Passover

Strong's gives pasach as to hop, to skip over or spare, and also to limp or to dance. Besides Exodus 12 and Isaiah 31:5 it stands three times, each meaning to limp or to leap (2 Samuel 4:4; 1 Kings 18:21, 26).

Those who read it so hold that four of the seven uses describe a body moving over or past, and that Isaiah's birds are a simile laid over the verb. Strong's gives the noun pesach as an exemption, and counts it 49 times. In the New Testament the feast is pascha (G3957).

Rashi, the eleventh-century French commentator, reads the verb at Exodus 12:23 as and He will spare, and allows also and He will leap over them (Rashi on Exodus 12:23, Rosenbaum and Silbermann translation, 1929-1934). John Wesley reads Isaiah 31:5 the same way, of the destroying angel passing over Jerusalem.

On this reading the LORD stands guard at the door of the blood-marked house, as birds guard their nest, and keeps the destroyer out. Both readings keep the blood as the sign.

Two things are kept apart: what the first century attests, and what was written down later. Both are worth knowing, and only the first can be read back into the upper room.

The caution lands on the later liturgy, and the feast stands. The Synoptics present the meal as a Passover, and first-century practice is described by what the sources show. The typology rests on Exodus 12 and the Gospels themselves.

The most common evangelical harmonization argues that John and the Synoptics agree, and that two phrases have been misread. The priests stay out of the governor's hall so they could eat the Passover (John 18:28). There the Passover can mean the chagigah, the festal offering eaten through the days of the feast, and the law itself folds it into Passover language (from the herd or flock, Deuteronomy 16:2-3). The paschal lamb was then eaten the night before.

And the Preparation of the Passover is Greek paraskeue, the ordinary word for Friday, so the phrase reads Friday of Passover week. Mark defines the term that way in so many words: the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath (Mark 15:42). D. A. Carson and Andreas Kostenberger both argue the case in their commentaries on John.

John is read as dating the crucifixion to Nisan 14, while the lambs are being killed, with the official Passover meal still ahead; the supper is then a Passover-shaped meal kept a day early. On this reading the typology is exact to the hour: the Lamb dies as the lambs die.

Its strongest form says John set the death at the hour of the lambs for theology, and the two dates cannot both stand. Readers who hold it take John's date as the history and the Synoptics' Passover as the frame.

A divergence of day-reckoning or of festal calendars lets both accounts stand exactly as written, each true to the calendar it follows. Galilee and Judea, or Pharisees and Sadducees, may have reckoned the 14th of Nisan by different sunrise and sunset conventions, so both accounts describe the same 24-hour window differently.

Or some form of dual-calendar reckoning let Jesus eat the Passover with His disciples before the official slaying of the temple lambs. The reckoning may be a solar calendar of the kind known from Qumran beside the Temple's lunar one, or a private meal held a day early.

Luke times it exactly: the cup after supper (Luke 22:20). In the order of the meal the cup that follows the eating is the third, the one that carried the name the cup of blessing. Paul then uses that name as though his readers already know it (1 Corinthians 10:16).

Joachim Jeremias made this identification the backbone of his study of the words of institution. He reads the Lord's Supper as a Passover meal whose shape supplies the meaning of what Jesus says over the bread and the cup, and the third cup is his reading of the meal's order.

Luke records the same vow twice over, of the cup and of the Passover itself: Jesus will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:16, 18). Whatever else is true of that night, the vow is a real deferral. Jesus binds His next cup to the kingdom and then walks out to Gethsemane, where He asks whether another cup may pass (Mark 14:36).

Some read the vow as leaving the meal unfinished on purpose, and find it completed at Golgotha, where Jesus says He is thirsty, takes the sour wine and says It is finished (John 19:28-30). The last cup of the Passover is then taken at the cross, and the feast is consummated at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). Brant Pitre develops this reading at length, arguing that the Passover framework explains why the meal stops where it stops.

It is a reading of the sequence that Mark and John leave to the reader. Mark 14:25 binds the next cup to the kingdom of God, and Revelation 19:9 names the supper where it is kept.

Passover came with an order to remember: the day is to be a memorial, zikkaron (Exodus 12:14). The remembering had a form. On that day a father tells his son that he keeps it because of what the LORD did for him when he came out of Egypt (Exodus 13:8). The Hebrew for that showing is haggadah, the telling, and the night is kept by saying out loud what God did.

The Greek is anamnesis: the memorial word, spoken over Himself on the memorial night. Paul hands the same command on and adds its direction: as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). The verb is a herald's word, you proclaim. Like the haggadah before it, the Lord's table is a memorial that is spoken, and it faces both ways at once: back to a death, forward to a coming. Joachim Jeremias reads the command in The Eucharistic Words of Jesus.

Mark ends the supper in one line: when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives (Mark 14:26). The hymn of the feast was the Hallel, Psalms 113-118. The Mishnah records it divided around the meal, the opening psalms before and the rest after (Pesachim 10:5-7). If that practice held that night, the last songs Jesus sang before Gethsemane were the closing psalms of the Hallel, and they end with Psalm 118.

Every line of it had already been in the air that week. The crowds had shouted verse 26 at the gate (Mark 11:9). Jesus had quoted verse 22 back at the builders in the Temple courts days before (Mark 12:10-11). Now He sings the psalm through and walks out into the night it describes.

Many Christians have been taught a picture, Chuck Missler among those who taught it. Three loaves of unleavened bread lie in one cover, the middle one is broken, and half of it is wrapped, hidden and brought back after the meal. The bread itself is striped and pierced, read with Isaiah 53:5 (by His stripes we are healed) and Zechariah 12:10 (they will look on Me, the One they have pierced).

The three-loaf custom and the hiding are medieval, and the Mishnah knows neither. The piercing is functional: the dough is docked so it cannot rise. The even stripes come from machine-baked matzah, which dates from the nineteenth century, and hand-baked matzah is irregular.

Held as devotion, the picture is still true to the thing it points at: bread without leaven, broken, hidden and brought back. It is kept with its date beside it.