Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — at the Cross

Continues from: Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — in Ancient Israel. This asks the same question of the cross that the companion post asked of Egypt.

We come to the cross already certain what it’s about: our sin. “ChristNot a surname but a title: the Greek Christos, rendering the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah) — "the Anointed." The anointing that set apart Israel's kings, priests, and prophets all converges on the one person it was pointing to. Synonyms: Messiah, Anointed, the Anointed One, Mashiach, Christos. See also: Logos More died for our sins” sits so deep in us that we read it onto everything the cross touches — including the PassoverThe LORD's Passover, kept on Nisan 14 (Lev 23:5): the lamb slain and its blood marking the houses spared in Egypt (Ex 12). The New Testament presents Christ as the Passover lamb (1 Cor 5:7), making it the opening act of the feast year. Synonyms: Pesach. See Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — at the Cross More it fulfills. (Not that it’s untrue — it’s that we attach it to the wrong feast.) But the same thing we found in Egypt holds here. Look for the Passover lamb to be called a sin offeringHebrew chatat — the offering prescribed specifically to deal with sin (Leviticus 4), distinct from the Passover. The Passover lamb is never called a sin offering; reading sin into Passover folds a later, separate offering back onto it, where Scripture keeps the two carefully apart. See Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — in Ancient Israel More at the cross, and it never is. The sin that does get named there — “if Christ has not been raised… you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17) — hangs on the resurrection and on AtonementAn English construction — at-one-ment — coined by Tyndale, not a direct translation. The Hebrew behind it, kaphar, means to cover, sharing its root with kapporeth — the cover of the ark, the mercy seat. The Day of Atonement centers on the High Priest bringing blood to that cover. The act and the object are the same word pointing at the same reality. Synonyms: Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, kaphar, kapporeth. More: a different feast, working on its own level — itself fulfilled both at the cross and further along the linear sequence, a knot worth its own untangling (See Review of Some APPARENT Inconsistencies of The Cross; Reconciliation of Some APPARENT Inconsistencies of The Cross). The point here is simpler: that sin belongs to Atonement’s unique process, not to Passover’s. At Passover, the cross is doing what it did the night Israel walked out of Egypt — bringing a people out of bondage, not dealing with their sin. Deliverance.

Part of why we miss it is where we go looking. Our Bibles are split into an “Old” and a “New Testament,” and that seam trains the eye to expect the old story to stop and a new one to start. It doesn’t. The account is continuous — the same God always at his work (John 5:17), the same feastsIn Leviticus 23, a feast is a designated period — not a single day but a span of time with its own structure and sequence. The Feast of Weeks spans seven weeks. The Feast of Tabernacles spans seven days. A feast may contain one or more annual holy days, but the feast itself is the full period, not any single day within it. Synonyms: festival, appointed time, moed. More running straight across the seam. The first feasts were keptFrom the Hebrew shamar — to watch over, guard, protect, give attentive care to. A shepherd shamar the flock. The keeping the feasts and sabbath requires is the attentive, protective engagement that creates the conditions for seeing what they reveal — not external compliance with a schedule. Synonyms: shamar, observe, guard, watch over. More in Egypt; this same Passover feast is being fulfilled at the cross. We’re following one thread across, not two.

And Scripture won’t hand us a caption for what it’s doing here. It does something better: it lets Jesus live it out where we can watchIn plain English, to observe means to see attentively — to give careful, focused attention to something. This is precisely what the Hebrew shamar points at: watchful, protective attention toward something valued. In religious usage, particularly in the Church of God tradition, "observe" has been reduced to performing an external requirement. The original sense — attentive seeing that allows something to reveal itself — is what the feasts and sabbath are actually asking for. Synonyms: shamar, keep, watch, guard. More. So let’s not argue the point — let’s lay his life beside the Passover feast and see whether it locks (See From Puzzle Pieces to The Picture of Jesus Christ).

