The Fulfillment of Passover
by
Robert D. Mock MD
Let us turn our attention to the events which led up to the
crucifixion. Galilee and Judea were astir, for it was a Sabbatical
Passover that occurred every seven years. According to Mosaic Law, every seventh
year the land would rest, with no cultivation. The only produce during
that year that could be grown, was that which grew naturally, whether it was
fruits or grains.
As such, the population would have to stockpile provisions
for that seventh year. During this time, the land stood at rest, and the
population was on a year long Sabbatical. During this time, eager
followers of any Messianic or Hasmonean aspirant to the throne flocked to their
cause. Those who were Torah students would spend the year in the rabbinic
schools of Torah study. These were peak years for the Zealots cause, with
their obsessed goal to free Judea from Roman rule. The
Sicarii were always available to promote the cause of freedom even if it
meant a quick assassination of an opponent.
We see Yahusha heading to Jerusalem, and for the first time
he cautions his disciples to arm themselves, if nothing more than
self-defense. Peter takes on the stance of a personal bodyguard of Yahusha.
Prior to Yahusha’ arrival word reaches him of the death of several Zealot
patriots, which give every appearance that the perimeters of Jerusalem, or at
least the City of David, had been secured in anticipation of a general
uprising. Then the battering rams were brought into the Kidron Valley.
Soon the strong tower of Siloam toppled and with it the death of eighteen
Zealot defenders.
John 12:1
“Then, six days before the Passover, Yahusha came to Bethany, where Lazarus
was who had been dead, whom he had raised from the dead.”
It was now six days before the Passover (8th of
Nisan), and Yahusha was arriving in Bethany. At this time he was a hunted
man. Ever since the resurrection of Lazarus, a few days’ prior, the
Jewish leadership, were plotting to put Yahusha to death.”
(John 11:53)
John 11:49-50; 53-54 – “And one of them, Caiphas, being the
high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all, nor do you
consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people,
and not that the whole nation should perish…Then, from that day on, they
plotted to put Him to death. Therefore, Yahusha no longer walked openly
among the Jews, but went from there into the country near the wilderness, to a
city called Ephraim, and there remained with His disciples.”
In the few days prior to the Passover, Yahusha had escaped
with his disciples to a wilderness town of Ephraim.
(John 11:54).
There they waited out
the days before the Passover. The tension was high. The suspense
was intense.
The city of Jerusalem was abuzz. Pilgrims by the
hundreds of thousands were thronging into the city. As with every year,
this was the day when they anticipated the announcement of the coming of the Messiah.
Would this be the year? The pilgrims in route would collect palm branches
and cedar boughs to bring with them in anticipation of the Messiah. As
with every festival, every living space a pilgrim resided. There they entered
the mitzvah baths to purify themselves. And then at the temple, they
awaited and watched for the coming of the Messiah. The whole populace was
also in anticipation of whether Yahusha would come to the feast. Also the
chief priests and Pharisees were also waiting, for ‘if anyone knew where he
was, the word was out that he should report it, so that the temple leaders
might seize him. (John 11:35)
John 11:56-57
“Then they sought Yahusha, and spoke among themselves as they stood in the temple,
‘What do you think – that he will not come to the feast?’ Now both the
chief priests and the Pharisees had given a command, that if anyone knew where
he was, he should report it, that they might seize him.”
On the eve of the fifth day before Passover, Yahusha was a
guest of honor in the home of Simon, in a celebration feast. There, Mary
Magdalene, the sister of Martha and Lazarus was also an honored guest.
She opened an alabaster vase with a pound of spikenard and anointed the head
and the feet of Yahusha, in the manner of anointing a king.
Matthew 26:6
“And when Yahusha was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman came
to Him having an alabaster flask of very costly fragrant oil, and she poured it
on his head as he sat at the table.”
John 12:1-4
“Then, six days before the Passover, Yahusha came to Bethany, where Lazarus was
who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead. There they made him a
supper; and Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table
with Him. Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard,
anointed the feet of Yahusha, and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house
was filled with the fragrance of the oil. But one of his disciples, Judas
Iscariot, Simon’s son, who would betray him, said, ‘Why was this fragrant oil
not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?’”
It was on the evening prior to the day of the lamb selection
by the high priest, Yahusha made special preparations with his disciples
(talmidim) for the events of the next day. It was a
secret mission. Yahusha knew that on the
fourth day before the Passover, the High Priest was to leave the city through
the north gate as he went to the sheep herds and inspected the yearling flock
for the most perfect lamb of the season. With this in mind, Yahusha then
laid out his strategy with his disciples.
