Commentaries:
While many consider Passover to be a Jewish festival, it should also be a sacred observance for all Christians. This is Jesus' own command, communicated through the apostle Paul, for the church to celebrate the Passover "on the night in which He was betrayed," which was the evening of the Passover, Nisan 14 on the Hebrew calendar. This was the practice of the New Testament church—in fact, it kept all of the holy days of Leviticus 23—as long as the original apostles lived.
However, like all men, the apostles died one by one until only the apostle John was left. Around the turn of the second century, John died. For a few generations under the leadership of John's disciple, Polycarp (AD 69-155), and a successor, Polycrates (c. 130-196), the Ephesian church remained faithful to the teachings and traditions of the early church, including the keeping of the Passover on Nisan 14.
Those few who stubbornly resisted the change to the celebration of Easter, which had supplanted Passover throughout most of Christendom, were called Quartodecimans ("fourteenthers") and Judaizers. By Origen's day (c. 185- 254), they were, he wrote, "a mere handful" among the millions living in the Empire. Even so, the Roman Church did not effectively ban the practice of keeping the Passover on Nisan 14 until AD 325 at the Council of Nicea, when rules were set down to calculate the date of Easter for the entire Church. Canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea (held in 363-364) later anathematized those Judaizers who kept the seventh-day Sabbath, many of whom were also Quartodecimans.
The controversy over Passover or Easter boils down to following Scripture versus following Roman Catholic tradition. Frankly, the reason that the Roman Church chose to keep Easter rests on two faulty pillars: 1) an intense prejudice against "the perfidy of the Jews" in the crucifixion of Christ (which has come to be known as the "blood libel") and 2) the widespread celebration of Easter among pagan cultures throughout the Empire. The convoluted theological arguments that have come down from the so-called apostolic fathers, repeated endlessly by their successors, are window-dressing to obscure these unpleasant factors.
Even during the first century, an anti-Jewish element had begun to creep into the church of God. In his epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, the apostle Paul had attempted to explain the place of God's law under the New Covenant, but as Peter later testified, in Paul's epistles "are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction" (II Peter 3:16). And twist them they did, moving the church away from the truths written in the Old Testament and expounded by Christ and His apostles. Soon, many Greek-speaking Christians, not wanting to be constrained by the "Hebrew" law, entertained Gnostic ideas that encouraged spiritual license. Finally, the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 ratcheted up anti-Jewish fervor to a fever pitch, and across the Empire, association with Jews and things Jewish was generally avoided.
In this way, the church that appears in second-century history is quite different from its first-century counterpart. It is largely Gentile, keeping Sunday rather than the Sabbath, and growing in power and political influence. It is also attracting new converts, not only out of Greco-Roman paganism, but also from the gods and goddesses of the frontier areas like Britain, Germany, and Dacia. This church found it easier to assimilate these new converts by syncretizing the Easter celebration with their pagan spring festivals, often called after the name of the widely worshipped fertility goddess, Ishtar (or some close variation: Astarte, Eoster, Ostara, Isis, Aphrodite, etc.). It is from these heathen influences that the Easter Bunny, dyeing eggs, giving candy, and other non-biblical Easter traditions have sprung.
Conversely, the Christian Passover is not a celebration but a solemn observance that commemorates the agonizing blood-sacrifice of Jesus Christ to pay for our sins (Matthew 26:28; Romans 4:25; I Corinthians 15:3; Ephesians 1:7; Titus 2:14; I John 1:7), to redeem us from spiritual bondage (Matthew 20:28; Galatians 1:4; Ephesians 2:1-3; Hebrews 2:14-15; I Peter 1:18-19; Revelation 5:9), and to open the way to fellowship with the Father (Romans 8:34; Ephesians 2:18; Hebrews 7:25; 10:19-22). Each year in the Passover ceremony, baptized Christians wash one another's feet to follow Christ's example of selfless service (John 13:1-17), as well as partake of the bread and the wine, recommitting themselves to the everlasting covenant that they have made with God. As Paul writes in I Corinthians 11:26, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes."
