Passover Seder Information

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PASSOVER SEDER



In scripture it is called the festival of unleavened bread. It is often called the Pesach (paysak) or Passover. It has been called by many other names, but by any name it is the oldest continual human activity in our history. This festival lasts for seven or eight days. On the first or second day of Passover, there is a ceremonial dinner that is called the Feast of Unleavened bread or the Seder. The Passover meal is known as the Seder, which means "order," because the meal and service are done in a prescribed sequence. It is the dinner that we refer to as the Last Supper. For the next three weeks I would like to address the Who, What, When, Where, and How of a Christian Passover Seder. This week I would like to address Who and What.


Who:
The festival itself is generally a family celebration celebrated in the home. We will be celebrating at church and it will be for the women of our church. Seder dinner can be a great teaching tool and also an evangelical tool but, like any other tool; to be effective you must use it. At the first mention of matzah in a traditional seder, the Jewish leader states that all who hunger are invited to the table.
What:
It is a Dinner: it is something like a Thanksgiving Dinner. It has been said that Seder teaches us the obligation to express gratitude. The first Seder could be considered our first Thanksgiving Dinner.
This Dinner is a Bible Study: Almost every facet of this dinner exists in order to pass on important Bible stories and Biblical Truth using all five senses of the participants. We don’t just hear the Word, we see, smell, taste, and feel the Word. This is a dinner and a story. The story is about God keeping promises. The story is about redemption and salvation. The story is about God’s work in our history. A Christian Seder, just like a Jewish one, embraces this entire ancient story. After all, it is our story. But the Christian Seder also adds to the story. It adds those things that Jesus added as He sat at Seder, the Seder we call the Last Supper. God spoke to Moses in Exodus 13:3 And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out from this place.

Exodus 12:14 Now this day will be a memorial to you, and you shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations you are to celebrate it as a permanent ordinance.
Exodus 12:24 and you shall observe this event as an ordinance for you and your children forever.
This Dinner & Story is a Festival. Like our Thanksgiving, this is a celebration. While we should always keep in mind and give thanks for those things we have, let us also remember that thanksgiving is not a solemn activity. We should celebrate the many things we do have. Our joy and happiness are a form of thanksgiving and should be apparent as we share. Share fellowship, share Love, share our scripture and our redemption, as well as our abundance. Our Jewish ancestors understood something that we may have forgotten, that Loving God is fun. They understood that there are times for solemn worship, but they knew that God also encouraged Joyful worship. The Last Supper of our Lord was certainly a solemn event, but it was also joyful. After all, it was His "fervent desire." Luke 22:15 It is my fervent desire to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.
This Dinner is a Ceremony: A ceremony is conducted by rules and regulations that come to us through custom and convention. If we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that our Worship services are mostly ceremony. Our problem with the Seder ceremony is that we are not Jewish and we are unfamiliar with the customs. While the first and second century Christian Church undoubtedly celebrated the Seder (see Acts 20:6), it has been almost lost to us. But let us not forget that we are not celebrating just a seder, we are celebrating The Seder. We are celebrating a Christian Seder, the Last Supper of our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus. We are celebrating the occasion on which Christ Jesus established a new agreement, a new contract between God and Humanity. We are celebrating not only salvation from the Egyptians and from all forms of slavery, the release of the captives, the liberty to those who are oppressed, but also redemption into the Kingdom of God, the recovering of sight to the blind and the acceptable year of the Lord. The very first Seder Dinner presupposed the Promised Land, but our Seder Dinner guarantees the Kingdom. "Thy Kingdom come" is not a wish but a fact to celebrate.


When:

For the Jew, Passover begins at sunset on the 14th day of Abib or Nisan, two different names for the first month in the Jewish calendar. As the new day started at sunset, the actual date would be the 15th. And the festival continues for 7 or 8 days. The Seder Dinner is eaten on the first, or the first or second day of the festival.
While this may seem confusing, it becomes clear when we consider a bit of Jewish history. As to two names for the same month, Abib was changed to Nisan, meaning the beginning, during the Babylon captivity. Before the captivity, only the name Abib was used. It did not automatically begin like January 1st does for us, directly after December 31st. The first of Abib had to be determined by the Jewish religious leadership. This was done by having certain trusted people watch the skies during and after the last month of the year, and reporting the occurrence of a full moon. The religious leaders then studied this full moon, determined that it was genuine and, if so, issued a directive. A signal fire was lit in Jerusalem which the people for miles around saw and then lit other signal fires until all the residents of the Promised Land knew that the New Year had begun. But when the Jews were held captive in Babylon they could not just reproduce this same tradition. They had to know when the New Year started in Jerusalem, not Babylon. During the captivity, these signals would extend from Jerusalem to Babylon, but because of the time involved and the possibility for error, the Festival of unleavened bread was extended from seven to eight days for all Jews not residing in the Holy Land, and the Seder Dinner could be observed on the first or second day.
From the Babylon captivity onward, there were always more Jews living outside of country of Israel than within its boundaries, so that this tradition of eight days remained, even after the Jews adopted an astronomical and mathematic calendar after the destruction of their Temple and the Diaspora. (the Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel)
Early Christians celebrated the Last Super, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus under the name of Passover, and in some countries that name or an equivalent of it is still used rather than the name Easter. It was much later in Christian history that we divided Passover into Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Our word "Easter" is not a traditional Christian term. It comes to us from the Germanic tribes and was their name for the goddess of spring. Easter became the combination of Passover with the celebration of new life as seen in celebrations of spring throughout the world.
Again, in the early days of our Church, the Last Super, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus were celebrated under the name of Passover. Like Passover week, the first and last days were considered equal to the Sabbath, regardless of the day of the week they begin. But later in Church history, most of the Church agreed that Resurrection Day deserved its own celebration. And it was decided that Resurrection Day should occur on The Lord’s Day, or Sunday. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday and continues until sunset the following day. The Lord’s Day, so named because of our Lord’s Resurrection, occurred on the day after the Jewish Sabbath. But the weekly celebration of our Lord’s resurrection and Resurrection Day, as determined from the first day of Passover seldom occurred on the same day. It was then decreed that the celebration of Resurrection Day would occur on The Lord’s Day closest to the appropriate time, and was determined by the Gregorian calendar.
Sometime later, Rome adopted the Julian calendar and the two calendars began to diverge. The Roman Church required all Churches under its authority, sometimes forcibly, to observe Resurrection Day on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. Today, in the Western world, that is when we celebrate Easter, sometimes weeks away from our brothers and sisters in the Eastern world.
So, when should we celebrate our Seder? The important thing is that we participate in that particular and important part of Holy Week. It is important that we come to realize the place of our covenant, as given us by our Lord at the Last Supper and how it relates to the work of redemption and salvation.


