14 Nisan, at twilight · March or April
Passover
פֶּסַח
Pesach
The night Israel left Egypt, kept every year afterward as a meal that retells it. One of the three pilgrimage feasts that brought the nation to Jerusalem.
The text, before anyone interprets it
What was commanded
A lamb without defect, one per household, its blood on the doorposts, roasted and eaten with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, eaten in haste and dressed to travel. Then kept annually as a memorial, with the instruction that when your children ask what it means, you tell them.
Where it turns up
The command is built to be interrupted by a child's question, so the story gets retold in the first person every year: this is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt. It is kept badly and rarely through the period of the judges and the kings, and then held on a national scale twice, by Hezekiah and by Josiah, both times as part of a reform.
What is on the table
The lamb
Without defect, its blood the sign on the door. Not a payment to God but a mark that this house belongs to him.
Unleavened bread
There was no time for the dough to rise. Leaven later becomes an image for what works through a whole batch unseen.
Bitter herbs
The taste of slavery, kept in the meal so the sweetness is never sentimental.
Salt water
Tears. The green of spring is dipped in it, because new life and grief arrive together.
The four cups
From the four promises of Exodus 6:6-7: I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will take you as my people. The promises are Scripture; counting four cups from them is rabbinic.
The afikoman
The middle of three matzot, broken, wrapped, hidden, and brought back at the end of the meal. The name is Greek and means roughly that which comes after. Rabbinic liturgy rather than a command.
In the New Testament
Jesus is crucified at Passover, and all four Gospels say so deliberately. The Last Supper is a Passover meal in Matthew, Mark, and Luke; John's timing places the crucifixion as the lambs are being slaughtered, and the difference between those two chronologies has been discussed for as long as there have been commentaries. Paul writes to a Gentile church that Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, and expects them to follow the reference.
Not in the Bible, and worth knowing anyway
What tradition added
Much of what makes these days beautiful comes from outside Scripture, and some New Testament scenes are far harder to read without it. It is set out here with its source named, which is the only honest way to hold it: interesting, often very old, and not binding on anyone.
The four cups, taken from the four promises of Exodus 6:6-7.
Where it comes from · Mishnah, Pesachim 10. The four promises are Scripture; counting four cups from them is rabbinic ordering, and it is the framework the Last Supper accounts sit inside.
Three matzot stacked, the middle one broken, half hidden as the afikoman and brought back at the end of the meal.
Where it comes from · Rabbinic liturgy, developed after the temple. Christians often read the three and the broken middle one christologically; that reading is a reading of a custom, not of a command.
The youngest at the table asking the four questions.
Where it comes from · Mishnaic. The Torah does command that you tell your son when he asks, so the custom is a formalising of something Exodus 13 genuinely asks for.
Reclining at the table as a sign of freedom.
Where it comes from · Greco-Roman dining practice adopted into the meal, and the reason the Gospels describe the disciples reclining rather than standing as Exodus 12 instructs.
Was, is, and is to come
The same appointment, three depths
An appointment on a calendar is not crossed off once. It comes round. Christians of every tradition read these events at more than one depth, whether they call it already and not yet, type and antitype, or near and far fulfilment.
It happened
A real night in Egypt, real blood on real doorposts, and a people who walked out.
It is happening
Kept every spring, and answered at a Passover in Jerusalem when the one John called the Lamb of God was crucified. Christians take the meal that came out of that night whenever they come to the table.
It is still coming
The marriage supper of the Lamb, where the meal is not a memorial of a rescue but the celebration after the last one.
How Christians have read it
A reading, not a statement of the text
The lamb without defect, the blood that turns away death, the bones not broken, the meal that makes a people out of slaves. Christians have read the whole thing toward the cross since the earliest sermons we possess, and the New Testament makes the connection itself rather than leaving it to interpreters.
In the wedding reading: In the betrothal reading of the feasts, Passover is where the bride price is paid: the blood on the doorposts, and the blood of the cross.
How it is kept now
Most Christians keep Passover only as it comes to them through communion, which the Gospels root in this meal. Messianic Jewish congregations keep it fully. A growing number of churches hold a Christian Seder, and that practice is genuinely contested: many Jewish voices experience it as taking a living liturgy and reassigning its meaning, and some Christians agree and prefer to attend a Jewish seder as guests, or to teach the feast without staging it. Others hold that Gentile believers are grafted in and may keep the feast that their Lord kept. Anyone leading one is better off knowing the objection than meeting it afterward.
If you want to keep it
If you hold one, say plainly whose meal it is and what you have added. Read Exodus 12 before the meal rather than around it, let a child ask the questions, and do not rush the bitter herbs. The point of the night is not the symbolism. It is that a real people were really brought out.
Should Christians keep the feasts? Every view at its strongest →