This morning of the 10th day of Nisan
awakened. The sky was crystal clear, the cool early spring breezes swept
down through the Kidron valley. The ripened barley was waving at the base of
the Mount of Olives in the Field of Ashes. As directed, the chosen
disciples found a donkey with a young colt tied in a doorway near an open
street. On the side of the Mount of Olives, the disciples (talmidim)
awaited their master.
Within the city of Jerusalem, the crowds of pilgrims
were in anticipation of a great procession with the arrival of the Pesach
Lamb. Every year, four days before Passover, a vast entourage of cohanim
(priests) would file out of the Herod’s Temple. Instead of exiting out
of the gate nearest the Temple on the western wall and walking over the
overhanging bridge over the Tyropean Valley that connected the Temple Mount
with the Upper City, the procession of hundreds of cohanim (priests) paraded
out of the Royal Stoa’s western gate entrance, where the vast temple market
place, the Bazaar of Hanan (Ananus the Elder) was located. There they
walked down the wide staircase over what is known as the Robinsons’ Arch,
turning south, then west and finally north as they connected with the main north-west
street of Jerusalem, the Damascus street going to the north gate, known as the
Damascus Gate.
The procession entered the Upper City, where the densely
packed homes, had the appearance of an impenetrable wall. To the left was
the tall imposing Hasmonean Palace, built over a hundred years prior looming
high on the horizon.
The cohanim (priests) began to line the sides of the Damascus
street, two by two, maintaining positions on either side of the street, as they
rocked back and forth with palm fronds in their hands. As the cohanim
positioned themselves, the high priest and his entourage made its way north to
the north gate. Outside the city they inspected the flocks of yearling
lambs to find the most perfect lamb. Year after year this custom was
dramatized on the fourth day prior to Passover. Inside the city, the
hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who flocked to the city had already arrived,
each one bringing a palm frond or cedar bough, they had collected in route to
the Holy City. The whole city was lined with greenery as they placed these
boughs outside the residence that they were staying.
The eager cohanim (priests) awaited the return of the high priest.
When Caiphas, the high priest entered the Damascus Gate bringing the selected
lamb by his side, the cohanim) at the gate began shouting, “Hosanna to the
Highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the
kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the Highest!”
(Mark 11:9-10) Upon
hearing the shout the people in the city, those who had already purified
themselves in the mitzvahs in the southern part of the city, ran out into the
street, also bringing their fronds and started shouting, “Hosanna in the
Highest!”
Outside the Damascus Gate, to the east of the city, the
disciples on the Mount of Olives were waiting to rendezvous with Yahusha.
We now have a whole group of disciples (talmidim), a mother donkey and her
two-three year old colt. A blanket is put over the colt and Yahusha quietly
puts his hand on the colt’s mane. This was the colt’s first riding experience.
The quietness of the master was transmitted to the colt as he mounts and they
begin the descent into the Kidron Valley into the city.
In unison, as cued by the Rabbi Yahusha, the disciples begin
to shout, “Hosanna in the Highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of
our Lord!” The flocks of pilgrims join in the chant as Yahusha and the
talmidim (disciples) went around the northern part of the Temple Mount,
below the base of the Antonia Fortress towards the Gate of Damascus.
In the meantime, the Caiphas, the High Priest, has now
exited the Northern Damascus Gate and was heading out to the fields to inspect
the flocks of yearling lambs. The chant intensified, the cohanim at the
Gate hear the chant and began to shout, “Hosanna in the Highest!
Blessed is he who comes in the Name of our Lord!” The chant now cascaded like a
domino down the Damascus street all the way to the wall to the temple mount.
Suddenly, the cohanim at the gate realize, they have been fooled. This
was not the return of the high priest. This was Rabbi Yahusha and his
disciples. Some of the Shammaite Pharisees, the dogmatic sticklers of
church protocol and defining the letter of the truth, challenged Yahusha,
“Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” Yahusha shouts back to them over the
swelling cries of the multitude, “If these were silent, the very stones would
cry out.” (Luke 19:40)
The people began to flock out of their homes, grabbing their
palm fronds outside the doors and the shouting swelled throughout the city.
Anticipation was high! The whole land had heard of the teachings of the
great Rabbi Yahusha. Was this not a Sabbatical year, a special year in
which the whole land rests? Were not rumors abounding throughout the land
that the Messiah would come in the on the Shabbat of years?
Not only was it a Sabbatical year, it was a Sabbatical Passover,
which only occurred every seven years, the Highest Passover when pilgrims throughout
the Diaspora flocked to the Holy Land. The city was swollen with
pilgrims throughout the world; Macedonia, Crete, Parthia, Rome, and Ethiopia.
Each pilgrim from their own countries, each with their strange costumes
akin to their native land, many trying to remember a bit of Hebrew they rarely
used, occasionally breaking into the tongue of their land of residence, all
producing a cacophony of sound and sight.