Where:
This is an easy question and one we will spend little time with. We can celebrate our Seder anywhere we can set up a dining table. The first Seder was celebrated in the desert, perhaps in tents or perhaps around a bonfire. Jesus celebrated His final Seder in an upper room, perhaps the same room where the disciples waited for the Holy Spirit after Jesus left. At one time, the Jews felt that Seder should be celebrated in Jerusalem and, even today, Jews who have no intention of moving to Israel still conclude their Seder with the words, next year in Jerusalem.
Jesus, knowing His life was in danger, had to send His disciples like Cold War spies into Jerusalem to find a place, we should have no trouble.

Why:

Why should we celebrate a Passover? If you have any doubts about your acceptance of this very different Christian tradition, your doubts can not be greater than mine were. The Seder can provide the forum for a congregation or family to grow in their own unique ways. To try something new that has a 3000 year history of bringing people closer together and closer to God. And finally, the Seder can help Christians to step out and learn in their own unique way of growing in Christ. This has to be the ultimate reason to perform this 3000-year-old ceremony that was so important to Jesus.
This do in remembrance of me; typically we think of the THIS as the breaking of bread and drinking of the wine. Could Jesus have also been referring to the Passover meal and the new covenant? We know that Jesus in Luke 22:15 said It is my fervent desire to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, Jesus would have participated each year in the festival. Passover was very special to Jesus. Jesus was circumcised and Jesus had His Bar mitzvah. Jesus went to the Temple to pray, and Jesus went to the synagogue to teach. And while Jesus had problems with some of the Jewish leadership, Jesus loved, chose to preach to, and drew His disciples from Jewish audiences.
Jesus chose one of the most sacred and the oldest Jewish celebration, a celebration of redemption, to establish His New Covenant. He traveled to Jerusalem where He knew He would be killed, because He had a "fervent desire" to eat this particular Passover Dinner with His Disciples. And, as Jesus ate that Passover Dinner, He knew that very shortly, He would be dead. At one point during that dinner, Jesus spoke His Last Will and Testament and then He requested that the disciples, and through them, all of us, do this in remembrance. I have a strong feeling that Jesus assumed that we would all be celebrating Seder. For what reason was this celebration stopped by Christians? Perhaps, it was in the dark ages when hatred of Jews was almost a sacred obligation and their celebration of the Seder an ideal time for persecution, perhaps it was then that it was decided that "this" meant the bread and wine alone. But I know that our focus should be the words of Jesus as we read them in John 6, verse 53: Then Jesus said unto them,verily, verily, I say unto you ,Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
It seems to me that the command to "do this in remembrance" is more a command to remember than to cause any disagreement over the form of remembrance.
When you first lift and bless the bread at the Seder, you make the statement "Let all who are hungry come and eat." In Jewish culture, that meant exactly what is said. Those without food were invited to join but, there is another, equally horrible hunger in our land; a spiritual hunger. Remember, Seder is a festival, and it is a dinner, the fact that it also feeds us spiritual food is only an added benefit. And what a dinner! Not just bread alone, but the Word of God. Why, should also be allowed to be answered individually by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps, this is a time to learn about ourselves and our place in the body of Christ.
How:
For the Passover Seder we will all worship communally. We will worship as a community. Paul tells us that of all the Spiritual gifts, Love (Agape) is the greatest, and the New Testament teaches us that Love is power. But this gift and power is useless unless we learn to first experience and then to use it. We might have begun experiencing and using this Agape in our nuclear families, but until we learn to share it in our Christian community, we will never be able to use it in the world at large. Did you know that Paul never referred to us as Christians? He referred to us as the Body of Christ, the One Body of Christ. We will be learning as the members of the body of Christ, practicing Agape love. We will know that we will love one another and that we are a member, a part of the Body.