When Calendars and Feasts Collide

Every year, on the 14th of Nisan (March/April on our calendar), Jewish families gather in homes around the world to celebrate Passover. During this time, young and old alike come together to remember the grief of Pharaoh’s oppression and rejoice that the Lord is faithful to redeem His people from their bondage.  

As followers of Jesus, this should resonate with us on two levels. We can first value the exodus event on its own terms in Scripture, appreciating what God did for His chosen people at that point in redemptive history. In fact, taking a moment to pause and simply reflect on Israel’s Passover prior to looking to Jesus allows us to get into the shoes of the Jewish community around us, as we sympathize with their experience as a people group.  

However, for those who are in Messiah, we understand that the Law serves a prophetic function (see Matt 11:13). While the Torah is not all made up of prophetic literature, it all prophesies, indeed points forward, to the work that God would accomplish in Christ Jesus. That prophetic function comes out quite clearly when we grasp that the Passover and recurring exodus give us categories which point us to Jesus’ redemptive work in the first century (see Luke 9:31).   

My heart is to give us some perspective on what it looks like in my church family (Grafted (EFCA) in Edina, Minnesota) to navigate these topics in a way that highlights the Jewishness of the gospel and deepens our engagement with the Savior.   

Dates and decisions

 As a pastor who has spent much of his professional ministry in the context of evangelical churches, I traditionally have the season we call “Holy Week” on my radar. Grafted, of course, aligns with evangelical convictions in general—and the EFCA, in particular—even if our expression of such convictions may seem culturally foreign to some. So, some of the questions I’ve had to wrestle through—not only with the Lenten season, but with several holidays—was, “What do we do here? How do we capture the heart behind this holiday and time with an eye toward both followers of Jesus who value the ‘Jewishness’ of our faith, while simultaneously creating a hospitable environment where Jewish people who don’t know Jesus can encounter Him in a way that they would understand?”  

In our ministry context, those are not easy questions to answer practically, since the Jewish calendar doesn’t precisely coincide with the calendar we often use to navigate the traditional Church calendar. During some years, the Jewish community observes Passover in a way that aligns with Holy Week. This is helpful, because it makes for a seamless explanation regarding the transition between the events in the book of Exodus and the ministry of Jesus and His fulfillment of those events. However, during some years, there is dissonance, such as in 2024, where Passover was about a month later than Holy Week. So, we've had to find a third way.  

Our approach

One thing I’ve learned during my few years of pastoral ministry is that we don’t need to fit into people’s buckets so long as we’re being faithful to Jesus. We can’t get around the idea that we are products of history, and whether or not I personally think we should be more oriented around parts of the Jewish calendar, the reality is that people are uniquely inclined to respond to church invitations and spiritual conversations during the Church’s classic Resurrection Sunday. It would seem to be poor stewardship to not participate in these seasons for the sake of Jesus.  

The way we’ve navigated these waters has been to say that during years where the above-mentioned calendars are in sync regarding Passover and Holy Week, such as this year, we will observe Passover during Holy Week and celebrate Resurrection Sunday with the broader Church. This keeps with the flow of the narrative as we find it in the Gospel accounts and allows us to maintain consistency with our church’s mission to see Jewish people come to faith in Yeshua. Practically speaking, this is the simplest and most ideal situation. 

But life isn’t always simple. During the years where there is a discrepancy with the calendars, we’ve opted to have what we call the “Harvest Summit” during the traditional Resurrection Sunday (see Matt 9:37-38). Last year, we hosted a panel about the heart of the gospel and how it applies both to us and the surrounding community. We discussed what the good news is and how the three of us on the panel came to faith in Jesus (all the panel guests this past year were Jewish believers, myself included). We then turned our attention outwardly to address Jewish mission in theory and practice. In our community, this allowed us to steward a unique day of the year with a heart toward gospel proclamation, while simultaneously calibrating our resurrection celebration to align with Passover (which came about a month later in 2024).   

During that following month, we had our Passover Seder on a Friday, followed by our Grafted “Resurrection Sunday,” which coordinated with the Feast of Firstfruits (see Lev 23:9-14; 1 Cor 15:20, 23), just as it did during the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry. While admittedly a bit complicated, it’s the path we’ve chosen for now as we seek to contextualize the work of Jesus to the people the Lord initially chose. 