You can almost see a cohanim, rocking back and forth with
their palm fronds, breaking the rhythm, leaning over and peering up the
street. Where is the priest? Where is the Lamb? Suddenly they
see. What! “Rabbi Yahusha riding a colt. followed by mother ass.
and a whole entourage of His disciples!” What is this!
The crowd became ecstatic; the town was in a tumult.
They shouted, “Hosanna in the Highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name
of our Lord! Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that is coming!
Hosanna in the Highest!” Jumping in glee they threw off their cloaks, so that
the Messiah could ride over on a garment-laden path. Yes, said the Zealots,
this is our man! We have sealed the perimeters of the city, and the
revolt is ripe to take the city in the name of Yahuah. Yes, said the Sicarii,
we have waited for him. Now we can destroy the hated Romans and the
traitorous temple leaders, the Herodians, and the Sadducees, who have played
into and have been bought by the blood money of the Romans. Yes, said the
peasants and the populous! Here is the Messiah, who will bring in the
Kingdom of the God of Israel. The crowds thronged behind Yahusha as he
headed south to the Temple Mount and the Royal Stoa. The people, the
cohanim were swept up in vast tide of humanity. Guess what?
Caiphas, the high priest was returning from the northern
fields with the Passover Lamb in hand and as he entered the northern Damascus
Gate, the street was empty. What’s going on! When he hears that Rabbi Yahusha
has entered the city as a royal aspirant to the throne of David, the Messiah
who is come, he was furious. Type met antitype at this moment. The Passover
Lamb met the Lamb of God.
Yahusha on the other hand, passed under the Robinson’s
Archway of the Royal Causeway and dismounted at the base of the assent to the
Royal Stoa of the Temple. Up the vast gateway he climbed. This
entry gate was awe-inspiring with polished limestone capped with fold plated
Corinthian capitals. Into the Royal Stoa, he strode. It was a long
hallway straddled out before him with four broad columned aisles. There
in the quietness of the Royal Stoa, in the stillness of the hour, in the temple
of his Father, he prayed. It was getting late, so he left the Temple and
walked over to Bethany.
The next day, Yahusha returned to Jerusalem and entered the
temple. Along the street the merchants were setting up their stalls to
begin the commercial activity of the day. The lower market was a very
busy area. There were cheeses in mounds, baskets with all manner of fruit
in them, jars with wine and various types of grain bread lying in piles on the
side. Merchants from the east were unloading a wagon of silk, as farmers and
traders jostled as they weaved in and out of the crowds. Here they came
to a large plaza with a monumental stairway leading up to the double gate of
the temple mount.
Straight ahead was the main entry into the Temple courts.
This area should have been an area of peaceful repose, to bring one into a
spirit of meditation before entering the House of the Yahuah. Yet instead
of the quiet meditation, He remembered there in the Royal Stoa, there was
frenzied commotion. The clanging sounds and rabble of commercial activity
abound. To the right and left were the moneychangers, exchanging the coin
of the empire, each bearing the image of Caesar into the silver temple
shekel. The walls were lined with small cages of doves and pigeons, where
the newly moms were bargaining for a thank offering to celebrate the happy
conclusion of their pregnancy. Oxen and sheep were lining the halls
bellowing in the aroma of a barnyard. Let us imagine the Houston Live Stock
Show in the grandeur of the Temple of God, and we can visualize in part what Yahusha
saw.
Yahusha squinted his eyes and then His face began to flush
with anger. He picked up a whip and began overturning tables, chasing out the
merchants, with sheep, oxen, and pigeons careening in three dimensions. In a
provocative show of force, he threw out the money exchangers and the commerce in
the temple courts suddenly ceased.
For three days, the sacrificial system ceased and it
appeared that Yahusha had full control of the Temple compound. He
spent the time preaching and healing the masses of pilgrims.
With an estimated one million attendees to the Passover, a
three-day shutdown was a major financial blow to the high priest Caiphas and
the
House
of Ananus, along with the Sadducean authorities, who made millions of
shekels for their own personal bank portfolios. Yet the Sadducean Temple
guards, and the Roman cohort of troops (about 500), made no attempt to arrest Yahusha
because they feared the people who were in sympathetic support of the ministry
of Yahusha.
Matthew 21:46-46
“Now when the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived
that He was speaking of them. But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they
feared the multitudes, because they took Him for a
prophet.”
Was Yahusha the Nazarene an armed revolutionary? No!
Though anti-Christian literature later would depict Him as such, we must
understand the political and seething cauldron that Jerusalem was in that day.
The Zealots as can be suspected
(Luke
23:19) took advantage of the political environment to seal the
perimeters of the city, in hopes of staging a political coup. They were
hoping to force Yahusha to make a rightful claim to the throne of David.