Easter, however, celebrates, not the Savior's death, but His resurrection, which most professing Christians believe occurred at sunrise on the Sunday morning after His death (please see "After Three Days" which explains from the Bible that this is not the case). Neither Jesus nor His apostles mention anything about observing or memorializing His resurrection. In fact, His death is the only event of His life that the Bible consistently commands us to remember (Luke 22:19; I Corinthians 11:24-25; see the principle in Psalm 116:15; Ecclesiastes 7:1).
And, yes, this excludes His birth too, making Christmas another non-biblical addition to the liturgical calendar. Despite the human desire to mark such times, Christians must be careful to do only what God's Word commands lest they be guilty of adding to or taking away from it (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32; Joshua 1:7; Proverbs 30:5-6; Revelation 22:18-19). When we add to or take from what God has said, we alter His revelation to us and are sure to veer even farther from His way.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Why Passover and Not Easter?
I Corinthians 11:17-34 encapsulates the solution to a tragic story of gluttony, drunkenness, class distinction, and party spirit—all within the framework of the "love feasts" of a Christian congregation! Why were some guilty of these sins? Because, despite being converted, some of them neither loved God nor their brethren, which a reading of the entire epistle reveals.
To what does Paul refer them to correct their abominable behavior? To the Passover service and Christ's death! Christ's death is the supreme example of unselfish and sacrificial service in behalf of the undeserving guilty. It is the highest, most brilliant example of love.
Out of a beneficent good will, the Father and the Son freely gave of themselves for the sake of our well-being. For those of us still in the flesh, this beneficent goodwill results in our forgiveness, forging a foundation from which the same approach to life can begin to be exercised. When we can properly judge ourselves in terms of what we are in relation to Their freely given sacrifices, it frees us, not only to conduct life as They do, but eventually to receive everlasting life too.
Job confesses in Job 42:5-6, "I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Though Job was among the most upright of men, all his life he had held a wrong evaluation of himself in relation to God and other men. Yet when God allowed him to "see" himself, as He did the apostle Paul in Romans 7, Job was devastated, his vanity crushed, and he repented. Now, he was truly prepared to begin to love.
"Do this in remembrance of Me" has a couple of alternative renderings that may help us understand more clearly. It can be rendered more literally, "Do this for the remembering of Me," or "Do this in case you forget." God does not want us to let this sacrifice get very far from our minds. It is not that He wants maudlin sentimentality from us. Instead, He wants to remind us that it represents the measure of His love for us as well as of our worth to Him, that we always bear a right sense of obligation, not as an overbearing burden, but a wondering awe that He would pay so much for something so utterly defiled.
We are admonished to remember not merely the personality Jesus, but the whole package: His connection to the Old Testament Passover; His life of sacrificial service; His violent, bloody death for the remission of the sins of mankind; the sacrificial connection to the New Covenant; and who He was, our sinless Creator! This act becomes the foundation of all loving relationships possible to us with God and His Family because it provides us reason to hope that our lives are not spent in vain. In addition, it motivates us to do what we failed to do that put us into debt in the first place—to love.
Paul admonishes in verse 29, "For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body." To eat the bread or drink the wine in an unworthy manner is to treat His sacrifice with casual, disrespectful ingratitude—a better translation might be "without due appreciation, especially as shown by one's life." It means that the person who does this is not showing much love in his life because he is barely aware of his sins and the enormous cost of forgiveness.
Such a person is not really free to love because he is still wrapped up in himself. When we take Passover, let us strive to remember that our fellowship at that special time is with Him. The others there to participate in the service are at that time only incidental to our relationship with Christ. The focus is on Christ and our unpayable debt and subsequent obligation.
John W. Ritenbaugh
An Unpayable Debt and Obligation
Through the apostle Paul, God has made certain that all of the members of the Body of Christ recognize, not only the necessity of participation in this solemn memorialization of Christ's death, but also the careful preparation that is a key to proper participation. Each individual must scrupulously examine himself while recognizing the inestimable cost of what has been done on his behalf.
God has clearly shown what He expects from all the participants leading up to that evening. He does not intend for us to go through this examination process with a sense of self-condemnation. Rather, as the Greek word for "examine" indicates, God intends it to be an approval process of making an honest evaluation of how we are relating to the One who has paid the price for our lives, the One to whom we owe allegiance in our every thought and action. The other side of the coin is that, without proper preparation for the Passover, we bring condemning judgment on ourselves for not undergoing the preparation process with all our hearts.
