Recently two of our Lifegroups have had the privilege of having Paul and Anne Plagerson, Christians from a Jewish background, give us a short introduction to the celebration of Passover. They looked particularly at how Jesus conducted his last Passover. Paul shares his insights in this post.
A Messianic Passover
Passover is probably the oldest religious festival in the world still continuing today. It celebrates the miraculous deliverance by God of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and the birth of a nation. 1500 years later Jesus celebrated the Passover just before his crucifixion with his disciples at what we know as the last supper.
Over the years the church has replaced Passover with Easter as Constantine and others sought to separate the church from its Jewish roots. Both festivals take place in the spring and are often at the same time in April.
The first Passover
The first Passover (Exodus 12) was marked by the sprinkling of lamb’s blood on the doorposts, so the Angel of Death would pass over that house. The Last Supper was celebrated with Jesus inaugurating the New Covenant with the act of communion with bread and wine as his body and blood.
The annual festival is to be a visible sign of what the Lord has done and in Exodus 13 v8 the explicit instruction is ‘on that day tell your son, I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’ So, over the generations the story of Exodus is passed down in families in a programme of scripture reading and songs round a special meal. This programme is known as a ‘Seder’ which means ‘order,’ and the story is recounted as if it were taking place today, in other words, what the Lord has done for me.
Seder
The Seder plate is a visual aid to the story. The Haroset (at the top of the plate) is a mixture of apples, nuts and honey which represents the mortar used by the Israelite slaves to construct buildings for Pharoah. It’s usually eaten on a piece of unleavened bread.
The rocket is one of the two elements representing bitterness, the other being horseradish. The parsley represents the hyssop used to paint blood on the doorposts. The parsley is dipped in salt water, symbolising tears and the horseradish is dipped in the Haroset.
The lamb bone reminds us of the sacrificial lamb and the roasted egg the cycles of life and new beginnings.
The Exodus Story
Jesus would have been recounting the Exodus story when He compared himself to the sacrificial Passover lamb. So many of the elements in the Seder foreshadow the coming of Jesus.
Today, the unleavened bread is striped and pierced, the bitter herbs remind us of the persecution suffered by Jews and Christians through the ages. The salt water, the many tears cried in slavery.
The ceremony of the ‘Afikomon where three pieces of matzo (unleavened bread) are set aside, the middle one broken and then hidden, and revealed at the end of the service point clearly toward Jesus’s death and resurrection.
As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8
‘For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.’
Praise (Elevation Worship) in Hebrew – Shevakh | Passover 2024
Thank you Paul
