Easter and Passover are holidays that celebrate life
Both are early spring festivals and the French word for both is the same: Easter is spelled Pâques and Passover is Pâque. Their precise dates are calculated with different calendars — the Christian calendar is based on the sun and the Hebrew calendar is determined both by the sun and the moon — but occasionally the two holidays overlap.
This is one of those years. Passover, which begins Friday at sundown, commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Easter celebrates Jesus Christ having risen from the dead: His death is commemorated on Good Friday and his resurrection, the foundation of Christian faith, is celebrated on Easter Sunday.
“They are two very different events,” said Gerbern Oegema, a professor of biblical studies in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University.
The major event of Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, is the seder meal on the first and second nights of the eight-day festival, “a home celebration in which the ritual evokes the memory of slavery and freedom,” said Ira Robinson, chair and director of the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.
“The key statement of the seder is that in every single generation, each and every Jew is required to understand that it is as if that person has left Egypt. It is not, in other words, an antiquarian exercise: It is a way of creating what you might call a virtual reality, in which the atmosphere of liberation is not ‘That happened to them thousands of years ago,’ but ‘This is our liberation now.’
“And part of the strategy of creating this atmosphere is the unleavened bread — the matzo.” Matzo is defined in the Haggadah, the Jewish text that lays out the order of the seder and is read and discussed during the meal, “as poor people’s bread, as indeed it was,” Robinson said.
The Jews left Egypt in great haste, with no time for their bread to rise, explained Julien Bauer, a professor of political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Jews who observe Passover do not eat bread — or any leavened products.
Most theologians and academics agree that the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples before his arrest and his execution was probably a seder.
“The gospels are clear that Jesus was presiding over a Passover seder,” said Calogero Miceli, a PhD student in Concordia University’s Department of Religions and Cultures whose doctoral research explores what Jesus looked like. “We know he was Jewish and that his followers were Jews. Only later did they come to see themselves as Christians.”
Early followers of Jesus incorporated Jewish traditions, Miceli said, but that changed.
“By 325 AD, in documentation we see clear evidence of (Roman emperor) Constantine saying, ‘We’re going to celebrate Easter.’ ”
Observed Robinson: “The New Testament narrative of Jesus’s final days understands that we are talking about Passover. But of course in the Judaic tradition in ancient times, when there was a Temple in Jerusalem, the centre of the Temple celebration was the slaughtering and consumption of a lamb or a goat — a Pesach lamb.
“In Christian metaphor, Jesus becomes the lamb whose sacrifice on the cross enabled salvation.
“So it is not merely that the Last Supper involves bread and wine, where Jesus holds up the bread to his disciples and says ‘This is my body’ and holds up the wine and says ‘This is my blood.’ These words evolved into the Christian Mass.
“In a larger sense, the Passover metaphor is of the lamb sacrifice in the Temple for Jews — but for Christians, it is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross that enabled salvation.”
Despite differences, both Passover and Easter encompass an element of faith, Oegema said.
“If you look at the text, when Christ rises from the dead, it is not really described in the New Testament. You only see that he is crucified and buried and they visit his grave and it is empty. There is an element of faith in it. That is the case, too, in the Exodus. How can we know whether than happened in 1400 BC in Egypt? We assume it is a historical event — and that there is an important faith component.”
If Passover commemorates liberation from slavery in a literal way, perhaps Easter celebrates it more symbolically, Oegema suggested.
“What does it mean to people when they repeat the liturgy that Christ has overcome death? It is, in a way, a liberation from slavery.”
And it’s no coincidence that both festivals take place in spring. It’s likely that in antiquity there was a spring festival.
“The rebirth of nature after a long winter period was celebrated with the community being together and celebrating,” he explained.
“Even if you take away all the religious elements, in antiquity and today there is still this very hopeful meaning attached to it: Nature itself shows that death can be overcome.
Especially Montreal after a tough winter: You just celebrate life.”