Introduction to a Christian Seder

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Introduction to a Christian Seder  :wtf:
Recovering Passover for Christians

Dennis Bratcher

The Festival of Passover - Christian Passover - Explanation of Terms and Symbols -
Preparation for the Seder - The Traditional Steps of the Seder - A Christian Seder Haggadah -
Additional Ways to Tell the Passover Story - Recipes
The Festival of Passover

Passover is the oldest and most important religious festival in Judaism, commemorating God's deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and his creation of the Israelite people. Passover is actually composed of two festivals, The Feast of Unleavened Bread and Passover (which is sometimes used to refer to the single day and sometimes to the entire span of both festivals).

The festival of Passover, known as Pesach, begins at sunset on the 14th of Nisan (usually in March or April) and marks the beginning of a seven day celebration that includes the Feast of Unleavened Bread. -1-  The focal point of Passover is a communal meal, called the Seder (which means "order," because of the fixed order of service), which is a time of rejoicing and celebration at the deliverance for the Hebrews that God accomplished in the exodus. Sometimes the meals during the entire period of Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread are referred to as Seder meals, called the first Seder, the Second Seder, etc., although usually only the first two nights are considered Seder meals.

Unlike the most Holy days of Christianity that are observed in Church, since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 Passover has been celebrated in the home with family and friends as they eat a meal together. It is customary to invite guests to share the Seder meal, especially newcomers to the community. The actual Seder meal in most Jewish homes is an elaborate feast, with food, games for the children, and plenty of time to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It is not unusual for a Seder to last three to four hours.

The Seder involves everyone present since they all have a Haggadah (Heb: "telling," the printed order of service, reading, and songs) and are called to share in reading and singing the story. While the father or grandfather is usually the leader of the service, others have roles as well. The mother of the home lights the festival candles that signal the beginning of Passover, the youngest child asks the four questions, the children help eliminate all Chametz, leaven, from the house, search for the hidden Afikomen (a symbolic piece of Matzah, unleavened bread) and open the door for Elijah, the parents or the grandparents tell the story of the exodus, and various others are designated to read or lead certain portions of the service.

Passover is really more than a festival. It is an elaborate teaching experience, especially for the children, intended to call people to their identity as the People of God. By using all of the senses, the Passover Seder tells the story of God's grace in history and calls the participants to experience and share in the story as their own story. Passover becomes more than simply a service or a time; it becomes a way to confess faith in the One who has acted in history, and for Jews expresses the hope that He will continue to act in bringing deliverance to all people everywhere.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread (Heb: matsoth; transliterated in various ways as Matzot, Mazzot for the plural form, or Matzoh, Matzah for the singular, or simply Matzo) is a seven day festival that is really a part of and continuation of the Passover celebration. It actually begins on the 15th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar and lasts until the 21st, although as early as Josephus in the 1st century BC the entire festival was counted as eight days (Antiquities, 2:15:1). In preparation for Passover, all chametz or leavened food (food with yeast) is removed from the house and cannot be eaten during the seven days of the Festival. The unleavened bread symbolizes the haste with which the Israelites had to flee from Egypt. Since they did not have time for the bread to rise in order to have provisions for the journey, they had to bake it without yeast (Ex 12:11, Deut 16:3).

The second night of Passover (the Second Seder) is celebrated as the First Day of the Omer (an omer is a sheaf of barley), since on this night an omer was brought to the Temple as an offering.   This reflects the likely origin of the Feast of Unleavened Bread as an agricultural celebration that the Israelites adapted from the surrounding Canaanites marking the beginning of Spring barley harvest. Some elements of the Passover itself may have had origins in the pastoral culture of the Middle East in observing the Spring birthing of livestock. Throughout history, Jews and Christians alike have adopted and transformed secular and pagan celebrations and used them to express their own faith confessions.

However, the origins of the festivals are really immaterial to their celebration within the community of Faith. The fact that in Scripture the two festivals are always linked as a memorial to the exodus suggests that whatever the origin, the Israelites combined the festivals very early in their history. The origins are important to students of Scripture and history, but do not really impact the festival as a celebration of God and faith.

