Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 1 Corinthians 5:6–8
Under the Law of Moses, the Passover was regarded as the greatest of three annual feasts for which every man in Israel was commanded to gather to the place of God’s choosing (Leviticus 23). This feast was held in remembrance of the night when the Lord passed over the blood-marked houses of the sons of Jacob as He struck the firstborn in Egypt on the eve of the great exodus. Although we no longer commemorate the Passover under the new covenant, we do remember the suffering of Christ, whom Paul identifies as our Passover lamb. But how are we as Christians to observe our Passover today?
First let’s consider the institution of the Passover more closely. Instituted on the night before the Israelites left Egypt, God gave very specific instructions regarding its observance. They were to eat unleavened bread to remind them of the haste with which they had left Egypt (Exodus 12:15–20, 39): in fact, all leaven was to be put out of their houses on the first day of the week leading up to the Passover (v 15). Each household was to slaughter a male yearling from their flocks, and they were to roast it with fire and eat it with bitter herbs on the night of the Passover (Exodus 12:3–10). This feast was to be observed throughout their generations so that they might remember what God had done for them and teach their children about it (vv 24–27).
As Paul told the saints in Corinth, Christ is our Passover Lamb today. According to the law, the paschal lamb was to be a male of the first year (Exodus 12:5). Prior to the advancement of ultrasound technology in the late 20th century, Mary was one of very few expecting mothers to learn the gender of her unborn child in advance (Luke 1:31), and this male son would be slain in the prime of His life. The lamb was also to be “without blemish” (Exodus 12:5). Paul wrote that Jesus “offered Himself without spot to God” (Hebrews 9:14). Peter says that we were redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19). The Passover lamb was to be slaughtered on the fourteenth day of the first month, the time at which Jesus observed the Passover with the eleven and instituted the Lord’s Supper (Matthew 26; 1 Corinthians 11). Although Jesus was crucified at roughly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered, He was in a very real sense “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8), for the passion of the Christ was determined by God from the very beginning (Genesis 3:15; Acts 2:23).
How are we to observe our Passover? Paul says that we must likewise observe our feast “without leaven” (1 Corinthians 5:6–8), meaning that we must rid our lives of anything that might make our sacrifice unholy in the sight of God. Like Israel on the night of the first Passover (Exodus 12:11), we must be ready to go at any time our Lord might call us (Luke 12:40). Just as God named the place for the feast for Israel (Deuteronomy 16:5–6) and commanded them to stay inside their houses on the night of the first Passover (Exodus 12:22), we must observe the feast in the place that God has designated today. The place for that observance is now neither Sinai (Numbers 9:1–5), nor Gilgal (Joshua 5:10), nor Jerusalem (Ezra 6:19), but the church in which the Lord has placed His name (Acts 11:26).