Easter Lesson
Apr 5th, 2007 by Bethany
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I think that it would be cool if for Sunday School or Relief Society or something someone would/could teach an Easter-as-related-to-Passover lesson. Of course, this may seem strange to some of you, but the Passover celebration is closely tied to everything we commemorate at Easter. As Christians, we believe that everything involved in Passover was a symbolic foreshadowing of the Easter events and Jesus celebrated Passover during the Last Supper, and it makes sense to me to discuss the ceremonial anticipation of Jesus, the Atonement, and the Resurrection while we commemorate the actual event. What helped people to learn about and understand Jesus before he came should help us understand him and learn about him after the fact.
For example, when the Israelites were getting ready for the last plague in Egypt, they were told to sacrifice a perfect, white, first-born lamb and put its blood above their doors to signal God to pass over their home and not let their first born child die. Later, God commanded them to repeat this every year (Passover) so that they would not forget that He saved them that night. Another layer of symbolism is that Jews in ancient times were told by God to sacrifice perfect, white, first-born lambs in their place at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. As Christians, we believe that these lambs represent Jesus Christ and the atonement–that Jesus was God's perfect, clean, first-born son who suffered and bled and died in our place and took our sins away. The blood sacrifices were an in-your-face way to show the people that our sins aren't pretty and Christ taking them away wasn't easy, but it was done anyway because God loves us. Thinking about the sacrifice of a lamb can help us to better understand and appreciate the Atonement of Jesus, even though we don't practice blood sacrifice now that Jesus fulfilled the law.
The Passover is all about becoming clean through the Messiah and being grateful to God for saving us from death and sin.
Of course, in order to teach a lesson on the Passover as related to Easter, one would have to understand a little bit more than average about Passover. The Jewish guide to the Passover Seder (feast) is called a "Haggadah," and haggadot explain how a Jewish passover should be conducted and the significance of the Exodus, so that's a good place to start. You can find a simple, fun version of the haggadah like the one my family uses when we hold a seder.
