Passover (Pesach)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. The clearest OT instance of substitutionary atonement, and the NT identifies Christ with it more often and more explicitly than with any other sacrifice.

Requirements

• A lamb or kid, male, a year old, without blemish. Selected on the 10th, kept until the 14th.
• One per household - with the provision that a household too small shares with its nearest neighbour (12:4). Nobody eats Passover alone and nobody is excluded for being poor.
• Killed at twilight on Nisan 14, by the whole assembly.
• Blood on the two doorposts and the lintel, applied with hyssop (12:22).
• Roasted whole, not boiled or raw, head, legs, inner parts (12:8-9). No bone broken (12:46; Num 9:12).
• Eaten with unleavened bread + bitter herbs, in haste, belt fastened, sandals on, staff in hand (12:11). Nothing left till morning… leftovers burned.
• Circumcision required for participation (12:48). A sojourner could keep it; an uncircumcised one couldn't.
• Second Passover a month later for anyone barred by corpse impurity or travel (Num 9:10-11).
  • Harper: "The appointed time for Passover could be set aside; ritual purity could not."

Plainly Stated Substitution

the Passover lamb functioned as a penal substitute, dying in the place of the firstborn sons of the Israelites, in order that they might escape the wrath of God.

• Jeffery, Ovey & Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions

• The structure of the night makes it hard to read otherwise. Judgment is announced against every firstborn in Egypt (12:12) - the text doesn't restrict this to Egyptians.
• What distinguishes the Israelite houses isn't ethnicity, virtue or location. It's the blood. Condition stated once and entirely objective: "when I see the blood, I will pass over you."
• Worth noting… this chapter, at the founding moment of the nation, in a rite commanded to be repeated annually and explained to every generation. Gives penal substitution the highest possible profile in Israel's self-understanding.

Barabbas

Morales connects Passover to the wider firstborn theology:

• All four Gospels record the release of a criminal at the feast. All four name him.
• Bar Abbas is Aramaic for "son of the father." Some early witnesses to Matt 27:16 read the name as "Jesus bar Abbas."

Such a correlation manifests the redemption of Passover: Jesus is the Son, the first-born of the Father, who must be sacrificed in order for humanity, Adam and his posterity to be released.

• L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?

• Two men before a crowd, both called son of the father. One walks free because the other doesn't.
• Exod 12 staged as theatre in a Roman courtyard, and nobody involved appears to have noticed.

A Meal, Not Only a Sacrifice

• Passover is a sacrifice you eat - structurally alongside The Peace Offering (Shelamim). Vos notes everything essential about the sacrificial meal is "said in discussing the Passover."
• Blood averts judgment… the meal makes a household out of the people it spared.
• Block: "whereas most of Israel's festivals were tied to their cultic system and hence ended with Christ, the Passover was neither associated with tabernacle/temple worship nor finished with Christ."
  • Began in houses, before there was a tabernacle, and was later centralised at the sanctuary without ever losing its domestic character.

New Testament Fulfilment

Most heavily attested typological identification in the NT, from several independent directions.

Paul Says It Outright

• 1 Cor 5:7 - "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."
• Fee: "that only shows how limited our availability to him is on the basis of his few letters. He clearly assumes that his Gentile readers will understand this thoroughly Jewish imagery."
  • Not a metaphor. Common understanding in a Gentile congregation in Corinth within 25 years of the crucifixion.
• Wright goes further - suggests this may be the controlling image: "The Messiah, then, is the Passover sacrifice, and his followers must think through what that means for their whole life. That, we may suspect, is the original and controlling sacrificial image for the death of Jesus, but it is by no means the only one."

John Builds His Gospel on It

Morales' observation of the Gospel:

• The frame. John the Baptist's "Behold, the Lamb of God" (1:29, repeated 1:36) finds its counterpart in 19:31-37.
• The unbroken bones. Soldiers don't break Jesus' legs because He's already dead, and John tells the reader directly this fulfils the Passover legislation that "not one of his bones will be broken" (Exod 12:46; Num 9:12; Ps 34:20).
• The timing. John carefully places the crucifixion on the eve of Passover, at the hour the lambs were slaughtered (19:14).
• The hyssop. John alone mentions hyssop at the cross (19:29) - the plant used to apply blood to the doorposts in Exod 12:22.
• The recurring feast. Passover as theological setting throughout (2:13, 23; 5:1; 6:4; 11:55; 13:1).
• Morales on John 2:17. The quotation of Ps 69:9 is altered from past to future: "Zeal for your house will eat [kataphagetai] me," where both Hebrew and LXX have "has eaten." In a chapter set at Passover, the future-oriented change may have the sacrificial consuming of the lamb in view.
• Peter and Revelation follow the same line: "the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish" (1 Pet 1:18-19); "you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe" (Rev 5:9).

The Lord's Supper

• Jesus institutes it at a Passover meal. Block's summary:

In each account Jesus presents himself as the head of a household of faith: he arranges for the Passover meal, which he transforms from a memorial of the exodus to a memorial of his own substitutionary death and ratification of the new covenant.

• Daniel I. Block, For the Glory of God

• Block: "Each time we eat and drink at the Lord's Table, we participate in the drama of redemption, memorializing and experiencing the grace of Christ's sacrifice."
• Waltke: "just as Passover was replaced by the Lord's Supper and circumcision by baptism." Two old-covenant signs, two new-covenant signs, and the correspondence isn't accidental in either case.
• Theology of the Supper itself: The Institution of the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper.

Good Stuff to Preach

• The blood was applied, not merely shed. In Exod 12 the lamb's death wasn't sufficient by itself. Blood had to go on the doorframe of the specific house, and a household that killed a lamb and left the blood in the basin wasn't protected.
  • That's the gospel's own logic: an accomplished atonement that has to be received. Which is why Paul, having said the Passover lamb has been sacrificed, immediately issues an imperative.
• The judgment was real and it was universal. God didn't pass over the Israelite houses because there was nothing there worth judging. The whole point of the doorframe is that the destroyer was coming to that door too.
  • Fee: "The death of Christ makes them new; yet they must get rid of the old in order to be new, precisely because in Christ they already are new! Thus no 'do in order to be,' but 'do because you are.'"