Passover and Resurrection: Christ Backwards and Forwards

For the past two years the articles I've written for my church in this current season have focused on Christ backwards and forwards, and I want to ask why.  It wasn't a tactic I had planned, as if I had outlined an essay of Biblical theology, to trace a narrative from Genesis to Revelation.  It just happened organically.  But that is who Christ is: Redeemer from the beginning, slain lamb, risen Lord, and coming King.  Christ didn't just happen in 33AD.  Christ has always been happening, and will always happen.  He is the One who was, is, and is to come.

Jesus' death and resurrection occurred at the time of the spring feasts - Passover, the Feast of First Fruits, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread - and their co-concurrence happened not by chance.  It was never that the Son of God just so happened to have been crucified at Passover; the crucifixion of the Son of God had always been planned for Passover, as His death was to be the substance behind the central symbol of Passover: the slain lamb.  Jesus was not the first slain lamb (though He was the first, and only, that fulfilled what sacrificing a lamb meant).  Lambs had been slain at Passover for centuries before Jesus, and as a boy, He would have witnessed his own father tend to the animal in the preparation week, and then slit its throat as an offering in the Jerusalem Temple.  Jesus had only been fulfilling what had began years before.

Christ Backwards
The first Passover is recorded in the book of Exodus:

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. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

“This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. On the first day you shall hold a holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly. No work shall be done on those days. But what everyone needs to eat, that alone may be prepared by you. And you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a statute forever. In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month at evening. For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwelling places you shall eat unleavened bread" (Exodus 12:1-20).

It really wasn't a coincidence for Jesus to be bloodied and brutalized, His flesh cut up and His body hung to die, at the time of the Passover.  It was a time when blood was used to save souls from death; those whom had painted the blood of the lamb upon their doorposts were spared from God's wrath that terrible night in Egypt.  It would be centuries later when Jesus, accepting the cup His Father had chosen for Him, went to death in order that His people be spared from the wrath of God's justice, making atonement for sin (becoming physically what yet another feast, Yom Kippur, represented symbolically) and saving the lives of His chosen that night, and forevermore.

The Last Seder
Go forward again to first century Judea, and to the upper room on the night before His crucifixion.  It was Erev Pesach, or the evening of Passover:

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat it.” They said to Him, “Where will You have us prepare it?” He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there.” And they went and found it just as He had told them, and they prepared the Passover (Luke 22:7-13).

It would be an evening of great celebration, centering around a meal called a seder where certain foods are eaten in remembrance of God's salvation of the Jews from Egypt, and His bringing them out of slavery into His land of promise.  It was during this night of symbolism and remembrance that Jesus took the cup of wine and the unleavened bread, items which themselves already carried Passover significance, and gave them additional significance (note: not superseding significance).  The bread is His body, the wine His blood, not yet broken and shed, but soon to be.  And He tells them that whenever they partake of it - the Passover meal, remembering the Lord's hand bringing them forth from bondage - they are to remember Him: His hand bringing His people forth from physical bondage in Egypt, and His sacrifice upon the cross, bringing His people forth from spiritual bondage, saving them from the sin of their own souls.  As Christ Himself looked back at the graciousness of His Father's hand, He looked forward to His own death and resurrection, and to His church's future practice of the remembrance of the cross.  The elements of a Passover meal altered into the the sacrament of Communion.

Two Johns Reveal the Connection
Is connecting Jesus' death at Passover and His atonement something that modern Hebraic roots aficionados have constructed?  Not at all.  There was something recognized about who Jesus was and would be when His cousin exclaimed, upon seeing Him arriving to the River Jordan to be baptized, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).  The next day John refers to Jesus in the same way - "Behold, the Lamb of God" (John 1:36) - and the identification as such prompts two men to follow Him and become His disciples.  John the Baptizer, a Jew who had observed the Passover every year of his life, had a revelatory insight into the role Jesus would play.  He looked backwards at his own history to recognize who the Messiah was, and what He would be for the people.

John, Jesus' disciple, also had a recognition of this Passover link when, years after Jesus' death and resurrection, and after a lifetime of testifying to the Messiah, he was chosen to be revealed the things of the end of days.  John was brought to the very throne room of God, and stood amidst the twenty four elders and four living creatures, before the altar of incense and the throne itself.

Then I saw in the right hand of Him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it, and I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. And one of the elders said to me, “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that He can open the scroll and its seven seals.”

And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And He went and took the scroll from the right hand of Him who was seated on the throne (Revelation 5:1-7).

John recognized Jesus' past as he looked into the future, seeing, as John the Baptizer did, Jesus fulfilling a role that had only been recognized and remembered symbolically, for "These [festivals] are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:17).

Christ Forwards
On Passover, all Jews were to come to Jerusalem to celebrate, bringing their lambs with them.  They would sacrifice their lamb in the Temple according to custom, and it was at the same time as this that Jesus was being nailed to the crossbeam of His instrument of torture and death.  It was upon the magnificent Temple Mount structure that He looked in His final moments, the place where, years before, Abraham had come to sacrifice his own son, where Solomon’s Temple resided, where the glory and presence of the Lord dwelt in the Most Holy Place within the Temple structure, where Jesus purged His Father’s house of prayer, where those whom Jesus longed to gather to Himself prayed, where there would be 3,000 converted and baptized to a baby church, where soon after there would be not one stone left upon another, and where someday He will return, to rule and reign as King in the New Jerusalem.

All this occurred at the time of Passover, when the blood of the lamb saves the people from death, to deliver them into new life.