The Passover

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This moment was important enough to make it into all of the gospels. Jesus was making a statement by laying his life down during the Passover so it stands to reason that if we have an incomplete understanding of the Passover, we have an incomplete understanding of Jesus and what he came to do. So we are going to be in:

Exodus 12:1-12 

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord.

So we are going to use our imagination a little bit this morning is that okay with you? Because the Bible was written for us, not to us does that make sense? It was written TO a very specific set of people at a particular time and a particular place, but it was written for us for our edification and building up. So its helpful to try and get ourselves in the shoes of the original audience opposed to the other way around. We are not trying to get the original audience into OUR shoes.

So I want you to imagine you are an ancient israelite living around 1300 BC in Egypt. How we doing? You and your family have lived under Egyptian rule under Pharoah for over 400 years. You grew up hearing about the God of your ancestors the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But all you’ve known is the bitterness of slavery and bondage. Making bricks from straw and mud with no rest and no end in sight. You and your people are worked to death, literally, and you cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for deliverance out of the yoke of Pharoah and into a fruitful land of freedom that was promised to your ancestors. 

Exodus 2:23 

 “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.”

This is where we’d queue up the Prince of Egypt soundtrack.

You’ve cried out to God for deliverance daily and then you start to see things happen that don’t make sense. The Nile river turns to blood. Frogs begin to cover the land. Gnats and flies swarm both man and beast. All of the livestock of the Egyptians drop dead and boils break out on the people and animals. Hail like no one has ever seen begins to fall from the sky and locusts eat up the crops that weren’t destroyed by the hail. Pitch darkness covers Egypt but somehow that darkness hasn’t reached your family or neighbors house. In fact, no plague has touched your house. Then the elders of your clan give you the instructions from Exodus 12. Kill a spotless lamb tonight at twilight. Take the blood and spread it on your doorposts. Roast the lamb and eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Don’t put any yeast in your bread because you’re not going to have time to let it rise. Keep your shoes and pants on and eat it quickly because you’re about to get out of dodge. Don’t leave your house tonight, because the destroyer of the Lord is coming to strike every firstborn in the land. But whatever home is covered by the blood of the lamb will be spared. The Lord will see the blood, and pass over you. A few hours later you and your family are rushing out of your homes and out of Egypt. The day of deliverance has come. Every year that follows at this same time of year, you will gather with your family and kill a lamb and eat bitter herbs. You’ll take all the yeast out of your house and eat unleavened bread for 7 days. Each generation will observe the passover and retell the story of deliverance.

So in a typical Passover meal in the years that followed the Exodus, Jews would follow a very simple kind of ritual and the’yre actually still doing this today— this is the same type of meal i saw as kid and the general structure of this is what Jesus did with his disciples at the last supper. 

Here is a picture of what the Passover seder looked like in Ancient Israel:

So you can see in the image everyone is sitting pretty low to the ground and there’s all the components we read about in Exodus 12. The unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and lamb. Over time more symbols and elements would be added to this meal through the rabbinic tradition so jewish teachers added more elements, so a seder plate today is going to look a little different, there’s going to be a couple extra things but this picture is pretty accurate to the meal laid out in Exodus 12.

As with many good gatherings the Passover seder begins with wine so we are still using our imagination here. I want you to pretend you have wine and if you dont drink you can imagine you have grape juice. The first cup in the ceremony is called the “cup of sanctification” representing God’s people as set apart and consecrated to the Lord. 

We’d start by raising our glass and the head of the house would say a blessing in Hebrew:

Leader: Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, boreh p'ri hagafen.

All: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.

The head of the house would then wash his hands three times as a purification. And then we’d move into what’s called the dipping of the Karpas.  Karpas is Hebrew for vegetable so imagine a piece of celery in front of you if you can maybe some lettuce and you take karpas and dip it into salt water, give thanks, and eat it.

If you’re wondering why, that’s the whole point. The dipping of the karpas is a rabbinic tradition meant to be symbolic of either Josephs coat being dipped in blood by which marked beginning of the Jews getting into Egypt in the first place, or it represents the tears of the Israelites under oppression in Egypt. It depends on who you ask and this is a tradition not explicitly mentioned in scripture, so take it with a grain of salt. No pun intended.

The next movement of the Passover Seder is to refill the wine cups and answer questions from the youngest person in the room, usually from the children sitting at the table. So here are the four questions:

-Why is this night different from all other nights?

-Why do we eat only matzah?

-Why do we eat bitter herbs? and

-Why do we dip our food twice? 

-On all other nights we eat sitting upright or reclining, and on this night we all recline.

