Happy Resurrection Day!

This is the final post in the current series of articles on Holy Week:

Part I: Lamb Selection Day
Part II: Passover Preparation
Part III: Passover Banquet
Part IV: Passover Sacrifice (also inserting Jesus’ use of remez while on the cross)
Part V: The Feast of Unleavened Bread

Today, in Part VI, we will briefly discuss the Feast of Firstfruits.

As was mentioned in yesterday’s article, the feast of Firstfruits is the third celebration during Passover week, and it is celebrated the day after the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

The Meaning of Firstfruits

Many Christians do not realize that the Jewish calendar, as established by God, is set up around the agricultural calendar of Israel. There have been number of discoveries of ancient agricultural calendars from Israel, which link the religious and agricultural calendars together. One of the most prominent was the discovery of the “Gezer Calendar Stone” (right), which is housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum in Turkey.

When you have entered the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land the LORD your God is giving you and put them in a basket. Then go to the place the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name and say to the priest in office at the time, “I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come to the land the LORD swore to our forefathers to give us.” The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the LORD your God. Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me.” Place the basket before the LORD your God and bow down before him. And you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the LORD your God has given to you and your household.(Deuteronomy 26:1-11)

So, the same way that we are to give to God the first part of our money, resources, time and everything else, these people brought the first part of their crop to God.

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Just as a refresher, here is where we have been thus far in this series:

Part I: Lamb Selection Day
Part II: Passover Preparation
Part III: Passover Banquet
Part IV: Passover Sacrifice

In the past, we’ve also examined Jesus’ use of remez while on the cross

Tonight, in Part V, we will be examining the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Timing

“Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. (Exodus 12:17-18)

“These are the LORD’s appointed feasts, the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times: The LORD’s Passover begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month. On the fifteenth day of that month the LORD’s Feast of Unleavened Bread begins; for seven days you must eat bread made without yeast. On the first day hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. For seven days present an offering made to the LORD by fire. And on the seventh day hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work.’ “(Leviticus 23:4-8)

On the Jewish Calendar, the Passover Festival is often a combination of 3 Festival celebrations, spread over a 7-9 day period (depending on which day Passover falls). These three festivals are: Passover, Unleavened Bread and Firstfruits. The Feast of Unleavened Bread, while it lasted a week in total, was celebrated in sacred assembly on the first Sabbath after Passover – whether it was the day after or seven days after Passover. Firstfruits was then celebrated, per Leviticus 23:15, the day after the Feast of Unleavened bread (and then the Feast of Weeks – Shavuot or Pentecost – seven weeks later).

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In Part I of this series, we examined Lamb Selection Day, and in Part II, we examined the preparations for Passover. In Part III, we delved into the Passover Banquet, now called the Seder. Tonight, in Part IV, we will examine the passover sacrifice.

Origins

The origins of sacrifice in Hebraic tradition, and so, too, for us, goes back hundreds of years before Moses and the Exodus to the time of Abram. In Genesis 15, we read:

After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision:
“Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”

But Abram said, “O Sovereign LORD, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”

Then the word of the LORD came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:1-6)

In this passage, God has promised to protect Abram and to reward him. In Abram’s culture, the two most important things one could have were children and land – because these were the only things that could carry on as a legacy to future generations. Nothing else could truly serve as a reminder to future generations of people the worth of a person and his or her life.

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In Part I of this series, we examined Lamb Selection Day, and in Part II, we examined the preparations for Passover.

In Part III, we will examine the banquet traditions of Passover as practiced in the first century – in very similar manner as is done today – with the intention of examining some significant details relevant to Christianity. It is not my intention to give an all-encompassing look into what is now referred to by faithful Jews as the Seder (which is most likely not the name used for this meal in the first century). If you want to see all of the parts of the service, there are a number of Christian and Jewish websites which document this.

The Banquet

Unlike the traditional Christian “Lord’s Supper”, this meal was a four-course banquet, each with a specific cup of wine to symbolize it, which might take five or six hours, total, from beginning to end. While we are certain that this was practiced in the First Century, we do not know whether Jesus and his disciples each had four cups or if only Jesus had the four cups (there is evidence of both, though the synoptic accounts seems to indicate that Jesus shared from one cup for at least the third cup), which also signified where they were in the meal. We do know, though, that the tradition of the cups of wine began some 200 years before Jesus and his disciples met in the Upper Room.