Knowing His allegiance with the multitudes, His powers over nature, His ability
to heal, and raise the dead to life, there was every expectation that this
claimant, Yahusha, would succeed and lay full claim to the Messianic
legacy.
Everything appears to go as planned by the Zealots, yet Yahusha,
when he took control of the temple complex, instead of making an armed
political coup against the Sadducean Temple Guard and the limited Roman
garrison in the Antonia Tower, He instead began to heal the sick and minister
to the spiritual and physical needs of the people. A live demonstration
of the true “Kingdom of God” was demonstrated those three days prior to the
Passover feast in the courtyard of the temple. There was always swift
retribution to any aspirant to the throne of David by the Romans, yet Yahusha,
recently anointed in Bethany, made a peaceful yet highly visible entrance as a
new claimant to the throne of David. The governor of Judea, the
Procurator Pilate, would later say, “I find no fault in him.” That a
revolt was thwarted is known by the legal swap of Bar-Abbas, the grandson of Judas
of Galilee, the famed revolutionary in 6 CE, who revolted with the census of
Roman. Now his grandson was plotting an armed revolutionary overthrow of
the Roman. While Bar-Abbas was set free, Yahusha was hung on a tree with
two of Bar-Abbas revolutionists.
By the 14th of Nisan, the Zealot forces went into
retreat without the full support of Yahusha and the thousands of the supporters
of His cause. Yahusha had come as the “Prince of Peace” not as a
fiery messianic warlord, like David. The revolt in the making fizzled
out. The price of the failed revolt, was the lifeless body of Judas,
hanging from a tree in a potter’s field.
According to the Mosaic instructions on the observance of
the Passover, the lamb was to be inspected by the High Priest and cohanim for
four days before the Passover slaying of the lamb. For four days, Yahusha
was also inspected, interrogated, accosted, intimidated, and challenged by the
Pharisees, scribes and lawyers.
From the 11th to the 14th of Nisan,
the Passover Lamb stood in the inner temple arena and was scrutinized by the
high priest and Sadducees. On these same four days, Yahusha stood in the
outer courts of the temple, ministering to the populous and repeatedly
responding to the inspecting challenges by the rabbinic masters of law,
halakhah, temple authority, and religious dogma, or eventually in the judgment
hall of Pilate listening to the slanderous accusations against Him.
The
first challenge
against Yahusha was on the authority of Yahusha, and who gave Him his
authority? (Matt 21:23-27, Mark,
11: 27-33, Luke 20:1-8)
Yahusha’ rebuttal was initiated by telling the parable of
the landowner of the vineyard, whose tenants slew the land owner’s son.
(Matt 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luke
20:9-19)
Yahusha then spoke a parable of the king preparing a wedding
feast for his son, the heir apparent. The invitees to the feast either
ignored the invitation or killed the servants who brought the invitation. A
guest without a wedding garment is cast out.
(Matt 22:1-14)
The
second challenge was
concerning three questions by the Pharisees, Herodians, and scribes to Yahusha
and the one question by Yahusha to his challengers.
The
first question was by
the Pharisees and Herodians concerning
paying taxes
to Caesar. (Matthew 22:
15-22, Mark 12:13-17, Luke 20:20-26)
The
second question was from
the Sadducees concerning the
resurrection
(Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27, Luke
20:27-38)
The
third question was
from the scribes about the great
commandment.
(Matthew 2:34-40, Mark 12:28-43,
Luke 20:39,40)
Yahusha then sent the challenge to the Pharisees, scribes
and Herodians concerning the Messiah’s ancestry.
(Matthew 22:41-46, Mark 12:35-37, Luke 20:41-44) In a final rebuttal, Yahusha proclaimed
the “woes” upon the scribes and pharisees.
(Matt 23:1-39, Mark 12:38-40, Luke
20:45-47)
And so while the selected Pesach lamb was being examined by
the temple authorities, during these same three days Yahusha was
scrutinized on whether his teaching were according to the halakhah of the
Torah. He was challenged on his spiritual and ancestral authority plus his
civil responsibility as a dependant of Rome. Here he met face to face
with his accusers which included: the temple lawyers, the scribal codifiers of
the law, the
Pharisees
of the House of Shammai who controlled the Synagogues in Judea in this era,
the controlling Sadducean authorities of the
House
of Ananus and the Herodians who ruled parts of Judea as administrative
representatives of Rome.
In the inner courts, the high priest could find no fault with
the selected Passover Lamb and on the 14th of Nisan, Passover, slew
him on the altar of the Lord. On the outer courts of the Temple, the
religious leaders and the civil governor could find no fault in Yahusha, and
hung Him on one of two sites: the Mount of Olives at the site of where
the “red heifer” was burnt and the ashes were collected or on Mount Moriah
where Abraham slew the goat in substitution for his son, Isaac on the altar to
the Lord.
