Should we celebrate Passover?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gavin
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
G

Gavin

Guest
My friend is non denominational and he told me that celebrating Passover is very important. Does the church have any teaching on this?
 
That’s strange. Growing up in a non denominational church we didn’t even acknowledge Easter or Christmas as a special day or celebrate it with a particular service. Why would they emphasize a Jewish custom? Especially one that Christ clearly supplanted when he instituted the Eucharistic meal(or Lord’s supper for the non-denom’s) during the last Passover meal he participated in.
 
Gavin said:
My friend is non denominational and he told me that celebrating Passover is very important. Does the church have any teaching on this?
Click to expand...
We do not celebrate Passover. We celebrate the masses of Holy Week and the Triduum.
 
Catholics celebrate Passover at every Eucharist. There are a wealth of Catholic articles discussing this on the Internet.

If you’re talking about Catholics having a Seder meal, the Church has not approved that as a public devotion for Catholics, which means a church can’t have one and invite parishioners, etc. You might participate if you are invited by a Jewish person to come and join them at theirs. You could also have one as a private devotion at home, within certain limits. Here is an article discussing it in more detail:


By the way, if your friend is “non-denominational”, then how is he such an expert on celebrating Passover? It’s a Jewish feast.
 
Last edited:
Gavin said:
My friend is non denominational and he told me that celebrating Passover is very important. Does the church have any teaching on this?
Click to expand...
At the very least, you would need to omit the prayers about the coming of the Messiah, and “next year in Jerusalem” after Messiah has come. It would be a real stretch to say “perhaps Christ will return by this time next year, and we will be in the heavenly Jerusalem”.

Far preferable for Catholics to participate in the Easter Triduum.
 
Christ has already fulfilled and abrogated the Passover feast in the Eucharist.
To say we should celebrate Passover would seem like a denial of this tenet of Faith, and thus may be scandalous.

At least that’s my two cents, and how it would seem to me.

Your friend may not mean to deny this, but it may be out of ignorance or some other reason (I am not that person nor God and don’t know their intentions).
 
Last edited:
Here is the Catechism:
1340 “By celebrating the Last Supper with his apostles in the course of the Passover meal, Jesus gave the Jewish Passover its definitive meaning. Jesus’ passing over to his father by his death and Resurrection, the new Passover, is anticipated in the Supper and celebrated in the Eucharist, which fulfills the Jewish Passover and anticipates the final Passover of the Church in the glory of the kingdom.”
In Jesus fulfilling the Law and instituting the New Covenant, we no longer are required to celebrate the Passover. Now if one wants to for personal reasons but does not consider it binding then one can. Example would be: celebrating the Passover as a memorial to the Hebrews escape of Egypt and that pointing to Christ and his Death and Resurrection being our release from sin to God. But it is not binding.
 
Last edited:
Its odd. I had a friend who was involved in a charismatic branch of the Salvation Army. This community also observed the Passover / Seder meal…but NEVER observed any form of the Lord’s Supper / Holy Communion. Very misplaced priorities.
 
To the OP…Easter IS the Christian Passover. We lose this in English, but in Spanish, Easter and Passover are the exact same word…Pascua. This would, I imagine, be true in all the Romance languages including Latin. Even in English, we speak much of the Paschal Mystery during Easter…that is, the mystery of Christ’s Passover. We celebrate the fulfillment of the Passover…the Jewish Passover is a symbol that points towards the greater reality of Christ’s Passover.

This is so lost in English that my Dominican Pentecostal/Evangelical wife, when we were first dating, was absolutely flabbergasted that I was insistent that I had to go home to Canada to celebrate Easter. She couldn’t understand why a grown man was determined to celebrate bunnies and chocolate eggs…it wasn’t until I explained that Easter is simply the odd, silly, pagan word for the Christian “Passover” that she made the connection…Pascua.
 
Well, given the fact that in the majority of languages, at least in Indo European languages, the word for Easter and Passover are the same or similar, we kind of do celebrate Passover.
 
Well yes, of course we do. Jesus is the Lamb of God, our savior, our Passover, whose blood has redeemed us. He is the fulfillment of what the Jews anticipated. See 1 Corinthians 5:7.
 
Last edited:
It’s interesting, as I have remarked before, that the Lamb of G-d of Passover is the Egyptian god, whose blood was smeared on the doorpost to protect the Jews from the pestilence. In fact, the blood of the lamb, according to Jewish belief, is not a sign for G-d to know that He should spare or redeem the Jewish people, but rather a sign for the people themselves that they should choose the G-d of Israel rather than the Egyptian god. By smearing the blood of the god of Egypt on their doorposts, the Jews showed defiance of any god other than the G-d of Israel. How especially appropriate and meaningful for Jews to commemorate Passover this year in particular, given the modern-day pestilence of the coronavirus.
 
Last edited:
That movement was rejected in the early Church as a heresy: The Judaizers. Acts 15 (the Council of Jerusalem) answered that for all time (or should have).

But, once one rebels, once the tether or the anchor chain is cut; once the foundation has been rejected, one is free to innovate to their hearts desire. We see that here daily.
 
Passover is included in the readings in the liturgical calendar but celebrating Passover instead of the Holy Mass is like looking at the menu instead of eating the meal.
 
Last edited:
You might point out to your friend that today’s Jewish Passover Seder is a non-sacrificial substitute for a Biblical Passover, created by Jewish rabbis long after Christians and Jews had gone their separate ways. (See Wikipedia, “Passover Seder”) A Biblical Passover, the kind that Jesus and his apostles would have celebrated before his death, featured a roasted lamb that had first been offered in sacrifice by a Levitical priest to the Lord on the Lord’s altar at the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem and only there. See Deuteronomy 6:22-23; Daniel 3:38 NABRE; Luke 2:41; John 4:20. Since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, a Biblical Passover has not been possible. St Paul and the author of Hebrews certainly didn’t think celebrating such Jewish sacrificial feasts was important. See Colossians 2:16-17; Hebrews 10:1, 8-10.

Some verses that refer to the Passover sacrifice: Exodus 12:27; 34:25; Deuteronomy 16:2, 5, 6; Mark 14:12; Luke 22:7.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top