VI.CHRISTIAN PASSOVER.
In the New Testament the rites and symbols of the Old Testament find recognition and explanation. This is peculiarly true of the passover service. It was a central fact in the gospel story. The sacrifice, or offering, of Jesus Christ as the Saviour, was made at that season;[580]and it was evident that he himself felt that it was essential that this be so. He held back from Jerusalem until the approach of the passover feast, when he knew that his death was at hand.[581]And his last passover meal was made the basis of the new memorial and symbolic covenant meal with his disciples.[582]The passover sacrifice is as prominent in the New Testament as in the Old.
Paul, familiar with Jewish customs by study andexperience, writing to Corinthian Christians of their duty and privileges as members of the household of faith, urges them to make a new beginning in their lives, as the Israelites made a new beginning on the threshold of every year at the passover festival, with its accompanying feast of unleavened bread, when all the lay-over leaven from a former state was put away. “Purge out the old leaven,” he says, “that ye may be a new lump, even as ye are unleavened. For our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ.”[583]
The primitive passover sacrifice was an offering of blood by the head of the household on the threshold of his home, as a token of his welcome to the guest who would cross over that blood and thereby become one with the family within. It was not an outsider or a stranger who proffered a threshold sacrifice, but it was the house-father who thus extended a welcome to one who was yet outside. The welcoming love was measured by the preciousness of the sacrifice. The richer the offering, the heartier the welcome.[584]
In the Egyptian passover the threshold sacrifice was a proffer of welcome to Jehovah by the collective family in each Hebrew home. In the Christian passoverit was the sacrifice of the Son of God on the threshold of the Father’s home, the home of the family of the redeemed, as a proffer of welcome to whoever outside would cross the outpoured blood, and become a member of the family within. Therefore it is written: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”[585]And “for this cause,” says Paul, “I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”[586]
Among primitive peoples, as among the Jews, no indignity could equal the refusal of a proffered guest-welcome, in a rude trampling on the blood of the threshold sacrifice, instead of crossing over it reverently as a mode of its acceptance. Hence the peculiar force of the words of the Jewish-Christian writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, concerning the mistreatment of God’s threshold sacrifice, in the Son of God offered as our passover: “A man that hath set at nought Moses’ law dieth without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy, who hathtrodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he wassanctified [separated from the outside world], an unholy [a common] thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?”[587]
All through the New Testament, Jesus, the outpouring of whose blood is “our passover” welcome from the Father, is spoken of as the Bridegroom, and his church as the Bride. His coming to earth is referred to as the coming of the Bridegroom–as was the coming of Jehovah to the Virgin of Israel in Egypt. He likened himself to a bridegroom. And his coming again to his church is foretold as the meeting of the Bridegroom and the Bride.
John the Baptist, forerunner of Jesus, speaking of his mission as closing, and that of Jesus as opening out gloriously, says: “Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but, that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”[588]
Jesus, referring to the charge against his disciples, that they did not fast, as did the disciples of John,said: “Can the sons of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast.”[589]
Paul repeatedly refers to this relation between Christ and his church: “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.”[590]“The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church.... Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it.... He that loveth his own wife loveth himself: for no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh. This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church.”[591]
In the Apocalypse, the inspired seer looking into the future, at the consummation of the present age, tells of the glorious vision before him, when Christ shall come to claim his own: “I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunders, saying,Hallelujah: for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigneth. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And it was given unto her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure: for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are bidden to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”[592]
And again he says: “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.... And there came one of the seven angels; ... and he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: ... having a wall great and high; having twelve gates. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof.... And the gates thereof shall in no wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it: and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie:but only they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”[593]
A closing declaration of the seer is, that the church as the Bride, with the representative of the Bridegroom until his coming, waits and calls for his return: “The Spirit and the bride say, Come.... Come, Lord Jesus.”[594]And so, from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse, the Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, recognize and emphasize the primitive Threshold Covenant as the beginning of religious rites, and as symbolic of the spirit of all true covenant worship.
Survivals of the primitive Threshold Covenant are found in various customs among Oriental Christians, and Christians the world over. Thus Easter is still looked at in some regions as the continuance of Passover, and the blood on the threshold is an accompaniment of the feast. Among the modern Greeks, each family, as a rule, buys a lamb, kills it, and eats it on Easter Sunday. “In some country districts the blood [of the lamb] is sometimes smeared on the threshold of the house.”[595]Easter, like the Jewish Passover, is the threshold of the new ecclesiastical year.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem,a principal incident in the Easter festivities is the bringing down of fire from heaven at the opening of the new ecclesiastical year.[596]This ceremony seems to be a survival of the primitive custom of seeking new life, in its symbol of fire, at the threshold of the home and of the new year, in the East and in the West.[597]
In the sacredness of the rite of the primitive Threshold Covenant there is added emphasis to the thought which causes both the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Church to count marriage itself a sacrament. And thus again to the claim that a virgin who is devoted to a religious life is a “spouse of Christ,” and that her marriage to an earthly husband is adultery.[598]Many another religious custom points in the same direction.