1 Cor 5:7-8

For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival…

                Having been raised in the strictest sect of Judaism and having spent his lifetime studying the Hebrew Scriptures, the Apostle Paul understood the connection between the Passover Lamb and the death of Christ. In I Corinthians 5, he called Christ our Passover lamb and encouraged us to “keep the [Passover] feast” in sincerity and truth. A few years back we learned how so much of the Passover Seder points to Y’Shua ha-Mashiach (Jesus the Messiah), so we began to celebrate this with our Christian congregation. Each year we invite other believers in Y’Shua to join with us. Most of us are not ethnically Jewish, so our celebration has a distinctively Christian flavor, but the imagery is clear.

                The Passover was the meal that Jesus ate with His disciples just before the betrayal and crucifixion. Christians call it “the Last Supper.” It was here that He instituted the Lord’s Supper and offered some of the most important teaching of His ministry. To see these things in the context of the Passover Seder adds greatly to our understanding of His words and example.

                Our Seder is intended to follow the events that Jesus would have followed that night before His crucifixion, right through to the institution of the Lord’s Supper. When the Disciples (later, Apostles) would have recalled the events of that evening, they would have seen how clearly the Passover pictured the death of Jesus that would happen on the following day, and it would have helped them understand why He had to allow Himself to be crucified. It will do the same for us. This order of events is largely followed by Jewish families to this day on their celebration of this feast.