also designed to demonstrate the Lord God’s judgment against Egypt’s gods. To the amazement of the Egyptians in particular and perhaps of even most of the children of Jacob, Goshen, the land where the enslaved Israelites lived, was spared the withering effects of some of the plagues. In Goshen, there were no swarming creatures, no dying cattle, no boils, no hail, no locusts, and no darkness. The last of the plagues targeted the Egyptian idolatry wherein Pharaoh and his son were worshipped as incarnate deities. The firstborn of everyone in the land of Egypt was to be destroyed as the Lord himself passed through the land. The major difference between this concluding plague and its predecessors would be the fact that this time, Goshen would not escape the visitation of this night of terror. In order to prepare the Israelites and provide a way of escape for their firstborn, God gave Moses a simple plan: on the fourteenth day of the first month, each of the families of Israel would sacrifice an unblemished lamb at the threshold of their house. In an open display of disrespect for heathen gods, the lamb was sacrificed in the basin at the threshold of the door of each home. Then, the patriarch of each family dipped a piece of hyssop in the blood at the threshold and applied it conspicuously to both doorposts and to the lintel of the door, in effect completely encircling the door with the blood. “When I see the blood,” God said, “I will pass over you.” The Hebrew word for “pass over” is pesach, which literally means “to jump over.” Marking the entry to each house with blood from the “paschal” lamb provided a way of escape for the Israelite firstborn. A second part of the requirement for escape was that the families remain in their houses throughout the night of the Passover, eating the roasted lamb, consuming bitter herbs, and sharing in bread that was made without yeast. The bread was the bread of affliction, but it was also the bread of haste. After a seemingly interminable duration of suffering in slavery, God would do a quick work to bring his people out. The Israelites awoke the following morning to find their firstborn spared. The Egyptians, on the other hand, were devastated, for the firstborn of every house, including that of Pharaoh, had died. In desperation Pharaoh’s hardened heart finally relented, and he ordered the Israelites to leave Egypt. Throughout that day, the chosen people requested and received from the Egyptians gold and silver (equivalent to wages for the time of their slavery). Then, on the fifteenth day of the first month of the year, they departed from Egypt “with a high hand,” knowing that God himself had delivered them. The route that God chose for their escape was one which brought them face to face with the Red Sea. (The term Red Sea is a misnomer. It is actually the Reed Sea, Yam Suph in Hebrew). By that time, Pharaoh had reconsidered the liberation of the Israelites and had determined to retake them. The entire camp of Israel found itself confronted by the choice of death in the Red Sea or at the hand of Pharaoh’s army. Moses, however, calmly ordered, “Stand firm and see the salvation of God!” Suddenly a powerful east wind began to blow, clearing a path of dry ground at the bottom of the sea. Walled-up water stood at attention, forming a channel through which Israel could pass. At that moment, each Israelite made a choice through an act of faith to cast his own life into the hands of the God who had parted the waters. All the Israelites walked down the western shore of the Red Sea believing that they would arrive alive on the eastern shore. Paul later characterized this act of faith as a baptism unto Moses, an immersion that came to be characterized as a death, burial, and resurrection to a different legal status. Just as later proselytes were legally changed from strangers to Israelites when they came up out of the waters of the mikveh (baptism), so when the Israelites passed through the Red Sea, they emerged on the other side with a change of status, no longer slaves but free men. What was to be fulfilled in this new nation of believers in the God of creation would ever be founded upon that one eventful night in Egypt when God provided the lamb as a vicarious and efficacious atonement, a means of escape that secured their freedom. And, to ensure that each generation would not forget what God had done, the Lord decreed that every Israelite home would forever celebrate the Passover each year by eating the roasted lamb, the bitter herbs, and the unleavened bread. Every Israelite was instructed to celebrate the Passover as an anamnesis, a virtual reenactment of the original event wherein one could relive the Passover in a very personal way. The first of the year for Israel would be not just the spring when everything is renewed; it would be the time of redemption, the time of freedom. A SECOND PASSOVER, A REFORMED FAITH For fifteen centuries, the Israelites had faithfully fulfilled God’s commandment, celebrating the Passover each year with their families and friends. In one such celebration, a group of Torah-observant Jews gathered around their Rabbi in a rented upper-level banquet room. “I have desired to celebrate this Passover with you before I suffer,” he had declared (Luke 22:15). Systematically, he and his disciples followed the seder of observance that the sages of previous generations had prescribed. They ate the roasted lamb, dipped their bread in the bitter herbs (John 13:26), and sang the Hallel Psalms (Matthew 26:30). This was the scene on the eve of Passover when Yeshua HaMashiach shared his last