The Passover Feast

THE PASSOVER FEAST This is a summary of what I have recently learned about the Jewish culture and how they celebrated the Passover feast. I will start on the day before the actual Passover celebration.

The Day before The Jewish housewife has 4 complete sets of dishes in the house. Milk and milk products, and meat and meat products must be kept separate and can not be served on the same set of dishes. So there is 1 set of dishes for milk and milk products, and 1 set of dishes for meat and meat products. And then these 2 sets of dishes are replaced by a ‘special’ set of dishes for the feast of Passover. The preparation of the feast takes one entire day. In the morning, the mother (and other adult ladies) takes out all the sets of dishes from the closet and washes them carefully. This includes the unused ‘special’ sets that will be used for the Passover feast. Also, the kitchen and the rest of the house need to be purged of leaven. So, that means, no usual bread, pieces of bread, or even crumbs are allowed to remain in the kitchen. Everything has to be cleaned. Leaven is the symbol for sin, so it’s like people getting rid of their sin, preparing themselves for the Passover feast. The parents usually place some pieces of bread or crumbs deliberately on some hidden places in the living room for the children to go find. And then when they do, they call their father. The father will come with a brush and brushes the crumbs or bread pieces onto a plate or other, and will throw this in burning fire place. The father explains to the children that that is what we do with bread pieces right before the Passover. Those bread pieces contain leaven, which stand for sin, and God the Father will pass judgment over sin and throw it in the fire of hell.

The day of Passover Then, the following day, when the Passover feast celebrations begin, when the table is set and the meal / celebration of the Passover feast can begin, the father will appear at the table, dressed in white; the symbol of righteousness. This symbolizes that he is the priest of the family and is to be without stain or sin. The mother will start the celebration by lighting the candles on the table. She always lights the candles in a Jewish family. Whether for the Sabbath, or for the Passover. Why this is? It was a woman that brought the Light of the world into this world. (Mary) This should remind us that Christ was man, like us. And in all things equally tempted, being able to understand what it means to be man, first hand. So, we have no right to think that we have an excuse not to follow in His footsteps, saying that God created him as a separate being, from something Godly, and that we are created from dust and can never follow in His footsteps. Personally, I believe the woman lighting the candles also symbolizes the Church of Christ. The Church that has the task to bring light into the darkness of this world. In other words: to bring Christ into this world. You could also say that Christ is being reborn into this world through the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, just as was the case with Mary. Once the candles are lit, the first cup of wine on the table is drunk. The father takes out 3 leaves of “Matzo’ (unleavened bread) and hides them in a cloth that contains 3 compartments. Each leaf of Matzo into a separate compartment. The father will say a blessing and then removes the middle leaf of Matzo from the cloth and breaks it in two pieces. Next, he wraps the two pieces into a separate cloth and hides it under a cushion of an empty chair, or anywhere else out of sight. By this time it is up to the youngest member of the family to ask 4 questions that will allow the father of the family to answer and tell the story of the Exodus. It’s always the youngest member of the family that gets to do this in the Hebrew language, and so every child will have his/her turn in life to perform this part of the ceremony. The child asks in a Hebrew chanting melody, repeating each question at least two times: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” “Other nights we eat both leavened and unleavened bread, but tonight we eat only unleavened bread. Other nights we eat all kind of herbs. Tonight we eat only bitter herbs. Other nights we do not even dip once, and tonight we dip twice. Other nights we eat either sitting down or lying back, but tonight we eat laying back.” Then the father will answer that this night is different from other nights because it’s a night of sacrifice. On this night men are going to kill God. It’s a story of sacrifice and salvation. As the father starts telling about the slavery in Egypt that their people had to endure, (“When we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt”) he will stop at each of the foods on the platter that represents a part of the story.

He will come to the bitterness of the slavery and point to the horseradish on the plate. The people will take the time to break a piece of Matzo and dip it in the horseradish and eat it. The horseradish is very strong in taste and can bring tears to the eyes. And this represents the weeping of the Jewish slaves under Pharaoh. The father will then proceed the story and come to the part where Pharaoh tells Moses that from now on the people will also have to make their own bricks and mortar. The family will then take a piece of matzo and dip it in a mixture of apples, nuts and cinnamon to remind them about the mortar. It tastes sweet. Jesus and his disciples were also doing this when they were celebrating the Passover right before Jesus’ betrayal by Judas. And maybe you remember Jesus telling His disciples that the one that dips his bread in the bowl at the same time with Him, will betray him. (Matthew 26:23) Then there is a lambs bone on the plate that represents the blood of the lamb. For the Jews that was the lamb that was sacrificed in Egypt in order for them to paint the blood on their doors. For us this is the Lamb of God that was sacrificed on Golgotha in order for us to paint the blood on the doors of our hearts. The father will take up the second cup of wine on the table and actually spill more from it than drink it. As he tells about each of the plagues of Egypt, he will spill some blood on a white plate. The last plague is the death of the first born. Personally, I believe this refers to Christ, who has become God’s first born and who died. Through which either judgment or salvation comes, depending on whether or not you have His blood on your life. And the next items on the plate are the bitter herbs that the family will dip twice into the bowl of salt water in the middle of the table. Once for Israel, young and green and in the springtime of its nationhood. And once for the Egyptian army that followed them through the water and perished. The last item on the platter is the egg. This is probably not original. It probably creaped into the ceremony during the Babylonian times. In Babylon the egg was the symbol of fertility. But fertility is not the same as resurrection. Easter day, in our culture is the day of eggs too, and we associate it with new life and fertility. But in the Jewish celebration it was the third day after the day of the leavened breads and it was the day of First Fruits. Jesus became the first fruit by his resurrection on that exact day. (1 Cor. 15:22-23) After the egg the father gets the hidden matzo back from behind his cushion or elsewhere hidden.

