There are not many years when the Jewish and Christian (Western) liturgical calendars work out to replay exactly the Passion chronology of John’s Gospel, but this is one of them. In addition to being Good Friday, today is the Preparation Day for Pesach and tonight will be the first Seder for our Jewish brothers and sisters.
Blessed Good Friday and Passover to all.
But wouldn’t last night need to be the first night of Passover for it to be an exact replay? Didn’t Jesus celebrate the Passover with his Disciples?
That would be a replay of the Synoptic chronology, which, yes, has Jesus celebrating Passover with the disciples on the night before he died. In John’s Gospel, though, Jesus is crucified at the hour that the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple, which was the day of preparation for Passover which began that day at sunset. So both the Synoptics and John link the crucifixion to the Passover, but they use the liturgical time differently to do it.
And the name in Latin for Good Friday (Feria Sexta in Parasceve) refers to the day of Preparation.
Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, in a private scholarly opinion, gives the nod to the Johannine timetable, as many scholars have. (And that the Last Supper was not a seder, properly speaking, which may explain the lack of reference to the women and families that were part of the pilgrimage entourage – the women and families would have normally been an integral part of the preparation and seder itself, but for a ceremonial rabbinical meal, not necessarily – ultimately, the silence is equivocal.)
Though I have read that it should be noted that, in the time of Herod’s temple, there was a second sacrifice – just by the temple authorities – that occurred on the first full day of Passover.
Yes, I noticed the synchronicity. It felt a bit creepy, quite honestly, but I wasn’t sure what to do with or think about it. It felt like an especially strong reminder of other events that used to happen on Good Friday, involving Christians and Jews.
I almost always watch Schindler’s List on Good Friday after the commemoration service.
My other thought was in a more pragmatic vein: If I’d attended Good Friday afternoon services, and was invited by a Jewish friend to join them in their Seder meal, might I have a dispensation to eat the meat (lamb, chicken) that would be served there? It would seem odd, if not silly, not to eat the meat; at worst, inhospitable — in the sense of accepting hospitality.
I wouldn’t call the feeling I had quite “creepy,” but it did unsettle me — though less for reasons of Jewish-Christian relations and more for the fact that the Calculation Hypothesis for the origins of the Date of Christmas posits April 6 as the historical (anniversary) date of the crucifixion (as well as of the Annunciation), nine months before Epiphany.
OK, so maybe “creepy” is the word after all.
You could always define your day of fast and abstinence as sundown Thursday through sundown Friday (if the Seder meal starts after sundown). That’s how we count the three days of the Triduum, after all. In my personal opinion, even if you didn’t have a reasoning like that, accepting hospitality and entering into the tradition is a very strong motivation to eat the meat. Or find a vegetarian seder. 🙂
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