The Passover and the Last Supper

I read an article in the Oklahoman recently that troubled me. The headline read:

“Churches to offer seder. Christians incorporate Jewish tradition into Easter activities”

I am uncomfortable with this because I feel our holiday is being misunderstood and to a degree, co-opted.

What do I mean? Too many pastors and ministers (among others both in the Christian and Jewish communities) believe that the Last Supper was a Seder. Such a belief is a mistake my professors warned us against in rabbinical school: namely, reading into a practice what we desire, rather than reading out what a practice instructs.

According to Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus and his disciples did eat some kind of Passover meal at the “Last Supper.” But was it comparable to the Seder that we have received from our Rabbis?

Absolutely not.

Let’s go to the sources: the Christian Bible. What happens in Matthew, Mark and Luke is similar. Jesus and his disciples had a Passover meal the evening of the day when the sacrifice was made at the Temple. It involved a blessing over unleavened bread; however, Jesus says: “Take, eat; this is my body.” There was also a reference to wine. But Jesus says, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

These were novel interpretations within Judaism, to say the least.

Matthew, Mark and Luke do not mention the following: candles, parsley, maror, horseradish, the four cups of wine, the four questions, singing, or any reference to the prophet Elijah. Moreover, there is no reference to a the telling of our Exodus from Egypt, the very center-piece of our Hagaddah, which means “telling.”

We can also look at who is not even mentioned by Matthew, Mark or Luke: women and children. Jesus and his disciples did not fulfill the mitzvah of sharing our story with the youngest generation.

But let’s dig even deeper in the Christian Bible. In the Gospel of John, there is no reference at all to a Last Supper as a Passover meal. Why? Because in the book of John, Jesus was crucified on the day in which the Passover sacrifice was offered at the Temple. For John, Jesus was equivalent to the Paschal offering, the ultimate offering for our redemption.

So what are we to believe?

In the newspaper article, there was a quote from Jews for Jesus missionary Ephraim Goldstein: “When you have Jesus at the Passover, we’re not taking anything out of context. Ultimately, we are really putting this right back in its context.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is one thing for these Churches to learn about the Passover Seder so that they can better understand our rituals and traditions. I have no problem with that. But it is another thing to take our Passover Seder and interpret their religious ideology and theology into it.

I will take pastors and ministers at their word when they say that they mean nothing offensive with hosting Passover Seders. I just wish they had a better understanding of Judaism’s past … how our Passover was observed during the time of Jesus … and how much this observance changed in the years and centuries after his death.

The Oklahoman article included a quote from Rev. Bob Younts, senior pastor at Mayfair Heights: “I think the better we can understand about Jesus and His culture and His life, the better we can understand His teachings.”

Well, let’s place ourselves at a typical Passover meal during the time of Jesus. They did not observe the Passover Seder that we celebrate – the Passover Seder that churches today are modeling. Why? Because it did not exist yet.

During the time of Jesus, this is how the meal progressed: We ate the Paschal offering. We told the tale of our redemption from Egyptian slavery.

That was it. There was no elaborate order yet and no step-by-step prayer structure.

The Seder as we know it began to take shape after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. One reality that motivated the Rabbis in the years after Jesus’ death to determine the structure and content of the Seder as we know it was the splintering of our people into sects: namely Jews and Jewish Christians.

The Passover Seder became our opportunity to define ourselves as Jews. We would explain our past, celebrate our present and envision our future. The Rabbis who established the details of our Passover Seder insisted upon a clear explanation of its ritual items. Why? In order to differentiate us from Jewish Christians who had contrary interpretations. The matzah for them was the body of Jesus; the wine for them was the blood of Jesus. The matzah for us was the bread of affliction; and the wine for us became symbolic of separate acts of redemption – God has redeemed us in the past and will offer a final redemption in the future.

Something else that greatly influenced to our Seder? Hellenistic culture. It was common in the Hellenistic/Greek world to gather for symposia … dinner parties; we would drink wine, eat hors d’oeuvres (including dipping vegetables into salt water), and discuss a theme, such as beauty, truth, politics. Our theme? Freedom.

But the structured order of the telling of our freedom at our symposium did not begin to take shape until the 3rd century, two centuries after the Last Supper.

For our own Passover Seders, I hope we celebrated who we are. And let us always recognize that Jesus as a Jew took part in a Passover meal of old. But was it a Seder comparable to our Seder? Hardly … because that would have been impossible.

With the Passover Seder, we celebrate our brit, our covenant. May it always be filled with happiness and humor, music and stories. And may we rejoice: For at the start of the Seder, we will be enslaved; half-way through, we will be free; and at the meal’s end, we will look to the time when not only the Jewish people are redeemed, but all people are redeemed.

L’shana ha’ba’ah b’Yerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem. A Jerusalem of love and peace … a Jerusalem for all peoples.