These four cups, according to Jewish tradition, are given their meaning from Exodus 6:6-7

“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will deliver you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

The four cups are (sometimes the English translations for the names differ, but the meaning is consistent):

1. The Cup of Blessing/Thanksgiving (I will deliver you)
2. The Cup of Judgment (I will free you)
3. The Cup of Redemption (I will redeem you with an outstretched arm)
4. The Cup of Praise (I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God)

Each of these four cups symbolized one of God’s promises, and it is believed, from numerous early Jewish sources, that wine was representative of life/blood, and that God was promising on His own life that He will keep His promises (more on this in the next installment, if it seems a little “odd” to you).

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Over the past 20-odd years, I’ve had a number of opportunities to teach and/or counsel high school youth groups, along with some additional experience w/ folks struggling with addiction recovery (groups that have more in common that you might think).  One of the common topics that I’ve found that these people have struggled with is the concept of decoupling forgiveness from the consequences of sin.

“If you have forgiven me, then things must go back to the way things used to be…”, so the argument goes.  “If you are still going to treat me different/punish me, then you really haven’t forgiven me,” is cry of the addict, and it is the siren call of the addicts’ enablers in allowing the abuse to continue.  In addictive/abusive relationships, it is quite common for the abusers to manipulate those around them by taking a key component of Jesus’ teaching about living in the Kingdom – the concept of forgiveness – and twisting into something antithetical to its purpose.  As the saying goes “the best lies are the ones that contain the most truth”..

And without a good grounding in the Word, it is easy to fall for this lie, which is why so many do.  And, as so many of the key threads of Jesus’ teaching do, the decoupling of forgiveness and consequences begins in the Garden of Eden.

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In Part I of this series, we examined Lamb Selection Day, which we Christians celebrate as Palm Sunday (though technically, since the selection happens on Sunday evening, it is actually on Monday in the Jewish calendar).

In this, Part II, we will examine some more of the traditions of Passover as practiced in the first century – in very similar manner as is done today – with the intention of examining some significant details relevant to Christianity.

Removing the Leaven

For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread (Exodus 12:19-20)

In Hebrew practice and tradition, on the seventh day before Passover, all families would search their houses for yeast (in some Jewish families, a paternal figure would hide bits of bread for the children to search out and find – which may have been borrowed later by Christians in ‘Easter Egg Hunts’. We do not have evidence, though, that this particular tradition was practiced in the first century). All yeast found in the houses would be brought to a central place and burned.

Yeast is used throughout the scriptures – both the Old and New Testaments – as a symbol for sin. While the elimination of yeast was a remembrance of the Children of Israel leaving Egypt so quickly that there was not time to make bread with yeast, this elimination is also symbolic of systematic removal of all traces of sin in one’s life. Keeping in mind that it is always important to keep sin out of our lives, it is this purposeful searching that it done at Passover that seeks ALL the sources by which it may have crept into our lives.

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[A few years back, I did a series of articles on Holy Week on my personal blog. I'm making a few updates and reposting them during this year's Holy Week.]

There are a number of interesting events and “coincidences” that can be examined in the Jewish Traditions of the Second Temple period which hold significant parallels with Christian understanding of the last week of Jesus’ life, leading up to his resurrection.

This is Part I in the series (Palm Sunday), with further parts planned for later this week, to correspond with the days being celebrated.

Lamb Selection Day

On the tenth day of the first month of the year (five days before passover), every family was required to choose a lamb for passover, per the instructions given by God to Moses:

Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. (Exodus 12:3-6)

In order that the families could comply with the instructions from Exodus 12, the lambs were chosen the afternoon of the 9th day of the first month, so that they would be with the family from the 10th (which began at sundown) through the 14th. One reason for this, according to some Jewish sources, was so that the lamb would spend time with the family, becoming a part of it, so that when it fulfilled its purpose, it would take the sins of the family with it.

Jewish historians record that the lambs were brought from the fields of Bethlehem to the south up to Jerusalem and through the Northeast gate of the city by the pool of Bethesda, called the “Sheep’s Gate” (see above). (As we discussed during the the Desanitizing Christmas series a couple of years ago, the sheep of Bethlehem were owned by the Sadducees, and only these sheep were allowed to be sacrificed on Passover – for the purpose of filling their corrupt coffers.)

The year of Jesus’ death, He and his disciples began the trip into Jerusalem on a donkey at Bethphage (which is exactly one Sabbath day’s walk from the city walls). Bethphage is to the east of Jerusalem, and the road travels over the Mount of Olives down to the Sheep’s Gate. There they were met by a crowd of people waving palm branches.