One thing to carry in from the leavenIn the biblical symbol-system, leaven is amoral — neither good nor evil in itself. It represents doctrine, teaching, knowledge, influence: the system that permeates whatever it enters and transforms it from within. The type of leaven matters; "the leaven of the Pharisees" is their doctrine, not leaven as a category. Synonyms: yeast, leavening. See Does Leaven Really Mean Sin? More post: leaven is amoral, and it always takes its character from whose it is. There is the leaven of the Pharisees, and there is the leaven of Christ. His leaven is his knowledge — his words, which he himself says “are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). So the bread of life is bread full of his life; emptied of it, that same bread becomes the bread of death. Watch it happen.

At the cross he lays his life down — not taken from him, given: “I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18). The bread of life, freely broken.

Then three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). And the dead, Scripture says plainly, have nothing: “neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the realm of the dead, where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). The bread of life, in death, is emptied — unleavened, the bread of death. It is no accident that the Passover sacrifice was never to be offered with leaven (Exodus 34:25); the lamb and the unleavened bread belong together, and here they meet in a grave. “As often as you eat this bread… you proclaim the Lord’s death” (1 Corinthians 11:26). The unleavened bread is the bread of death.

And then he does what he said he could: he takes his life up again, by his own power (John 10:18). He lives — the bread of life, raised (John 6:35, 58). “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life” (Romans 5:10). Reconciled by the death; saved by the life.

So watch what the Passover and Days of Unleavened BreadThe seven days following Passover — Nisan 15 through 21 — when leaven is put out and only unleavened bread is eaten (Lev 23:6). Scripture calls that bread the "bread of affliction," tied to leaving Egypt in haste (Deut 16:3) — a fuller sense than leaven simply standing for sin. Synonyms: Feast of Unleavened Bread, Unleavened Bread, ULB. See Does Leaven Really Mean Sin? More actually pictured, lived out in him: not sin put out for a weekThe cycles of day, month, and year we observe in the heavens — the earth's rotation, the moon's orbit, the earth's circuit around the sun. The week has no such anchor in the sky, yet we are instructed to observe it too — a complete cycle of seven culminating in the seventh, the same shape that surfaces everywhere in Scripture. Synonyms: shavua, cycle of seven. See also: Sabbatical year. See Where Does the Week Come From? More and let back in again, but a life laid down and taken up. The Days of Unleavened Bread were never a ban on misbehaving. They were always this.

And yet the resurrection morning shows the story isn’t sealed at the empty tomb — not quite, not yet. Mary reaches for him and is stopped: “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). Yet that same morning the other women take hold of his feet (Matthew 28:9), and a week on, Thomas is told to reach out and touch the wounds (John 20:27). Between the don’t-cling and the holding, something happened the text never narrates but plainly demonstrates: he went to the Father and came back. The wave sheafThe first of the firstfruits of the harvest — a single unleavened sheaf lifted and waved before God on the day after the Sabbath during the Days of Unleavened Bread. It marks the transition into the counting period of the Feast of Weeks. 1 Corinthians 15:20-23 identifies Christ as the first of the firstfruits of the resurrection — the wave sheaf pointing precisely at him. Synonyms: wave offering, firstfruits offering, omer. See The Feast of LEAVENED Bread More — the firstfruitsFirstfruits (Greek aparchē; Hebrew bikkurim) — the first and best of a harvest, brought to God ahead of the rest and set apart as His. Scripture layers it: Christ is the wave sheaf, "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:20-23); the ekklesia are in turn called firstfruits (James 1:18) — an early portion themselves, ahead of a far larger harvest still to come. See also: Wave sheaf See Why Pentecost Has No Fixed Date More — lifted, presented, and returned (1 Corinthians 15:20). A simple act; it takes only a moment. And he could not yet be held until it was done.

And it leaves a question this post won’t answer: why did the firstfruits have to be lifted to the Father and brought back before he could be held — and what is made full only in that return? That belongs to the count that begins right here, inside the unleavened days, and to its own telling.

But the thing the title asked is already answered. At the cross, as in Egypt, the Passover is not a sin offering. It is deliverance — the bread of life laid down, and taken up again. The sin question is real, and it has its own stage further on. This one was never it.

See also: Does Leaven Really Mean Sin?