The End Is a Passover

Ask most Christians what the Passover is about and they will say Egypt. The lamb, the blood on the door, the angel passing over. That is right. But it is only the beginning of the answer.

The Passover is a pattern. It was set up to be repeated, and each time it is fulfilled it points further ahead. This article walks the chain from the lamb in Egypt to the end of the world, and shows where the Mass sits in it.

What the word means

Passover is the English word. The Bible’s word is Pasch. It comes from the Hebrew pesach, a passing over, and the Greek and Latin Bibles kept it almost unchanged as Pascha. That is why the Douay-Rheims Bible, the translation used in this Library, calls the feast “the Phase (that is the Passage) of the Lord” (Exodus 12:11). It is why Paul can write “Christ our pasch,” why the Church speaks of the paschal mystery, and why most of the world still calls Easter Pascha. Whenever you read Pasch, paschal, or Passover below, hear the same thing: the night the Lord passed over.

The lamb was meant to be repeated

When God gave Israel the Passover, he did not give them a one-night event. He gave them a feast to keep forever.

“And this day shall be for a memorial to you; and you shall keep it a feast to the Lord in your generations, with an everlasting observance.” — Exodus 12:14

A memorial is more than a reminder. The lamb was not eaten once and then remembered. It was eaten every year, and every year the family ate it as if they were in Egypt that night. God wrote that into the words a father was to say to his son.

“And you shall tell your son in that day, saying: This is what the Lord did to me when I came forth out of Egypt.” — Exodus 13:8

“To me.” Not to my ancestors. A father born four hundred years after the Exodus was told to say that the Lord brought him out. Jews still say it at the Passover table: in every generation a man must look on himself as if he himself came out of Egypt. The Catechism says the same thing in its own words. Each time Passover is kept, “the Exodus events are made present” (CCC 1363). That is what a memorial is in the Bible. Not the memory of a rescue. The rescue, present again.

The instructions were exact. The lamb was eaten in one house, and not a bone of it was to be broken (Exodus 12:46). Hold on to that detail. It comes back.

The lamb was Christ

When John the Baptist first saw Jesus, he did not call him teacher or prophet. He used the word every Jew would know from the feast.

“Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who takes away the sin of the world.” — John 1:29

The Gospel of John then builds the whole crucifixion around the Passover. Jesus is condemned on the day of preparation, at the hour the lambs were being slaughtered (John 19:14). When the soldiers come to break the legs of the crucified, they find him already dead, and John tells us why it mattered.

“For these things were done that the scripture might be fulfilled: You shall not break a bone of him.” — John 19:36

That is Exodus 12:46, quoted at the cross. The lamb whose bones were never broken was a picture, and on Good Friday the picture came true. Paul says it in five words: “Christ our pasch is sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

The meal was left unfinished

Now go back one night, to the upper room. Jesus is keeping Passover with his disciples. He takes the bread and the cup, and he says something that most readers pass straight over.

“For I say to you that from this time I will not eat it, till it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” — Luke 22:16

He says it again over the cup: “I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, till the kingdom of God come” (Luke 22:18). Matthew’s version adds where the cup will be finished: “that day when I shall drink it with you new in the kingdom of my Father” (Matthew 26:29).

Read those words slowly. Jesus is not saying the Passover is over. He is saying it is not yet complete. The meal he began that night will be finished in the kingdom. And in the same breath he tells them to keep eating it until then: “Do this for a commemoration of me” (Luke 22:19).

Paul understood exactly what that meant, and he says it in Passover language. “Christ our pasch is sacrificed,” he tells the Corinthians. “Therefore, let us feast” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8). The lamb has been killed. What is left is to eat it.

Then he says how long the feast runs. Every time the Church eats the bread and drinks the cup, “you shall show the death of the Lord, until he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Put those two verses together. The Church is not remembering a Passover that happened once. She is eating the Passover that saves her, the way Israel ate the lamb on the night the destroyer passed over. The Eucharist has a direction. It faces forward, to the night he comes.

The end is the last Passover

So what does the kingdom look like when the meal is finally finished? John saw it.

“Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” — Revelation 19:9

The end of the world is a supper, and the host is a Lamb. Earlier in the same book John sees him “standing, as it were slain” (Revelation 5:6). The marks of the sacrifice never go away. The Passover lamb of Egypt, the Lamb of God on the cross, and the Lamb of the wedding supper are one Lamb, seen at three points on the same line.

The Catechism draws that line in a single sentence. Christ’s death and resurrection, “the new Passover, is anticipated in the Supper and celebrated in the Eucharist, which fulfills the Jewish Passover and anticipates the final Passover of the Church in the glory of the kingdom” (CCC 1340). Egypt, Calvary, the altar, the kingdom. One feast, kept forward.