God has given us an assortment of tools to handle this process, and probably one of the best is to go through Jesus' own words spoken in the last 24 hours of His human life. Of the 21 chapters in John's gospel, five of them (13-17), almost a quarter of the book, are detailed instructions from that one day, which we can use as a guide for our self-examination leading to the Passover. Jesus spoke these words either directly to His disciples or indirectly, as in His prayer to His Father just before He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane to be tried and crucified.
We could focus on various points from these words to guide our personal examination as we approach that most solemn evening, but we will concentrate on one important and telling piece of our relationship with Him, as seen in our relationships with one another.
In John 15:11-19, in the middle of His last crucial directions to His chosen disciples on the night before He offered Himself for our sins, Jesus teaches:
These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. These things I command you, that you love one another. If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
Of all the instructions Jesus gave to us on that night, this may be the most encouraging, and at the same time, among the most difficult for us to realize in our blossoming relationships within the church. God has ordained that we produce fruit engendered by a loving relationship among the friends of God in a world of those who are, through blindness, His enemies.
Out of the entire world, we have been chosen now to develop that friendship, not with the world, but with those placed in the love and friendship of the Body of Christ! This relationship, unique among the brethren separated from the world to Christ, is a critical part of the judgment God is talking about in I Corinthians 11:31. This should be a key element of our evaluation as we strive to keep the Passover in a worthy manner.
Are we really living up to the ordained responsibilities of the friends of God within our relationships with one another? Proverbs 18:24 reads, "A man who has friends must himself be friendly, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." The deep meaning of this verse in Hebrew gets lost in the English translation. At first glance, it seems to say merely that to be a friend we need to be friendly, but a closer examination reveals it to be a clear warning to those God has separated from this world through Christ.
The exact translation of this verse has spawned quite a bit of controversy, but it is not difficult to see a clear tie between this verse and what Jesus tells those who are in a proper relationship with Him, as recorded in John 15. Those in a relationship with Him must have the same relationship with one another, a relationship that binds to Christ and separates from the world!
Mark Schindler
Passover and Friends United in Truth (Part One)
The "cup" symbolizes the blood Jesus spilled in sacrificing His life. God is saying that through the blood of Christ, He is "sealing" His agreement of salvation with us. Though He had already promised it, Christ's blood certifies His agreement to justify us in preparation for salvation (Romans 5:9-10).
Such a monumental sacrifice must be fittingly remembered! If Passover becomes a mere ritual or pious habit, it loses its significance because Christ is not really being remembered with understanding and appreciation. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the brethren as rushing through the service, their minds so focused on their own bellies that they were treating each other with selfish disregard. Passover's purpose is not just to remember certain historical events, but to grasp the point of Christ's death. If we fail to comprehend its meaning, we are much more likely to treat His death unworthily.
Paul covers three major subjects in I Corinthians 11 and the chapters surrounding it: 1) our relationship with God, 2) our relationship with other members of the church and 3) spiritual liberty. Their common factor—the unique means by which all three are made possible—is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Christ, Our Passover
The apostle Paul carefully taught the Gentile Corinthians to keep the Passover using the symbols of bread and wine that Jesus had instituted. These scriptures teach us to keep the Passover "till He comes," and the true church of God will still be observing the Passover as He commanded. All those who have accepted His redemption eagerly anticipate His return to share the eternal life He makes possible by His sacrifice!
Earl L. Henn
Holy Days: Passover
Concerning the bread and wine, Christ instructs us, "Do this in remembrance of Me". This command could also be translated, "Do this for the remembering of me," or "Do this in case you forget." God does not want us to let His Son's sacrifice get very far from our minds. He does not want us to get maudlin over it, but to remember that it represents the measure of His love and our worth to Him. Remembering helps us retain a right sense of obligation. He does not wish that our obligation become a burden, but fill us with a wonder, an awe, that He would pay so much for something so utterly defiled.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Passover, Obligation, and Love
Other Forerunner Commentary entries containing 1 Corinthians 11:24:
Exodus 12:8
1 Corinthians 11:23-29
1 Corinthians 11:25-29
