Christ our Passover

Last week, we started this series on the history of how Christians have understood the atonement — that is, what Jesus did that saved us — by looking at the notion of recapitulation, the idea that Jesus saved us by essentially rebooting humanity and being entirely faithful where both Adam and God’s chosen people both failed. This week, we’ll look at two specific ways this perspective manifested itself for the first Christians; today, we’ll explore the major ancient Christian theme of Christ recapitulating the Passover, and on Friday, the minor (but fascinating and surprisingly fulsome) theme of Christ our Bridegroom.

The feast of Passover involves the ritual commemoration, or, really a ritual recapitulation, of the Exodus, which is without a doubt the founding and grounding myth (using the term in its technical sense of a story around which a society builds its identity and values) of the tradition we now know as Judaism. As I’ve previously noted, “It wasn’t just one story among many, but was the story for how this rather rag-tag, obscure people among the many similar peoples of the Ancient Near East (ANE) came to understand themselves as God’s special people.” It’s the story of how the Hebrews were languishing in slavery in Egypt for generations before they cried out to the God of their ancestors and God raised up a leader for them who challenged Pharaoh and led them to freedom in a promised land. The Passover ritual recollects and makes present for participants one specific even in the Exodus story: When God was about to unleash the final (and most horrific) of a series of plagues upon the Egyptians, God told the Hebrews to protect themselves by killing a lamb and smearing its blood around the doorways of their homes:

Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. … You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. … This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord. … The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. (Exodus 12.3-13)

This was to be done again annually in remembrance of their deliverance from both the plague and slavery itself.

The centrality of the Exodus story, with its themes of bondage and freedom, in Jewish self-understanding meant that this was also the primary lens through which the first Christians, who were all Jews of course, understood what God was doing in and through Jesus. That his story culminated around Passover only heightened this signification for them. (Even if one were to take the most skeptical approach and say that the Gospel-writers made up this timing, that would only serve to strengthen the argument that the Exodus and Passover motifs were the most important for them!) As I noted last week, the Gospels frame Jesus’ life story as a recapitulation of the Exodus story: His name casts Jesus as a second Joshua, he goes into Egypt before coming back to the Promised Land, he is baptized in the River Jordan, the boundary of the Land of Promise, and, though the details vary among the Gospels, they all frame the events of his death around the Passover meal, with either his Last Supper with his disciples being a Passover meal or his death itself functioning as the killing of the Passover lamb. And, the quintessential ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist (or Holy Communion), is a reworking of the Passover ceremony. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (5.17). In fact, so great was the connection between Jesus’ death and resurrection with the feast of Passover in early Christianity, that the word for Easter was (and still is in most parts of the traditionally Christian world) simply the word for Passover.

The importance of this way of looking at the atonement in the early Church can be seen primarily in its hymns. One ancient Easter prayer reads: “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast!” And the major Eastern Orthodox Easter hymn includes the lines:

Today a sacred Passover is revealed to us:

A new and holy Passover
A mystical passover
A passover worthy of veneration
A passover which is Christ the Redeemer
A blameless Passover
A great Passover
A passover of the faithful
A passover which has openend for us the gates of Paradise
A passover which sanctifies all the faithful

The idea that Jesus’s death is thematically connected to the Passover should be clear to anyone who grew up in the Church. But what may be surprising, is what this connection would have meant. As much as many Christians immediately jump from ‘ritual death’ to ‘forgiveness of sins’, the Hebrew Scriptures never talk about the Passover ritual in connection with the sacrificial system. Likewise, the major festival surrounding the theme of sin, Yom Kippur, was in a different part of the year altogether, and had nothing to do with the killing of a lamb. But, if not about sin, what was the Passover about? In the language of religious studies and anthropology, the original Passover was what is known as an apotropaic ceremony; this means that it was about warding off evil, or in this case, protecting against an avenging ‘good’. In its annual form, it is a commemoration of this protection and the freedom it provided. In other words, the governing idea behind the Passover is not the forgiveness of sins, but freedom from slavery.

At first glance, this may not resonate strongly with the Christian story as many of us know it, but once we look for it, we see that the New Testament is chock full of references to bondage and freedom: It’s in Zechariah’s song (aka the Benedictus, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and set them free,” Luke 1.68), in Jesus’ own mission statement (”He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” Luke 4.18), in Jesus’ framing of his healing and teaching ministries (Luke 13.16, John 8.31-36). And it can be found throughout Paul’s writings as well — roughly forty times — including statements about Jesus setting us free from sin (Romans 6.18), death (Romans 8.2), decay (Romans 8.21), and the ways of this world (Galatians 1.4). So, far from ignoring the theme of bondage and freedom, the New Testament actually expands on it, from not just the cultural and political aspects of freedom, but also freedom from illness and injury, and freedom from one’s own sins. The interesting thing here is that, when this metaphor touches on sin, it de-emphasizes personal responsibility. The problem is less that we break relationships because choose to do the wrong thing, and more that we are trapped in systems and cycles largely beyond our control. The solution is freedom, an act of God that breaks the power of these systems over us.

It’s now time for our summary chart and then to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this way of looking at the work of Jesus.

Summary

Looking at these questions, we see that this way of understanding Jesus’ life, ministry, and death is pretty robust. In addition to having satisfying and internally consistent answers to most of these big questions, the answers stress the continuity between what God was doing in Jesus and what God had previously done in Israel’s salvation history. It does a better job than the general recapitulation image does of placing an importance on Jesus’ death, but like it, it remains weak in how it understands the resurrection. I’ve put a statement in parentheses in the table because, while it’s probably how the resurrection would be understood from this perspective, it’s also completely unnecessary to it. There is no resurrection in the Passover ritual. The type of life envisioned in the bondage-and-freedom motif remains squarely in this life, not the next. And this is probably why this understanding of Christ as our Passover was never used on its own, but was strongly connected to what has become known as the Christus Victor motif (which we’ll look at next week). Additionally, the Passover imagery disconnects Jesus’ death from the idea of the forgiveness of sins, which is a link that Paul makes. So it can’t be said to capture the spirit of all of what Paul thought about Jesus’ life and especially his death.

But again, the point for the early Christians was not to develop full theological theories of everything. Rather, they were searching for motifs from their own traditions through which they could understand what they had experienced in Jesus. And, as we’ve seen here, the Exodus story, and the Passover specifically, provided a powerful lens to do that.