Israel was not taken out before the plagues

One more thing about Egypt, because it changes how you read the end. Israel was not removed before the judgment fell. They lived in Egypt through all ten plagues. The first three, the blood, the frogs and the gnats, are described falling on the whole land with no exception named. From the fourth plague on, God set Goshen apart, so that the flies, the hail and the darkness did not reach them (Exodus 9:26). But they were still there. They watched Egypt come apart around them for months.

The last night was different from all the others. Israel was not spared the destroyer because of where they lived. They were spared because of the blood.

“I shall see the blood, and shall pass over you; and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I shall strike the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 12:13

Any house without blood on the door was struck, from Pharaoh’s palace to the prison (Exodus 12:29). Goshen was no protection that night. Only the lamb was.

That is the pattern for the Church. Jesus prayed for his disciples in exactly those terms: “I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from evil” (John 17:15). And when John sees the saints at the wedding supper, they are not people who were lifted out before the trouble. “These are they who have come out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). Through the plagues, spared the death, by the blood. It is Egypt again.

Revelation keeps the same shape

The plagues of Revelation can be confusing on a first read. Some of them fall on everyone. Others fall only on the wicked. Put them next to the plagues of Egypt and the confusion clears, because Egypt went the same way.

The early plagues of Revelation spare no one. When the first trumpet sounds, hail and fire burn a third of the earth and “all green grass” (Revelation 8:7). No exception is named. That is the first three plagues of Egypt, falling on the whole land.

Then God’s people are set apart, just as Goshen was. Before the angels are allowed to strike the earth, the servants of God are sealed on their foreheads (Revelation 7:3). From that point on, the plagues pick their targets.

“And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth nor any green thing nor any tree: but only the men who have not the sign of God on their foreheads.” — Revelation 9:4

The last plagues are aimed the same way. The first vial falls on “men who had the character of the beast” (Revelation 16:2). The wicked are struck and God’s people are not. But God’s people are still there, in the middle of it, as Israel was in Goshen.

Now look at what the seal is. In Egypt God said of the blood on the door, “the blood shall be unto you for a sign” (Exodus 12:13). In Revelation the servants carry the sign of God on their foreheads, and the destroyer passes them by. The mark has moved from the door to the person. It still does one thing. It is what the destroyer reads.

The blood and the flesh

Now come back to the last night in Egypt, because the Passover had two commands, not one. The blood went on the door. And the lamb was eaten.

“And they shall take of the blood thereof, and put it upon both the side posts, and on the upper door posts of the houses, wherein they shall eat it. And they shall eat the flesh that night.” — Exodus 12:7-8

Both were required. A house with blood on the door and an uneaten lamb inside had not kept the Passover. The blood turned the destroyer away, and the flesh was the meal the family ate while he passed. One lamb, applied outside and eaten inside.

Jesus kept both halves. Over the cup he said, “This is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you” (Luke 22:20). The blood that was painted on the doorposts is the Blood of Christ, and the Church drinks it. Over the bread he said, “This is my body.” The flesh of the lamb that Israel ate that night is the Body of Christ, and the Church eats it at every Mass.

He had already said it would be this way, and he did not soften it when they objected.

“Amen, amen, I say unto you: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.” — John 6:53

The Catechism quotes that verse as the Lord’s own invitation to Communion (CCC 1384). You cannot keep the Passover by standing outside a house with blood on the door. You have to go in and eat the lamb.

One change is worth noticing. In Egypt the blood was never drunk. The Law forbade it: “No soul of you… shall eat blood” (Leviticus 17:12). At the Last Supper Jesus put the blood in a cup and said, “Drink all of this” (Matthew 26:27). That is part of why the crowd in John 6 was scandalised. What was on the door is now in the cup. What kept the destroyer out is now inside the people he passes over.

What this means for the Mass

This is why the Church prays the way she does at the altar. Every Eucharist, the Catechism says, the Church “turns her gaze to him who is to come,” and calls for his coming: “Marana tha! Come, Lord Jesus!” (CCC 1403). The Lord is really present, but veiled. The meal is really the Passover, but not yet the last one.

And it settles a question about how the end comes. It does not come by the Church conquering the world, and it does not come by the Church being carried out before the trouble starts. The Church enters the kingdom “only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection” (CCC 677). Israel stayed in Egypt through the plagues and went through the sea. Christ went through the tomb. The Church will go through her own night, with the blood of the Lamb on the door, and come out the other side to a supper.

So the next time you kneel at Mass, you are not only remembering Egypt, and not only remembering Calvary. You are eating the lamb, with his blood on you, on the night before the passing-over. You are eating the meal Jesus left unfinished, and waiting with him for the night it is finished. The end of the world is a Passover. The Church has been keeping it every Sunday for two thousand years.