Stoned-Campbell Disciple

Sometimes I am simply astonished by my brothers and sisters. Jesus once asked a group of Bible experts, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Mk 12.24). Yes, this statement is directed to men who thought of themselves to be Bible experts.

A person has written to me, concerning Easter, “I am grateful that I remember the resurrection of Jesus every week not once a year.” And I’ve received other messages with the same basic message some nearly verbatim.

I have acknowledged neither. I had to refill my Cup of Java to make sure I was reading the rejection of “Easter/Pascha” correctly. Seriously brothers and sisters, is this supposed to be an objection?

Do these brothers/sisters actually believe that celebrating Easter (early Christians called it Pascha) implies in any universe, that Christians across the globe and thru the centuries celebrating Easter remember the resurrection only once a year! My friends this is actually absurd and I am not trying to be offensive by saying it is absurd. I just know of no other word suitable for it.

If you remember your wife/husband’s anniversary or birthday does that imply you are only grateful for them one day a year? Surely such is worse than silly. It is not even rational.

But these critics seem to not understand a biblical rhythm of life.

Sunday/Lord’s Day and Easter/Pascha function analogously to the Sabbath and Passover. I cannot stress enough that early Christians did not own personal New Testaments, much less Bibles. They learned the contents of the Story thru public worship. This is simply essential to grasp to understand early Christianity.

Early Christians for the first 100 or so years were mostly Jews. They had a “biblical” rhythm to life. That rhythm was dominated by the festivals. The sabbath is the first and primary festival in the Bible.

Sabbath and Passover are connected. So are Lord’s Day and Easter. Some (they do not know the scripture as Jesus said) do not seem to realize that the Sabbath remembers the liberation of slaves from Egypt, the Exodus just as much as it remembers the days of creation. This is stressed many times in the “Old Testament” not least in the Ten Words (Deuteronomy 5.12-15).

So every single week, Israelites, remembered the salvation by the grace of God in the Exodus. But also in the Passover feast, Israel celebrated the event and reenacted the event. They did not only remember God’s astonishing earth shattering grace on the 14th of Nisan. They did it weekly and had a shabbat meal, a miniature Passover.

Just so, the Lord’s Day with its meal remembers the astonishing grace of the God of the Exodus supremely in the death and resurrection of the Messiah. Early Christians and modern Christians, like Jews around the world, remember the foundational events of faith every single week.

But Easter/Pascha was viewed in the early church just as the Passover was for a millennia prior to Jesus. The Passover celebrates what the Sabbath does. Easter celebrates what the Lord’s Day does. There was no competition between Sabbath and Passover nor is there any between the Christian Pascha/Easter and the Lord’s Day.

Early Christianity was born in, shaped by, and has the DNA of the Hebrew Bible and Judaism ground into it. It is astonishing how little we understand our own faith.

To celebrate Easter hardly implies only remembering the resurrection once a year. It is the “Christian Passover.” It is genetically connected to the weekly “festival” of gathering in the name of the Lord … the God of the Resurrection is the same God of the Exodus which is why Jesus used the PASSOVER as his Last Supper in the first place. (See how Paul connects them in 1 Corinthians 5.7).

Remember that Jesus, the Apostles, James, Paul, etc were, and are, Jews. The book they wrote, we call it the New Testament, is a Jewish book.

Further Study

Easter/Pascha: Theology and Freedom, Part 1

Easter/Pascha: History & What they Didn’t Tell Me about the Early Church, Part 2

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2021 at 8:07 am and is filed under A Gathered People, Discipleship, Easter, Hermeneutics, Jewish Backgrounds, Lord's Supper, Patternism, Sabbath, Worship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.