NOTES for Exo 12:11-14

Even a quick glance at the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Exodus allows us to see in these chapters a ritual text dedicated to the feast of Passover, the very feast Jesus celebrated with His disciples when they gathered for the meal we call the Last Supper. This early text, most likely pre-exilic, connects the meaning of Passover with the deliverance of God's people from death: the sacrificial blood on the doorposts turns the hand of the angel of death away from the house.

Later, after the exile, in the era of the Second Temple, the Passover seder, the order for celebrating Passover whose center was the ritual meal, became connected with the theme of the Exodus. Every believing Jew, in celebrating Passover, had to relive the liberation from Egyptian slavery that the people had historically experienced during the Exodus.

This reinterpretation of the feast's central event most likely took place during the Babylonian exile. Before the exile, the center was not so much liberation from slavery as deliverance from death, and the pre-exilic text we read today in Exodus testifies to this with complete clarity. And during that Passover Seder which became the first Eucharist for the Church, the Savior once again returns the Passover seder to its original meaning.

He returns to the theme of deliverance from death, the central theme of the seder of the pre-exilic period. But if in the time of Moses the matter was deliverance from physical death, as an event, in philosophical terms, that was existential, absolutely significant then and there, where and when it happened, now the matter is final and absolute deliverance. It is a deliverance that touches the whole world, the whole fullness of times and spaces, what is called by the Hebrew word olam, difficult to translate into foreign languages. Jesus returns the feast to its original meaning, bringing it to the absolute depth that became the full victory over death through the Resurrection. Thus the Old Covenant is joined to the New, and what began in the time of Moses is completed in the days of the Messiah's coming.