The First Day of the Omer begins the 49 day countdown (7 weeks of 7 days) to the celebration of Shavuot, known in the Old Testament as the Feast of Weeks or in Christian Tradition as Pentecost (50 days, counting from the first night of Passover).  The period between the two festivals is know as the Days of the Omer, and serves to tie the two festivals together into a season of sacred time.

While originally an agricultural festival celebrating the beginning of the wheat harvest, in Jewish tradition Shauvot has come to be celebrated as a commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, a service of thanksgiving for the commandments and instructions by which the Israelites were to live out in practical ways the implications of being the people of God.  By using  the Days of the Omer to link Passover and Shauvot, they made obvious the theological link between the grace of God in the exodus and the call to faithful response and obedience represented in God's gift of the Torah.

The last day of Passover is often treated like a Sabbath, with special prayers and no work done.
Christian Passover

There has been increasing interest among Christians in this ancient festival. There are various reasons for this renewed interest: an increasing sensitivity to cultural and societal problems and a corresponding desire to learn about others; a renewed awareness of the importance of the Old Testament Scriptures as Christian Scripture; a desire or even a need in our modern world to recover a sense of the sacred through liturgy and sacrament; the willingness to find new and innovative ways to worship; and perhaps even the enjoyment that comes from acknowledging the continuity with a 3,000 year old community of faith.

As a result, there has been an explosion of interest in adapting the Passover festival to Christianity. Various organizations, such as "Jews for Jesus," have long promoted Christian Passover services as a means for Jews to retain their cultural heritage while confessing Christian faith. They have also used the Christian Passover as a means to communicate to Christians the Jewish religious heritage that they value.

Our goal here in presenting a Christian adaptation of Passover is to retain the theological, confessional, and educational dimensions of the service. That is, it is presented as a way for people of Christian Faith to express that faith in the context of a gathered community by participating symbolically in the story of salvation. It is presented very deliberately and purposefully as a Christian service, with no apologies. Yet, there has also been a deliberate attempt to preserve the spirit of the Jewish traditions and experience in the service, and to respect the faith journey of Israelites and Jews across the centuries. For that reason, apart from the fact that it will likely be Christians who are participating in the service, the thoroughly Christian dimension will come at the end of the service. After all, that is really how God chose to work in history: to the Jew first, and then also to the rest of us!

http://www.crivoice.org/seder.html

[Christopher Marlowe]

I know it sounds whacked, but I have celebrated seders and found them to be very enlightening.

I have Jewish friends and relations by marriage, so I was invited to seders and I went. Back then I knew nothing about the protocols or the hoax. I was a television zombie and I thought the Jews were the chosen people...

A seder is the meal that the Hebrew people were ordered to eat every year to commemorate their exodus from slavery in Egypt. At the meal the story is told of how God struck Egypt with 10 plagues until the Pharaoh let them go from slavery. God told Moses to part the Red Sea, and Moses led the people across. Then the Pharaoh tried to rush across after them and the Red Sea closed in on them and drowned the Egyptians.  

You have to realize that a lot of Jews in the US, especially the ones I knew, were not religious. The seder was something they did every year, just like Thanksgiving. For secular or Reform Jews, the seder seems to take on more of a feeling of promoting universal freedom. The seder readings vary, and so some are made with a very religious bent and some are made with a more secular humanist approach.  I remember being at one seder where the reading was talking about how Jews stood for freedom everywhere in the world, and my friend, another non-Jew, started piping up with, "That's not really true.  Jews seem to be involved with repressing people a lot of the time."  It was very awkward and funny.  I didn't know what he was talking about at the time.

