15 to 21 Nisan · March or April
Unleavened Bread
חַג הַמַּצּוֹת
Chag HaMatzot
The seven days following Passover, during which no leaven was to be found in the house. So closely joined to Passover that the New Testament often uses the two names for one season.
The text, before anyone interprets it
What was commanded
Remove all leaven from the house and eat unleavened bread for seven days, with a holy assembly on the first day and the seventh. The bread is flat because there was no time to wait.
Where it turns up
The search for leaven became a household ritual: the corners of the house swept, the last crumbs gathered by candlelight. It is one of the clearest cases in the law of a physical act built to teach an interior one.
What is on the table
Matzah
Flat, pierced, and striped by the baking. Made in haste, and kept as the bread of affliction.
The search for leaven
Done by candlelight the night before, gathering the last crumbs. A small ceremony about looking in the corners.
In the New Testament
Paul takes the image and applies it to a church tolerating something it should not: clean out the old leaven, for a little leaven leavens the whole lump. He is writing to Corinth during this very season, which is why the metaphor arrives when it does.
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
Seven days of bread made in haste, because there was no time to wait for it to rise.
It is happening
The corners of a life swept out by candlelight, which is what Paul asks of a church during this very season: clean out the old leaven.
It is still coming
A people with nothing left in the corners, in a city where nothing unclean enters.
How Christians have read it
A reading, not a statement of the text
Bread without leaven, read as a life without corruption. Where Passover is the lamb dying, Unleavened Bread is what follows from it: sin carried out of the house rather than merely covered.
How it is kept now
Rarely kept as a separate observance by Christians outside Messianic congregations, and usually folded into Passover where it is kept at all. The image of leaven, however, is thoroughly at home in Christian preaching and always has been.
Should Christians keep the feasts? Every view at its strongest →