Judith Niewiadomski, Yonkers
Passover commemorates not only the liberation of the children of Israel from 400 years of slavery in Egypt, but also the promise of what the Messiah would bring: deliverance from the bondage of sin and man’s fallen nature and healing. For Christians, Jesus Christ was the Passover sacrifice for all times, fulfilling God’s most important promises of redemption from sin and death.
The Hebrew slavery in Egypt was so abject that the government ordered the people to murder Hebrew babies if they were male. (Exodus 1:15ff) Moses miraculously survived because of his mother’s faith, and grew up in the royal household. The Egyptians gave the hardest tasks to the Hebrews, and deliberately made these harder, forcing them to make “bricks without straw” that is, having to go out and find the materials as well as make the finished product without reducing the number made. (Sounds like many “environmental” regulations which have made cars both more expensive and less safe and appliances more costly and less functional. Evil adapts to the cultural conditions of the time.)
The Passover celebration was commanded by God to remind the Hebrews of God’s deliverance. Leviticus 23:5 “ In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the LORD’S Passover.” It was an eight day feast, with special preparations, requiring for many, a pilgrimage to the Temple at Jerusalem. Centuries later, when Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem, it was a swamp of religious and political corruption. “After two days was the feast of the Passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death.” (Mark 14:1) The king had murdered John the Baptist, and the corrupt religious leaders tried several times to kill Jesus Christ–-hardly the deeds of men of God. They should have been the first to recognize and honor the son of God. But the high priest was appointed by the Roman government and the chief priests and scribes were not the true leaders of Israel. They had the position, but spiritually they were corrupt, and lived off the people. Instead of serving them and teaching them, they oppressed them with legalistic self-righteousness and never delivered anyone from sin or sickness. When Jesus Christ brought the light of God, deliverance and healing all they could see was a threat to their power.
Think about that. Here is the only begotten son of God, the Messiah they have been awaiting for thousands of years, demonstrating the power of God as it had not been seen in 400 years, and the chief religious leaders were conspiring to murder him. They should have been the first to sit at his feet to learn from and help him, but they worshiped their positions of power and so schemed and conspired to kill him to hold on to positions they were neither spiritually nor morally entitled to.
The Last Supper was not the Passover meal, but it was part of the eight day feast of Passover. John 18:28 shows that Jesus was under arrest before the Passover high Sabbath. “Then led they Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment: and it was early; and they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the Passover.” Another distinction is that Jesus Christ and his disciples ate sitting down. The Passover meal was eaten standing with clothing clothes bound up for quick travel, a walking stick in hand, and shoes on. (Exodus 12:11) Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” portrays men seated at a table: customary for Renaissance Europe, but not how meals were taken in the ancient Middle East, where the custom was to recline on a couch or mat, barefoot. John 19 states that on the “preparation,” the day when the Passover lamb was selected, Jesus Christ was in the hands of the religious and political authorities who were torturing him and humiliating him. But the high priest’s soldiers would not go into Pilate’s judgement hall because it would have made them unclean to eat the Passover meal. The amazing hypocrisy to pretend to obey the religious law when they were torturing and preparing to kill the son of God parallels what we see today in the political arena. Lust for power and the will to violence began with Lucifer trying to usurp God’s position and contaminated man when Adam and Eve decided that being able to live freely with one exception wasn’t enough and they succumbed to the temptation to “be as gods.”
Jesus Christ paid the price for that: he was killed at the exact time that Jewish families were killing their Passover lamb. They would eat it after sundown, which was the beginning of a new day. Jesus Christ never got to eat that Passover meal with his disciples, but become the fulfillment of the Passover for all time. 1 Corinthians 5:7,8 “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Christians are no longer under the Old Testament law, but under a new covenant.
While every item in the Passover meal has significance to remind people of what God had and would continue to do for them, (deliver them from sin and its consequences) there is no mandated meal for Resurrection day. The significance of the somewhat ordinary Last Supper is in the memorial Jesus Christ instituted. God had told Adam and Eve that the day they broke His one restriction, they would bring death into the world as the result of their sin. Genesis 2:16, 17.
The Old Testament law was hard to live up to, the consequences were a reminder of man’s need for the Messiah to come. The bread and wine of the Last Supper represent what Jesus Christ accomplished for us. Galatians 3:13. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse [penalty] of the law.” His blood, like the blood of the first Passover, covered for our sin. His broken body paid for the sickness that sin brought into the world. He even made the memorial much simpler: a bit of wine to represent his shed blood and a bit of bread, to represent his broken body. Matthew 26:26-28 “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”
The purpose of a memorial is to remind us of what was accomplished. So, don’t worry about being good enough. You can claim your healing and deliverance because he was–and is.
Judith Niewiadomski, Yonkers