The palm branch was a symbol which some scholars believe was not allowed within the city of Jerusalem, because it was associated with the zealots who wanted to overthrow Rome. The war cry of the zealots was “(God) Save Us!” chanted over and over again. In Hebrew, this would be pronounced “Ho-sha-NAH”, which we pronounce today Hosanna. This comes from Psalm 118:25-26, which is at the end of the Psalsms of Jewish blessings (Ps 113-118) called the hallel, sung during Jewish holidays.

O LORD, save us;
O LORD, grant us success.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.
From the house of the LORD we bless you. (Psalm 118:25-26)

And so, the cry of “Hosanna!” was not one simply of recognizing Jesus as a king – but one of a liberator. It was a cry for revolutionary overthrow of the oppressive Roman government. As an opening to the Passover week, it was a harbinger of civil unrest and violence that put the authorities of the city on edge.

Palm Sunday

This is the setting for Lamb Selection Day – which we Christians call “Palm Sunday”. And it is on this day that the Lamb of God, born in the flocks of Bethlehem, who was sacrificed for all of our sins, entered the city of Jerusalem. This was done at the end of the day (Mark 11:11) which would have been the same time at which the Passover lambs were being selected for each family group (and it is also the time that the disciples would have chosen the lamb for their own Passover Meal, which occured on the evening of the 14th day).

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

“Say to the Daughter of Zion,
‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ ”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosannain the highest!”

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”

The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” (Matthew 21:1-11)

As Westerners, we may miss this, but to Hebraic audiences, the picture is a stark one being painted here: Jesus is proclaimed a messiah by the people, but in doing so, they were selecting him as the Passover lamb to cover all the sins of the people for all time. He was from the flocks of Bethlehem, as all lambs were required to be in that time. The people waved the Palm branches, declaring Yeshua the Messiah. And so it is that the early Christians understood this day (which we celebrate as Palm Sunday) as the day in which Jesus was selected to be our sacrifice.

And so it is that this perfect lamb would have additional significance 5 days later, on the day of Passover…

(to be continued in Part II: Passover)

So, I’ve started going through the Bible on my iPod (with the long trip back from TN, I’m now somewhere in Numbers), using the stuff from folks at The Bible in 90 Days. (I don’t know that I’ll make it through in 90 days – my goal is just to go all the way through it again).

Needless to say, I’ve picked up an appreciation for more of the narrative and its flow as a listener (rather than a reader).  My problem w/ reading is that the footnotes, line notes, references, etc. all become very distracting and send me off on far too many bunny trails.  So, while reading through the Bible is an excellent study, for me (at least) it still misses some of the narrative aspects.

[For example, hearing Joseph - no longer able to hide his identity from the suffering of his brothers - tearfully confess his identity to them, has never been so powerful a picture to me than when I heard it (instead of reading it).  I'm sure I must have driven through a dust cloud at that moment, since it seems some of the dust stuck in my eye at that point of the story.]

So, I had to laugh in my most recent drive at the following verse in Numbers:

Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.

I know Rick Frueh has quoted this before, but coupling this verse with the accepted tradition that Moses is the author of Genesis – Deuteronomy, the irony finally hit me.  This is also why, a number of commentaries suggest that it was likely a later prophet who added this parenthetical clause to the Torah (and not Moses), since simply writing it would nullify itself.

And so it was, after I laughed, I got to wondering how many times I nullify the content of what I’ve just said, just by saying it…

For my next magical trick, I’m going to steal liberally from my pastor. But seeing as how he gets the vast majority of his material from Someone Else, I think I’m safe.

We’ve been studying Revelation on Sunday mornings at my church. Even if a person takes significant license with the text and/or interprets it all metaphorically, you have to deal with the question, “How can a loving God judge man, bringing about the horrible plagues cataloged in the text and condemning people to hell?”

The easy answer is found in Isaiah 55:8:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD.

But I think that we don’t really understand the magnitude of that verse the way we ought.

Although we’ve dealt with the question (”How can a loving God. . . “) before, my pastor raised it again this week, noting in Revelation 15:3-4:

They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying:

“Great and marvelous are Your works,
Lord God Almighty!
Just and true are Your ways,
O King of the saints!
Who shall not fear You, O Lord, and glorify Your name?
For You alone are holy.
For all nations shall come and worship before You,
For Your judgments have been manifested. ”

He noted that, “Here, [the singers] are going to be seeing the most devastating judgments on the earth. And is anyone complaining about how unfair it is?” (Obviously the answer is “no”.)

