Why Passover and not Yom Kippur?

Yesterday, in the middle of a series on atonement at the Well, we took a look at the question of “How did Jesus interpret his own death?” At every turn, Jesus seems to use Passover to define what he was doing. This raised the question, “Why Passover and not Yom Kippur?” You can read about each of these feasts in Leviticus 16 and Leviticus 23.

Scot Mcknight addressed this question in his book A Community Called Atonement.

We answer that by answering this question: What did his death at Passover do? Passover involved the death of a lamb and the smearing of a lamb’s blood with the hyssop branch on the door; the blood protected from God’s wrath and liberated Israel. If this is what Passover was about, then this is what Jesus was doing: “storifying” his own death at Passover, claiming that his followers, by ingesting his body and blood, were “smearing” blood on themselves to protect themselves from the judgment of God against the oppressive, violent, and power-mongering leaders of Israel and Rome who were oppressing God’s good people. We need to recall that Jesus had just announced (read Mark 13) that judgment would shortly come to Jerusalem. God’s wrath is here understood in concrete, historical terms: judgment against sin and systemic violence in the historical order.

If we think about what this might have meant to the first followers of Jesus, we could conclude this: the Last Supper was an act of liberation from Rome and Israel’s unjust leaders and the claim that those who “ingest” Jesus will be protected from them and liberated to live in the kingdom of God. By choosing Passover instead of Yom Kippur to explain his death, Jesus chooses the images of divine protection and liberation. He offers himself – in death – to absorb the judgment of God on behalf of his followers so he can save people from their sins. His is the blood of the lamb that will secure his followers for the kingdom of God.

No one would argue that this is all there is to the death of Jesus, but one must begin right here: Jesus’ act at the Last Supper declares that his death is atoning, that his blood is like the Passover blood, that his blood absorbs the judgment of God against sin and systemic violence, that his death will save and liberated his followers from their own sins, and that his death will create the new covenant community around him.

Out of this understanding comes a much fuller picture of atonement than the one I grew up with. The atonement I grew up would have fit perfectly if Jesus had died on Yom Kippur (the day that the sins of Israel were taken away). Because that was why Jesus died… to make sure my sins wouldn’t be counted against me! Right? Yes, but when we see atonement through the lens of Passover, we start to see that atonement is more than just the forgiveness of my personal sins and start to see how atonement affects not only our relationship with God, but with others, ourselves and the world in which we live! We start seeing that we are being called into a community of people who live out the dreams of God in this world, bring justice and mercy to the places where we have been planted. We also begin to see that Jesus’ death has everything to do with liberating those who are oppressed by the systemic evils of the world today.

What do you think?