Why Easter and Passover belong together
In an ideal theological world, Easter would come right after Passover. That’s how it happened for Jesus: who went to Jerusalem for Passover, had a last Seder with his disciples, was arrested, executed, and rose on Sunday morning.
Because the main currents of Judeo-Christian adherence employ different calendars, Easter rarely follows hard upon Passover. Western Christianity uses the Gregorian calendar; most of Orthodox Christianity uses the Julian calendar; Judaism uses the Hebrew calendar; meaning Easter and Passover dates change annually. (Which is how the phrase “moveable feast” originated.)
This year, Western Easter is March 31; Ramadan ends on April 9; Passover begins April 22; Orthodox Easter is May 5.
Next year, Passover begins eight days before Easter, almost exactly the Biblical timing. The two Easters fall on the same day next year too.
Da Vinci could have titled this The Last Seder.
The larger perspective is that Easter following hard upon Passover, as it did for Jesus, should remind us Christianity is a close cousin to Judaism. Islam is a close cousin to both – the three are the Abrahamic faiths, tracing their ancestry to the same forebear and worshipping the same God.
This essay takes a best-case view of Abrahamic faith. Obviously there are worst-case views. Thomas Paine wrote in 1807, “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or [Muslim], appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind while monopolizing power and profit.” Ouch.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are at loggerheads today in many places. Historically, they have been at peace as often as in conflict, and sometimes protected each other against oppression.
For example in medieval Spain, Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors worked together in Castile, attempting to resist the sinful impulses that became the Spanish Inquisition. That period is described well in Dogs of God (Knopf, 2005) by the late James Reston Jr. You’ll have to read the book to find out what a “dog of God” is.
The relationship between Passover and Easter is especially important as regards a basic fact, too little contemplated today: Jesus was Jewish, lived and ministered in a Jewish milieu, according to the Gospels never spoke nor heard the word “Christian.”
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