It’s not just that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder. Both holidays are about the dead rising to new life
.. Christianity’s most important day recapitulates Passover. Both holidays face head-on the daunting power of death—and both announce God’s greater power of life... The Hebrew word for Passover is Pesach. In French, Easter is Paques... They celebrated Easter on the first Sunday after Passover, as we do as well.. all agreed on the central point: The lunar cycle that sets the date for Passover also determines Easter... Passover emphasizes the blood of the Passover lamb, which Moses commands the Israelites to put on their door frames so that the Angel of Death, sent to kill the firstborn of Egypt, will “pass over” them. This image—the lamb whose blood saves—is taken up in the New Testament.. Jesus himself is the Passover lamb, offered as a sacrifice for the whole world... John 1:29 emblazoned: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”.. During the time of Christ, Jews came from the surrounding provinces to bring lambs to the Temple in Jerusalem for the Passover sacrifice... “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord, our God, took us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”.. The Passover Seder recalls and celebrates the resurrection of the people of Israel... Most religions regard death as profane and keep it far from their sacred sanctuaries. Christians, by contrast, allow death to come into their churches.