Passover celebration with his twelve disciples. During this Passover, however, Jesus instituted a New Covenant Passover celebration that would forever be a memorial to demonstrate the Lord’s death until his return. “Take, eat; this is my body,” he declared of the unleavened bread. “Drink ye all of it; this is the new covenant in my blood,” he said of the Passover wine. For the first time, they celebrated the momentous deliverance that was to occur on the very next day when the Lord was to consummate his role as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” as John the Baptizer had described him three years earlier (John 1:29). At the conclusion of the seder, these Passover celebrants went out to the Mount of Olives. There Jesus prayed for hours in the Garden of Gethsemane near the Kidron Valley. All that was human in him cried out to his Father for release from the bitter cup of suffering that he was to endure the following day. Finally, however, he uttered those immortal words of submission, “Not my will but thine be done.” Just then, his betraying disciple, leading a band of men from the high priest, kissed him on the cheek, delivering him into the hands of his enemies. During that night and early the following morning, Jesus was taken before various civil and religious authorities, none of whom could find fault in him. Just as the Passover lamb was to be “without blemish” (Exodus 12:5), so Jesus “offered himself without blemish to God” (Hebrews 9:14) so that all who would believe in him would be purified and presented “without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing” (Jude 1:24). Despite his lack of guilt, the political conspiracy between the Roman civil authorities and some of the aristocratic, apostate religious leaders condemned Jesus to death. He was led outside the city of Jerusalem to a spot called the Place of the Skull, Golgotha, where he was nailed to the cross he had carried, crucified for all to see, the Son of God suspended between heaven and earth, the Lamb of God bleeding and dying for the sins of the world. On this momentous Passover, at the moment when the Son of God declared, “It is finished,” and surrendered his last breath, the massive curtain of the temple was torn from the top to the bottom by the hand of God, creating a new and open means of access to God for all men. The means of atonement had been made. Again, God declared, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” All men could now come boldly before the throne of God, bearing the blood of the Passover Lamb, the Messiah himself. This freedom was of far greater consequence than that at the Red Sea: this was a freedom from the bondage of sin that brought abundant life and the promise of eternal life. Again, as it was in Egypt, it was some time before the final liberation was achieved. The sacrifice of the lamb secured the downpayment on freedom, but the Red Sea crossing was required for the total liberty that was fully realized when Israel came to Sinai and entered into a covenant to become God’s nation of priests. Likewise, the price for eternal freedom was paid as the blood of the Lamb spilled from the cross on Golgotha’s hill; however, it was three days later when the Son of God came forth from his entombment, triumphant over death, hell, and the grave, having crossed over the chasm between the dead and the living and ascended into the presence of God in heaven. The death, burial, and resurrection that was prefigured in Israel’s Red Sea immersion forever provided the way to freedom from sin and access to eternal life for all who would believe and apply the Lamb’s blood to the doorposts and lintels of their hearts. Though some had been resurrected from the grave by words of faith from prophets, never had one risen of his own accord. “I have the power to lay my life down and to take it up again,” Jesus had said, for “I am the resurrection and the life.” When the massive stone was rolled away and Jesus came forth, he demonstrated his power over sin and death. He fully conquered in his own life the last enemy that will finally be subdued for all men at the end of the age. The miracle of Passover had just taken on new and more profound proportions for the Jewish disciples of the Savior. They were commissioned to share the good news of God’s new Passover provision with the entire world, making disciples of all nations. For those earliest Christians, Passover observance each year took on new meaning. As it had always been for them, it continued to be a celebration of God’s deliverance from Egyptian bondage. As Jews, they were required by the terms of their covenant to remember the Passover; however, it now took on even more profound significance, for it also became a time for celebrating the finished work of Calvary, the death of the spotless Lamb who brought freedom from sin and the gift of eternal life. Even when these earliest Christians followed their Lord’s command and took the good news to the Gentiles, these new initiates into the faith of Jesus were instructed to observe the Passover. The apostle officially designated as the church’s ambassador to the Gentiles, Rabbi Paul, a student of Gamliel, gave this recommendation: “Because Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us observe the festival . . . with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:8). He continued to underscore the new covenant observance for Passover: “For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed took bread; and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same manner he also took