He then went on to give an illustration that helped me better understand this issue:

My two-year-old daughter [is] a very sweet girl. But she has a lot of self-will to her. Now she doesn’t have the wisdom or knowledge or experience or mental capacity that I do or that [my wife] does. But she thinks she does. She thinks she knows the right way to do everything herself. If her shirt or dress is on backwards, it’s “right”. If she doesn’t get Sprite for breakfast, then it’s “not fair”. If candy’s not on the menu for dinner, then sometimes a tantrum will ensue, proclaiming dad’s injustice.

And [my daughter and I] are both humans. When you try to put your capacity and knowledge and wisdom and compare it to God’s — take [the difference between my daughter and me] and multiply it by infinity, and you maybe come close to understanding the difference between what you think and understand and what God thinks and understands.

And yet, as [my daughter] grows and matures, she’ll start to understand why we do the things we do as parents. It’s the same thing [for us] as Christians — we grow, we mature, we gain from God’s Word. We grow in the Lord. We start to understand more of His ways and why He does [what He does]. But there will not be a perfect understanding until we come face-to-face with Him.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to travel south to Tennessee for a day to meet some old friends (well – “old” as in from my college days, even though they are just as “old” as me), and to go with them to see my son’s musical group in concert in Greeneville.  It had been twelve or thirteen years (by my recollection) since we’d last seen one another, though we’d kept up on Facebook the past couple of years.

But it was almost like walking into a time warp.

During my three semesters at Milligan, my constant companion was Craig.  We met the first day in the dorm (he was just across the hall), loved music, and shared a number of other interests as well.   We also tended to “push” each other – in some ways good, and in some ways not.  Musically, we grew together, learning how to cooperate in the setting of a band.  We got involved in a number of practical jokes, and spent a good deal of time hiking up into the mountains, into caves, and into some intentionally dangerous situations there.

But the thing I appreciated most of all was our talks together.

Once our homework was done (and sometimes even if it wasn’t), we’d sometimes talk until three or four in the morning about most any topic under the sun.  He loved the Beatles and was a russophile (illegally owning a cat named “Trotsky”, may he rest in peace).  I loved Peter Gabriel imports, movies and fireworks (with a mortar launcher that could be operated from our rooftop).  We also had a number of demons we struggled with.

While I didn’t know what it was at the time, I struggled a lot during the winter (January – March) with depression (something I’ve written about here before) and impulsivity, which don’t mix well.  Our midnight talks certainly helped me get through this, and became some of my fondest memories of my time at Milligan.

Friday, when we met in Greeneville, I had made excellent time, which gave Craig, his wife (who I also knew from Milligan) and I some time to catch up.  One of the topics we talked about was Craig’s conversion into the Eastern Orthodox church, which I found to be incredibly interesting – both because of my relative ignorance on the EOC, and because I wondered how his journey took him there.  Along the way, we discussed all sorts of things, from canonization to orthopraxy to prayer to tradition to repentance.  Even when we might have disagreed, it didn’t matter, because our purpose was communion and encouragement, much of what it used to be.

After the concert, we went back to their house (they were gracious enough to offer me a room for the night), and sat down to talk “for a bit”.  It seemed like we’d only been talking for a few minutes when I looked down and saw the time on my iPod – 3:00 am.

My first thought was: some things never change.

Which got me to thinking.  We had talked about repentance – metanoia (Gr.) or t’shuvah (Heb.) – and how it was – visually – an image of recognizing the direction you are walking, stopping, and then turning back toward God and walking toward Him.  With repentance, it is we who change, not God, and when we turn to Him, He is still the same.  Our relationship with Him is how it was before we turned away.

Something else we talked about was prayer – prayer as something far more than a laundry list of concerns and desires, but a basic building block of our relationship with our Father.  Honestly, my prayer life sucks.  My conversation with Craig, if nothing else, revealed this to me (among some other things I’m trying to right.)  I’ve got some ideas on improving, with one of the basic ones being to just start doing it, even if it feels stilted…

So as I drove back, I thought through all of the things that God might have been trying to say to me over the weekend.

Pray.

Repent.

Love.

Spend time in each other’s presence.

All things I know, but I don’t do – or at least don’t do well.

God speaks in all sorts of ways, and sometimes the most tangible way He speaks to us is through His image in our brothers and sisters.

Shalom.