Coming from their perspective, it is a social thing they do every year.  IMHO, most Jews are not "in on" any cabals, but are trained to be afraid of being holocausted. And this sort of ritual also helps them to think of themselves as unique.  At the same time, in the US I see that most Jews are not religious, and most don't even celebrate seders anymore.  Of the ones that do celebrate seders, a good number probably invite non-Jews and Jews intermarry more and more often.  The seder seems to be losing its appeal. I think there is still an attraction to being Jewish, and even if there is not an overt cabal, I think most people understand that they stand to do better in some businesses, e.g. Hollywood, if they are Jewish. So there may always be people who act to better themselves social and financially in this way.  

Coming from my own perspective, I found the seder to be very enlightening to my own faith.  When I heard the stories recounted, and saw everything from a Christian viewpoint, it seemed open up into a whole new dimension. e.g. The Jews hear that they were in slavery in Egypt. To a Christian, that is symbolic of how people are born into the slavery of sin.  The Jews hear the story of plagues on Egypt, but a Christian hears how God has defeated demons to set us free from sin. A Jew hears about people crossing some water to get away from their slave owners, but the Christian understands how God sets us free from sin through baptism in the Lord Jesus. Finally, the Jews are told that they have to eat this feast of a lamb without blemish, and the Christian understands that this feast refers to the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God.  

As a Christian at a Jewish seder, I was overwhelmed with their numerous references to the Gospel.  I was amazed that these people could be recounting this story that is filled with references to Jesus, but that they could understand who Jesus is.  Their eyes were closed.  It felt like a religious experience because I was amazed at the power of God to tell His story.  At the same time, I don't think that the seder meal is necessarily holy anymore.  I don't believe that the Jews have a covenant with God, their story was meant to introduce Jesus Christ and to provide a context to His life.  Now that Jesus fulfilled their covenant, and they rejected Him, the New Covenant is in Christ only.

As a Christian, I see that Jesus enacted His Last Supper at a seder meal that was celebrated on the day before Passover.  The day before Passover was significant because that was the day that the lambs were slaughtered for the seder. Jesus blessed the bread and said the Bread was His Body. As a Catholic, I believe that Jesus turned the bread, spiritually, into His own Body. That way we can feast on the Lamb of God literally, by eating the Holy Eucharist.

The Last Supper has a double meaning: it was the Last Passover Supper of the Lord, because Catholics believe that all Masses celebrate the same Mass, and that these are all in union with the Lord's Supper.  Also, after the Last Supper, there were no more seders under the effect of the Covenant! Jesus fulfilled the Covenant and veil in the temple was torn when He died on the cross. Therefore, there was no more effect from celebrating the seder. The only religiosity of the seder is when it gives context to Jesus' life and mission, and provides Christians with an understanding of what the Last Supper was like.  Otherwise it is just as meaningless as anything the Jews do in their temples.  The real supper is celebrated at the Holy Mass.

[Michael K.]

Dear Christopher Marlowe,

Deep thought there, I wish I had the energy to delve into all the good things you raised up, but I am getting sleepy.  I just agree about 100%.

[Yo Mama]

"Passover" celebrates and commemorates the murder of all the first born infants in Egypt by the genocidal Jewish tribal god Yahweh.  The Jewish angel of death "passed over" the Jewish households during his baby killing spree.  This is where the name of the holiday comes from.

Great stuff.   :twisted:

[Michael K.]

Dear Yo Mama,

Do you just NEED to proselytize?  I thought that was just for silly Jewish Christians.  SO COME ON THEN AND TELL US THE REST.  What is your creed?  What should we believe?  What is Truth?

[Yo Mama]

So I guess that means you didn't know the origin of the Passover holiday.  Isn't this a basic fact about Judaism that you should know if you're posting on an anti-Jewish site like TIU?   :roll:

[Michael K.]

Dear Yo Mama,

Let's see, you're:  atheist, (check); try to enforce your political correct views, (check); rude and confrontational, (check);  are you a   ?

BTW, I have a PhD in Jewology, so I don't need any remedial help from the peanut gallery, but thanks all the same.

[Yo Mama]

If you didn't even know a simple fact about Judaism such as the origin of the Passover holiday, ones has to wonder at what else you don't know.