Israel's Holidays and Ours

            Israel celebrated—ok, Israel was supposed to celebrate three great feasts each year.  I say ‘supposed to’ because 2 Kings 23:21-23 leaves the impression that Passover was missed pretty often.  True, you can read it two ways:  either Israel hadn’t celebrated the Passover in almost 600 years, or, more likely, they hadn’t celebrated it particularly well in 600 years.  Either way, these festivals apparently didn’t dominate Israelite life like the Lord intended.  (On the other hand, there is evidence of faithful observation in at least some eras of Israel’s life, as, for example, in the lifetime of Jesus, Luke 2:41-42.)

            Anyhow—three great feasts:  Passover, Pentecost (Feast of Weeks), and Atonement/Booths.  Passover commemorated the Exodus out of Egypt.  Pentecost was a harvest festival.  Booths commemorated the time in the wilderness.  The marking of time in this way reminded them of God’s provision:  He had brought them out of Egypt.  He led them to a land of milk and honey, in which they would have enough.  And He had preserved them in the wilderness.  The festivals pointed to God’s grace and reminded them of His faithfulness.  And, of course, they had their weekly Sabbath, which the Lord explains two ways:  first, as a reminder of His creating work, and second, as a reminder of their former toil as slaves and their present freedom.

            One thing that interests me is the way the Lord used those Old Testament holidays as a sort of template for His ‘main’ event.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that Jesus’ crucifixion coincides with the Passover—after all, most of us have heard that story told every Lent for years and years.  I suppose one thing that is surprising is that Jesus’ death is not connected to the Day of Atonement.  (Given the course of later theological thought about the death of Jesus, that connection would make sense.)  Passover, not Atonement—what might that mean?  While we probably don’t want to parse these things too finely, the emphasis in Jesus’ death is perhaps more to the ‘release from oppression/freedom’ side than the ‘atonement’ side.  That is, it may be more about death’s oppression and the slavery of sin of the human race than it is about ‘how an individual gets right with God,’ although I am certainly not excluding the latter!

            Then, 50 days after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit is specifically tied to the feast of Pentecost.  So, at least part of the significance of the pouring out of the Spirit in Acts 2 seems to be that God provides freedom and fullness (harvest) for His people, even as they find themselves without ‘a land of their own’ in this present, evil age.

            In terms of pattern, at least, it’s interesting that the church, from those earliest days, kept these things going.  They celebrated from the earliest days a ‘sabbath.’  (The Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, was transposed to Sunday, the day of resurrection, but it’s still a weekly celebration of God’s mighty acts of salvation.)  The first annual holiday the church recognized was Easter, followed quickly by the annual celebration of Pentecost.  Apparently the church recognized that she, too, needed the structured reminders of who she was, to Whom she belonged, and what He had done to make her what she was!
--Re-posted from February, 2011