The questions serve as a kind of bridge into the Exodus story. So the elders at the table would then go around reading several chapters from Exodus which we aren’t going to do right now because it would take about 40 minutes and it ends with what called the Hallel in Hebrew which simply praise. Its where we get the word Hallelujah, which means praise the Lord make sense? So we’d read the exodus story and move to The Hallel which is straight from Psalm 113-118. These Psalms refer directly to the Exodus story. So we’d have our wine or grape juice and recite:

Psalm 113

Leader: Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord! 

All: Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore! From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!

Leader:The Lord is high above all nations 

All: His glory above the heavens!

Leader: Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

All: He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, 

All: To make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people. 

All: He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Praise the Lord!”

And then we’d say a blessing over the wine:

Leader: Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, boreh p'ri hagafen. 

All: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.

Can you see how this could easily take two hours?

Next we break the matzah the unleavened bread and say a blessing over the bread called the Hamotzi which is too challenging for me to recite in Hebrew so we can just read the English together:

All: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.

And then we’d break it and eat it. In some ceremonies one of the broken pieces is wrapped in a napkin and saved for later.

So we’ve sipped our wine, dipped our veggies, broken bread, and answered some questions. Next, the bitter herbs, or in Hebrew MAROR. Which means bitter. It’s the same word from

Exodus 1:13–14 “So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives MAROR with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”

Traditionally this would be a horseradish mix of some kind or just straight up horseradish. If you’ve never had horseradish it’s kind of like Wasabi. It stings the nostrils and brings tears to your eyes. It’s painful. So the maror is eaten as a reminder of the harsh service and ruthlessness in Egypt that God rescued the Israelites from. It is part of what God commanded the Israelites to do in remembrance every year.

So our nostrils are stinging and the kids are crying… but what about the lamb? The sacrificial lamb whose blood was spread on the doorposts? Remember the three main components from Exodus that make up the Passover: the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the lamb which was kinda the main thing. This is where it gets really interesting. Because an Ancient Israelite would have sacrificed a passover lamb in preparation for this whole ceremony and it would have been a part of the meal, they would have blessed a third cup of wine, sung more hymns from Psalm 113-118, blessed a fourth cup of wine, and concluded the seder. But in modern day Judaism, a lamb isn’t sacrificed for the seder at all. Today when Passover is celebrated a sort of horseradish and matzah sandwich is eaten instead or a lamb shank is substituted in. And in the gospel accounts of the Last Supper, the passover seder, there is no mention of the lamb. Remember I said if we don’t understand the Passover, we have an incomplete understanding of Jesus. Jesus is a Jew from the tribe of Judah who knows better than anybody how to observe the Passover and yet this is how the Passover seder with Jesus of Nazareth goes:

Matthew 26:26–29 “Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.””

Do you see what He’s doing? Everything in scripture is intentionally mentioned or not mentioned. And so isn’t it interesting that at this point in all the gospel accounts there is no talk of the Passover lamb? You won’t find it! John the Baptist seems to know why, the man who came to prepare the way for the messiah. Upon seeing Jesus as he baptized men and women in the river Jordan, the first words out of John’s mouth are this,

John 1:29 “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

The lamb of God. In Exodus 12 God commands the Israelites to “take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses” but Jesus comes AS the lamb from His father’s house. Jesus says this is MY blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. A new and better salvation. The God-man who calls himself the “bread of life” in John 6:35, allows himself to be beaten and whipped and pierced and broken to save a people from the slavery and bondage of sin and the Pharoah of their deceitful hearts. When he says “this is my blood of the covenant” He is saying “I am the Paschal Lamb”, it is my blood that will cover the door post of your life. It is my blood that causes the judgement and wrath of God to pass over you. And so the firstborn of all creation in the greatest act of poetic justice, willingly lays his life down to purchase the freedom of all who would believe in Him. And so the debt is paid. That lie, that thought, that slander, that lust and pride has fully and completely been atoned for. And so the bitter herbs of the new covenant become a life of repentance. The sting and pain of the bondage of sin are felt when the conviction of the Holy Spirit comes and causes us to repent. The maror of the old life. And the Exodus, the Exodus is our long journey home to new creation. Like pilgrims leaving Egypt we are strangers in a strange land. Citizens of a different kingdom, where both Jew and Gentile are covered by the blood of the lamb. The covenant God made with the Israelites outside of Egypt was a sign post of the better covenant to come, with a better sacrifice, and a greater promise. Everlasting life with God in a new heaven and new earth. And today we are closer than we’ve ever been to that reality. Where the Passover reminded the Israelites to look back and remember their deliverance and liberation, the new Passover with the true lamb points not only back in remembrance but also forward in anticipation for new creation:

1 Corinthians 11:25–26 “In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

We say this every week! This is communion! And do you see what the apostle Paul is saying? He’s saying we look back at our deliverance, and look forward to Christ’s return. I’ts not just remember where he took us from but look at where we’re going. Remember and proclaim until he comes. Remember and proclaim.