The Supper of the Lord From this moment in the ceremony we recognize what we call the supper of the Lord. The supper of the Lord starts with the third cup of wine in the Passover celebration and the piece of broken matzo that the father had hidden away and now retrieves. Remember that this is the part of the celebration that the gospels describe. Jesus was celebrating this Passover with the disciples and with the third cup of wine He told them to continue doing this until Christ returns. (Matthew 26:26) The father will say a blessing over the matzo. “Blessed art Thou Father, which brings forth bread from the earth’. This phrase is very meaningful when considering that Christ called Himself the Living bread. He was born in Bethlehem (House of bread), died on the feast of unleavened breads, and rose again, as bread coming forth from the earth, and the first of many, on the feast of First Fruits. The bread of the Supper of the Lord: The Matzo is not leavened, it’s pure. – Jesus is without sin. The Matzo has been grilled and shows the stripes of the grill print. – By His stripes we are healed. (Jes 53:5) The Matzo has holes – Jesus was pierced for us. (Zach 12:10) We receive salvation by allowing a part of Christ (a part of the Matzo) to enter ourselves and become partakers of Him and gain the quality of rising forth from the earth, as He did. (Resurrection in the here after) The wine of the Supper of the Lord: A cup of wine in the Old Testament Jewish times was the way for a bridegroom to propose to a woman. Courtship and ‘dating’ did not exist in Israel. Now this part of the cultural background is very interesting and your minds will be enlightened about the meaning of Christ’s words in the New Testament as I proceed to explain the customs. The bridegroom would go to the house of the woman he wants to propose to, carrying a cup of wine and a marriage contract. As a sign from the woman, that she accepts the proposal to marriage from the man, she would then drink from his cup. Then the man would leave the house of woman with the words: “I shall go to my fathers’ house and prepare you a room.’ This is the gospel: In the New Testament we have the blood of Christ instead of the wine, the new covenant instead of the marriage contract, and heaven instead of an earthly room, prepared at the home of the father of the bridegroom. From the moment the man leaves the house of the bride’s family, she can be sure that he will come back for her to marry her. She is officially engaged from that moment and wears a veil whenever she steps outside of the house, so that the whole village or city will know that she is now engaged to be married. She is now separated from all other women, just as we become separated from this world once we accept Christ. The woman will then light up a little wooden oil lamp, every night before going to bed, and place it at her window.

The customs are that she will not know when the bridegroom will come for her for bridegrooms would usually come as thieves in the middle of the night, unexpectedly. And the light at her window would be a sign to the bridegroom that she is expecting him, whenever he comes. The young man would go about building an extra room to his father’s house. But he will not know the date of the wedding either. Neither the bride nor the bridegroom decided on when the marriage will take place. Probably it would be somewhere around the time when the room for the bride was finished, but the only one that decides and therefore knows is the father of the bridegroom. And he would keep this to himself until that day that evening had come. Then they would gather some family and friends and go up to the house of the bride and wake her up. As soon as they were at hearing distance, they would shout and sound the horns or trumpets so that the bride would hear and wake up. (1Thes. 4:16) The day of the Lord will also proceed with the sound of trumpets. The people would rush into the house of the bride’s family and grab the bride, carry her through town and bring her to the room built by the groom. When we drink the cup at the supper of the Lord, we accept His “proposal’ to be part of His bride and we can be sure He will come for us. Each time we do this in remembrance of Him, we renew the initial acceptance of His offer, allowing Him to cleanse us from every sin, so that we can be put before him without blemish on the day of our ‘wedding’.

The last cup of wine And then the last cup of the Passover is the fourth cup of wine. This represents the coming of Elijah, or Judgment day. Mal. 4:5. The Jews still expect Elijah. But the Christians expect Jesus’ second coming. The father will end the celebration with the words ‘Next year in Jerusalem”. For more articles like this, go to www.image-of-christ.blogspot.com