"Life With Christ in God"
The day had been set from the beginning, and the time had come. Jesus gathered His disciples to the upper room of a home on Mt Zion, likely that of Mary, John Mark’s mother, for the Passover Seder. He told them, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Lu 22:15). It was Nisan 14 on the Galilean and Essene calendars, but Nisan 13 on the priestly calendar.
Moses instituted Passover as a yearly feast, for on that day God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. Before it began, each house killed the Passover lamb and painted its blood on its lintel and doorposts. That night, the start of Passover, the angel of death brought the tenth plague on Egypt, the death of the firstborn, but when he saw the blood of the lamb covering the entrance of any home, he hopped over that house. Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, is derived from papach, which means hop.Although Moses brought them to Mt. Sinai to worship Jehovah (YHWY) and covenant with Him, they could not keep it. They were in spiritual bondage, just like every person. Worse, they were destined in that condition to die, eternally separated from God, the source of all light and life; but God provided a lamb, as He did for Abraham. His blood, if painted on someone’s doorposts and lintel, covers them. Death, when it comes, hops over them, and they are delivered into the presence of God, into eternal life. But where was the Passover lamb the night that Jesus ate with his disciples?
The Passover Seder began with a cup of wine, one of four cups during the traditional Seder. They represent four promises that God made to the Israelites (Exodus 6:6-7). The first cup is the Cup of Sanctification (“I will bring you out”). No gospel details the drinking of the first cup, but since the meal progressed, we assume Jesus drank it with His disciples. The second is the Cup of Deliverance (“I will rescue you”), often called the Cup of the Plagues. The Jews dip their finger in the cup and cast a drop of wine on their plate as they announce each plague that befell Egypt, while eating bitter herbs. Jesus postponed this cup, for he alone drank it.
The third is the Cup of Redemption (“I will redeem you”). This is the cup that the gospels report Jesus drank with His disciples, but He clarified its meaning. He told them, “Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matt 26:27-28). Jesus offered His blood the next day as He gave His body as a substitute offering for every sinner, for we all have sinned. It is the blood of the New Testament, promised at the beginning of the Babylonian captivity. While the blood of the lamb offered in Egypt redeemed the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, it is the blood of Jesus that redeems us from the bondage of death in which Satan ensnared all of us. His blood satisfied the demands of God’s justice and provided a remission of sins for all those who believe on Him. We remember the offering of His blood and the redemption it brought each time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.
Jesus did not offer the fourth cup, the Cup of Praise (“I will take you as My people”), for He will not drink that cup until He returns. He told His disciples, “I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt 26:29). Jesus must come again to complete His kingdom. This is the cup “of wine on the lees well refined” reserved for “the supper of the Lord” at “the marriage of the Lamb” (D&C 3d-f), for it is then that He will take His people as a groom takes his bride into the house of the Father, a room in the mansion of His Father where Jesus went after He ascended “to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2).
After the supper, the disciples sang the Great Hallel—Psalms 113-118—as they went to the Garden of Gethsemane. Gethsemane means olive press. The Psalm proclaims near its end, “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner” (Ps 118:22). It is there, a stone’s throw from the cave where they pressed the olives three times to extract the oil, that Jesus asked His Father three times to let “this cup,” the cup of wrath, pass him; but to the glory of His Father, Jesus concluded, “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done” (Matt 26:42).
During the Passover Seder, before the Cup of Plagues, the head of the house would have taken the middle matzah, or unleavened bread, from the afikoman and broken it in half. After removing the rest of the matzah to be eaten during the meal, he would have wrapped the half-matzah in a linen cloth, placed it in the empty afikoman, and hidden it for the children to find after the Seder meal.
The Temple guards took Jesus to be judged by the chief priests and Sanhedrin. After they found him guilty of blasphemy for claiming to be the promised Messiah, they took Him to the Prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate, demanding His execution. Pilate found Him “without fault” (John 19:6), but the Jewish leaders were boisterously insistent. “Crucify him, crucify him” (John 19:6), they shouted. He did.
When Jesus died, the Roman soldier pierced His side, and the blood that had come from His broken heart gushed out, running down His body and onto the Father’s mercy seat, where it atoned for the sins of the world. Joseph of Arimathea, uncle of Mary, Jesus’ mother, begged His body from Pilate, and they buried Him in a rich man’s tomb on the day of preparation, before sunset. Jesus remained in the tomb the next day, Passover’s high sabbath. On the third day, the day of First Fruits, before daybreak, Jesus rose from the grave and became “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor 15:20). He discarded the linen in which they had wrapped His body, and burst from the tomb. He is the Messiah who retained His power while entombed, the same power that renewed His breath and revived His dead body, that rolled the sealed stone from the tomb’s entrance, through which Jesus, risen from the dead, walked out.
After the Seder meal, the children search for the hidden afikomen, where the linen-wrapped half-matzah is hidden. The child who finds it receives a reward. Jesus is the bread of life. He is the unleavened bread because He was without sin. All those who find Him receive Him as their reward. He died for them, was hidden in a sealed tomb, and rose again with power to raise all who believe in Him to eternal life, joint-heirs with Him in the mansions of His Father.
We will gather on the first Sunday of April, April 5, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, when the Breath of God, the Holy Spirit (Breath), entered Jesus’ dead body, and He arose. What the Jews esoterically proclaim at the Passover Seder this year, which is Tuesday night, but the beginning of April 1 for the Jews, we, with Christians around the world, openly proclaim on Easter Sunday. Jesus, the Messiah, the only begotten Son of God, lives. He rose from the grave and has the power to raise from the dead all who believe on Him.
Jesus said, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Intimately knowing the Father only comes by living with Him. That familial relationship does not begin at the resurrection, but at regeneration, when we are born again. Jesus said, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). When the Holy Ghost, the promised Comforter that was pressed from Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, is born in us, we become new creatures. (2 Cor 5:17).
Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Savior. It also praises His Father for the plan of salvation that Jesus perfected in His atoning sacrifice, for through Him and by Him we can be born again, regenerated into citizens in His eternal kingdom, where neither death, nor sorrow, nor despair touches our new and eternal life, a life any of us can begin today. It is a life “hid with Christ in God” (Col 3:1-3).