Jesus and the Feasts of the Lord

Part 1: the Spring Feasts

The moment Jesus was born, his life and ministry started following the prophetic pattern of the seven Feasts of the Lord. Messianic promises were ingrained into the feasts’ rituals, many of which Jesus fulfilled during his first coming. The rest wait to be accomplished on his return. You can read some of my thoughts on these feasts in previous posts, but let’s look again at Jesus and the feasts his life so richly parallels.

We begin with the spring feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, and the Sheaf of First Fruits. In future posts, we’ll consider the others.

Jesus and the Feast of Passover

During the first Passover, when God poured out his wrath, a multitude of lambs gave up their blood to mark the Jews for salvation. Seeing the crimson sign on their doorposts, the Destroyer killed Egyptians but passed over the Israelites. To memorialize the moment, God commanded Israel to celebrate an annual Passover meal of bread, wine, and lamb.

Centuries later, Jesus linked himself to this feast. But he came as a singular Lamb whose blood would pour out to mark anyone calling on the name of the Lord for salvation. Today, we celebrate this part of the Passover meal with the bread and wine of communion.

Yet there was more to the original event than a bloody mark and a meal. When God sent a shepherd (Moses) to confront Pharaoh, he poured out spectacular plagues on the nation of Egypt. When Jesus arrived as the Great Shepherd (the one Moses said would be “a prophet like me”), he provided himself as the Lamb for the Passover meal, but brought no plagues with him.

Much as Jesus worked signs and wonders during his first coming, we only see plagues connected with him in end time prophecies. Where they do appear, their effect promises to be exponentially greater in scope than those in Moses’s day. During the first Passover, plagues overwhelmed a single nation governed by a human monarch. When Jesus returns, he will confront a demonic ruler (the Anti-Christ) of a global kingdom. The plagues he uses to finally and completely wrench his people from the grip of his enemies will affect the entire world.

It makes me wonder what Jesus had in mind when he said this to his disciples at the end of the meal. “I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom” (Matthew 26:29). Was he speaking of a future Passover more spectacular than the first? One where water once more turns to blood and great rivers split, where deadly plagues obliterate earth’s green plants and hailstones beat down cattle in the fields?

Jesus and the Feast of Unleavened Bread

Passover was only the beginning of the prophetic feasts. Hard on its heels came the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Starting the evening of Passover, the people fasted from yeast for seven days. Leavening agents were swept from their homes so that only the unleavened “bread of affliction” graced their tables. Gone was soft and chewy bread, with its pleasant texture and inviting flavor. The humble, unrisen matza would remind them of their hasty exodus and the manna God provided daily in the wilderness. For seven days, they commemorated God’s faithfulness while keeping themselves separate from yeast and the sin it represented.

Sometimes we celebrate communion with a crusty loaf of bread today. We pass it from hand to hand and tear off a piece as it goes by. But it wasn’t so at the Last Supper. The bread Jesus raised during the meal was unleavened–cracker-like. He didn’t tear the airless, unrisen bread. He broke it–crumbs showering onto the table. “This is my body,” he said of the fragile, shattered thing in his hands. The humble and weak-looking substance of himself, seemingly broken and destroyed, would prove to be the Bread of Life, the only thing capable of fully satisfying spiritual hunger.

Jesus and the Feast of the Sheaf of First Fruits

The last of the spring feasts was the Feast of the Sheaf of First Fruits. On the third day after Passover—the third day after Jesus’s crucifixion—a temple priest raised a bundle of barley before the Lord, the first of all the crops to ripen. By the time the disciples confirmed Jesus had risen, the priest was waving the sheaf in thanksgiving and declaring the official opening of the harvest season. With that, the theme of resurrection was forever linked with this feast because, once the first fruits proved holy, the rest of the harvest would be holy as well. As if demonstrating this principle, other graves opened the morning Jesus rose. Many dead stood up and walked around Jerusalem (Matthew 27:53).

Harvest becomes a central concept in all of the feasts of the Lord as we’ll see moving on. What could be more central to human life than food on the table? Agricultural bounty was part of the portion God promised Israel in their covenant relationship (Deuteronomy 7:13). But the portion God reserves for himself is his people (Deuteronomy 32:9). So he too will have bounty as he gathers souls from the world’s fields into his kingdom.

Next time, the Feast of Pentecost.

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