the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). Indeed, references to “eating the flesh and drinking the blood” of Jesus (John 6:53) can be understood only in the context of the Passover. For the Christian believers, the unleavened bread of the Passover spoke of their liberation from sin and false teaching, including the “leaven” of much of the contemporary religious establishment, which included greed (Matthew 23:14), intolerance (Matthew 23:29-33), ostentatious hypocrisy (Matthew 23:25-28), misdirected fervor (Matthew 23:15), and skepticism (Matthew 22:23ff). The paradigm is clear in Hebrew where chametz (leaven) means “bitterness,” the result of sin and unethical conduct, while matzah (unleavened bread) means “sweet without sourness,” the result of tasting and seeing that the Lord is good and ingesting his Word which is sweeter than honey. Believers in the Messiah had left the life of bitterness, enslaved to sin and evil concepts, and had embraced a life of consuming all the Lamb of God (as their ancestors had eaten all of the paschal lamb), conforming themselves to the image of God’s dear Son. APOSTOLIC OBSERVANCE When the time came for the first Passover following Jesus’ ascension, the growing band of Jewish believers assembled in their homes to fulfill the commandment regarding remembrance of the Passover. This time, however, they added the order which Jesus had commissioned to the traditional seder that the sages had outlined for Passover observance. They remembered two Passovers, one which secured their freedom from Egyptian bondage and the other which liberated them from sin through the shed blood of the Passover Lamb himself. This order continued unbroken in all the Jewish households of the Christian church. Then, when the church opened the doors of faith to the Gentile nations on the basis of simple faith in the atonement of Jesus, its Jewish leaders continued their observance of the Torah as it had been expanded and completed by the teaching and example of Jesus, the Messiah. Their expanded and renewed faith represented a reformation of restoration (Hebrews 9:10), a return to the Torah’s original intent of inculcating a life of lovingkindness rather than the superficial punctilious observance of commandments that characterized many in their day. A prominent feature of this reformed faith was the annual observance of Passover, again celebrating two deliverances: the Exodus and Calvary. A CONTINUING HISTORY OF OBSERVANCE The celebration of Passover (on the fourteenth day of the month Nisan according to the Jewish calendar) continued in the early church for more than three centuries. The Ethiopic version of the Epistle of the Apostles (circa 150 A.D.), declares, “And you therefore celebrate the remembrance of my death [the Passover]; then will one of you . . . be thrown into prison, and he will be grieved and sorrowful, for while you celebrate the Passover he who is in custody did not celebrate it with you.” Apollinaris, bishop of Hierapolis (circa 170 A.D.), declared unequivocally: “The fourteenth of Nisan is the true Passover of the Lord, the great Sacrifice; instead of the lamb we have the Son of God . . . who was buried on the day of the Passover.” As the church became increasingly Gentile in leadership and demographics, a gradual shift away from what by then were considered “Jewish” practices developed. For the Western Church, this replacement of the Jewish foundations of the Christian faith reached a point of culmination in the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine. During the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., Constantine demanded that the church no longer have anything in common with the Jews whom he viewed as the “parricides of our Lord.” With his insistence, church leaders changed the time of celebration from Nisan 14 on the Jewish calendar to the first Sunday after the vernal equinox on the Julian calendar. This celebration eventually came to be known in English as Easter, named after the Saxon goddess of spring and light, Eastre, in honor of whom a festival was celebrated in April. Even after the practice of Passover observance had been discarded by the Western Church, Epiphanius (circa 315-403 A.D.) continued to report the fact that earlier church leaders had insisted that Passover be observed each year on Nisan 14, saying, “You shall not change the calculation of the time, but you shall celebrate it at the same time as your brethren who came out from the circumcision. With them observe the Passover.” The Eastern (Orthodox) Church continued to observe Passover on Nisan 14 until the eleventh century. Various Christians through the centuries have remained faithful to the idea of remembering the death of Jesus on the day on which he gave his life for man’s salvation: the day of Passover. FOUNDATIONAL EVENTS Passover, then, the fourteenth day of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar, has forever established itself as foundational both to Judaism and to Christianity. In both cases, it speaks of freedom and liberation from oppression. In both cases, it speaks of God’s forgiveness because of acts of faith on the part of his people that provided the means by which the demands for divine justice are met so that he can pass over. And, because of the momentous events of this day, both Jews and Christians are called to remember God’s mighty acts and to celebrate his goodness throughout all their generations even to the end of the age when the Messiah will once again commemorate the Lord’s Passover in his kingdom.
April, 2013 WWW.THETRUMPETER.COM
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