A Grafted passover

The question still stands: When Passover does roll around, what does that look like for us? Well, similar to the Jewish community, we hold a celebratory Passover meal, called a Seder (from the Hebrew word for “order,” as in an ordered ritual meal). If you’ve ever participated in one of these, they are a multigenerational, multi-sensory event that invites you into the story of the exodus as you try out various “elements” that serve as object lessons and a means of remembrance. These include things such as dipping parsley into salt water to remember the tears of slavery, or an apple mixture called charoset to recall the mortar used in building for Pharaoh.  

For our church family, this is one of the biggest events of the year, a sort of celebratory banquet where we go big! It’s a lot of work for our hospitality and events teams, as well as volunteers (for which I’m very grateful!), but it’s also quite fun.   

We do it not because we feel an obligation to come under the Law, but because no matter who you are, whether Jewish or Gentile, it provides a uniquely enjoyable time that reinforces the redemption found in Messiah Jesus. During our time together, we walk through the elements, share in a meal, engage in meaningful discussion and try to follow the overall flow of the Seder as we articulate the gospel in a way that is biblically faithful and missionally relevant to our Jewish neighbors, and edifying to the Church body.  

The lord of the passover

In reading this, you may be wondering, “But how does this impact my walk with, and understanding of, the Lord?” Here’s how: While there has been much development in Seder tradition since the first century AD, it’s clear that on the night Jesus gathered with His disciples prior to His death (the “Last Supper”), He was participating in what became known today as the formal Seder (see Matt 26:17-30). As first-century Jews gathered in Jerusalem to remember that God’s justice had indeed passed over their homes by the blood of a lamb, Jesus reclined at a table with little time left before He would be the Lamb whose blood would be shed (see 1 Cor 5:7; Rev 5) so that God’s good and perfect justice would pass over us, a sinful and broken people.  

He took the traditional cup of wine (potentially the third cup of the evening, what is called the “cup of redemption” in modern Seder language), as well as the unleavened bread, which Deuteronomy 16:3 calls the “bread of affliction,” and made clear both what was going to happen to Him and what the result would be: He would die (be “broken”), and His death would establish a new covenant, characterized by the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation to God and inward transformation that could only happen by the Holy Spirit (see Matt 26:26-28; Jer 31:31-34).  

Jesus took the primary categories a Jewish person would associate with Passover (e.g., redemption, substitution, judgment, etc.) and made it clear that they all found their ultimate fulfillment in Him and what He would do for His people. Friends, this is the background for the ordinance that we so value as the Church, the Lord’s Supper.  

It is at the table that we recall that “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7b), but Jesus didn’t stop there. He said in Matthew 26:29 that although this may be the last time for now that He would partake of Passover with them, there would come a time in the coming kingdom where He would recline with His people again and feast with them, a time that we as believers should greatly look forward to! Not only does the Lord’s Supper look backward, but it also invites us to look forward to a future fulfillment.  

Going deeper

I don’t know how often your specific church family partakes of communion, but I do know that Jesus commanded us to take of it with regularity. And every time we come to that table to receive the elements, all this depth of meaning is loaded into that one ordinance. 

There’s the background of the exodus event, the first Passover where God showed Israel that He was the God who redeems. There’s the perfect and climactic redemptive work secured by Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And then there’s the hope and joy of the world to come for all who have entrusted themselves to the King of Israel.  

For us at Grafted, it’s our privilege to hold a Passover Seder each yeardon’t hold it because it gives us something novel, but because it provides depth and beauty to what God’s people have been practicing from the very beginning of the Church. Missionally speaking, Passover also provides a built-in reminder of God’s deep love for the Jewish people. While this love is not to the exclusion of the rest of the world (see John 3:16), it is indeed a love that is tied to His covenant promises to Abraham (see Gen 12:1-3; Gal 3:26-29  

As Passover approaches, let me ask you to prepare your heart and ask the Lord for divine appointments with those from the Jewish community. Rejoice with them over what God did for them all those years ago, and don’t forget to tell them about the One who led them out of Egypt (see the text variant on Jude 5).  

I’d like to close with a challenge: Both the Church and Jewish calendar are numbered by times of the year—and sometimes full seasons—of remembering and rejoicing in God’s work. Do you personally have regular times throughout the year, whether on an official calendar or not, where you are remembering and rejoicing in the Lord?  

It’s easy for me, even as a pastor, to overlook the value that such times could have on our relationship with Jesus, but imagine the change it would make if each one of God’s people went through the year with regular reminders of His justice, His grace, His mercy, etc. How might the Holy Spirit use those times to shape us into the people He desires us to be?