Passover Easter Seder

I love Easter. For years, however, I couldn't call it that in good conscience. When I was about 17 years old, I began to ask questions about my faith and about traditions surounding it. Why did we meet on Sunday? Why do Evangelicals, Anglicans, and Catholics do communion differently? Where did the Christmas tree and other holiday traditions come from? Upon discovering some answers, I became zealous for what I now understood, or at least thought I understood.
One such "understanding" was about Easter. I learned that the word "Easter" was related to "Aster," meaning star, and to my horror, related to the ancient fertility goddess Astarte, or as she was called in the Bible, Ashera.

Oh dear. All along, Christians have been wishing each other a "Happy Easter" on the holiest day of the Christian calendar! I linked the fertility goddess to other emblems of fertility, such as bunnies and eggs, and upon further research realized that pagans all over the world had indeed worshipped fertility goddesses during the spring equinox. Ancient Christians had clearly appropriated pagan festivals and "Christianized" them, never fully detaching from the original rituals and symbols.

I became an anti-"easter" activist. I made it a point to wish people a "Happy Resurrection Day!" and educated all who would let me bend their ear for a few minutes as to the ungodly origins of the word "Easter", and of the holiday itself. This continued into my marriage, and when I had children, I made a point of denying them Easter candies and egg hunts, focusing on the real reason to celebrate: Jesus!

Jesus is, of course, the reason Christians celebrate Easter, and when a believer wishes you a Happy Easter, they are of course refering to the joy of His resurrection, not the pagan goddess or fertility festival. Why was the name and ancient association so upsetting to me? Because I knew something was amiss with Easter... something was missing. Yes, it was about His death and His resurrection, not about bunnies and jelly beans, but why did my clebration of "Resurrection Day" lack power? Why did it lack appeal to my children? Why was it not memorable? Easter as a secular holiday is memorable. There are traditions that go with it: Colours. Foods. Activities. Stories. Decorations. I loved Easter as a kid. I loved getting my Easter basket and finding the eggs. I loved getting a new spring dress and hat and wearing them to church, and then having a big family meal at Grandpa's. It was very memorable and very predictable.

That was what was missing in my version of the holiday. I wanted it to be all about Jesus, but there were no traditions other than church and a meal that went with it. As my children grew, they began to feel like they were missing out on their peers' fun Easter holiday activities, so I upped my efforts, doing Resurrection based arts and crafts with them, even making Resurrection rolls, where the marshmellow entombed in pastry dough "disappears" while baking, leaving an empty "tomb."
When I attempted to decorate, it was all spring greens and flowers, which naturally led to incorporating birds nests and speckled eggs. When I once put out a moss covered stone rabbit in my table display, it suddenly struck me. This was no different than secular Easter decorations employing the dreaded fertility symbols of eggs and bunnies! Oh dear. What to do?
All this time I continued to research and study the Bible. At some point, I had the epiphany that the Last Supper was actually the feast of Passover. This began a series of connections that led to the discovery of Messianic Seder Dinners. These were fascinating, especially in the symbolic connections to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus hidden in the "Hagaddah," the dinner ceremony. I was drawn to it. What I found, however, was that those who embraced the Jewishness of scripture and practiced seder dinners tended to disconnect it from the more gentile influenced church traditions, resulting in a divide in the body. There were those who still innocently wished people Happy Easter, those who zealously insisted on Happy Resurrection Day, and those who yet insisted on Pesach Sameach, or Happy Passover in Hebrew!

Being entirely gentile, albeit a "righteous gentile," I wasn't sure if it was cultural appropriation to celebrate Passover, it being a very Jewish holiday after all. I also wasn't familiar with any of the traditions, so it was very foreign feeling to me. After all, what IS Manischewitz wine?!
I decided that I wanted to create my own celebration based on Exodus and the Gospel accounts, and began to merge Resurrection Day and Passover for a unique and personal experience of God's deliverance.

That was when the word Easter became redeemed.
First, I discovered that both ancient Jewish and Gentile Christians called their holiday celebrating Christ's death and resurrection Passover, or Pesach. That was news to me! Then, as missionaries spread the gospel up into Europe, they found that the word "Pesach" had little value where no knowledge of Judaism existed, and they began to instead refer to it as "Resurrection Day," like me. In German, the word for resurrection was "Eostre," and in English, (a Saxon Germanic language), "Easter." To this day, in both German and English, we refer to Resurrection Day by it's ancient name, Easter, meaning resurrection. Who knew? It turns out that the Astarte connection was simply poor linguistics, (Alexander Hislop's Two Babylons), and had nothing to do with stars or a Caananite goddesses. Of course, those who still wish to avoid the name Easter point out that it actually meant "dawn," as in the rising of the sun, and the Europeans even had a godess they called by that name. That, to their credit, is totally true. 

When missionaries first arrived, there was no word that meant "resurrection from the dead." Such a thing had never happened before. What they did have was a word that meant "the rising." The concept of the "death" of winter and the resurrection of plant life in the spring, as well as the "death" of the sun and it's resurrection to life every morning they did have. So this is the word that the Christian missionaries used to share the gospel with the pagan barbarians of Europe, my ancestors. Is it not fitting to recall the darkness we came out of by using the first appropriated word that became an instrument of our salvation? Thus "Easter" was redeemed and became part of my vocabulary once more.

 This year, I was not prepared for Easter. A combination of COVID19 concerns and Moriah's birthday falling so close to Easter weekend, led to a haphazard idea of simply cooking a ham on Sunday and saying Hallelujah!

But Friday morning, I was spontaneously inspired. I discovered that Passover week had begun, with most seders having already occurred on Wednesday or Thursday, but why not? I pulled out every accumulated bit of Passover and Easter decor and decorated my dining room. At around noon, I realized a dinner would be useful to go with the table setting, so I rummaged in the freezer until I discovered a large chicken from our friends' farm on Gabriola Island. I cut up lemons and picked fresh rosemary sprigs from my favourite garden bush, hauling in extra branches for the table centrepiece. I added some olive oil and sea salt, and it was in the oven.
What now? Oh, wine! I remembered that I had purchased two red wines a couple months ago with no purpose in mind. Were they still there? Yes! Now, I decided that I might as well do a full seder, so I dug around until I had found lettuce, an egg, bitter dill-mustard, apples, and fresh parsely from my garden.

 I chopped up the challa, adding red wine, honey, and nuts to it, as is traditional, and boiled the egg. I filled a little cup with salt water to dip the parsely in, and laid out the elements on a plate. I would use a chicken leg bone instead of a lamb shank, once the chicken was ready.

But matzo? Anything unleavened? Nine. Lo. Uh, uh.  What would I do? Pinterest! I would make homemade matzo bread! Now I was really into it. I never could have done this had there been anything, literally anything, else to do. But thanks to the nasty coronavirus, I was entirely available to pursue my Passover Easter Seder as much as I pleased!

I used spelt, (another bonus! store-bought matzo is made with wheat, my nemesis), olive oil, and sea salt. It's so simple.

You knead it together, roll it out, poke lots of little holes in it, and bake it at 500F until it's crisp. I made four. Three were set aside for the Haggadah; my favourite part of the meal is the breaking and eating of the afikomen (the middle matzo) along with the third cup of Redemption. This is the part of the meal that Jesus instituted as the "Lord's supper," or communion. The afikomen represents Jesus! If you've never looked into the symbolism of a seder dinner, do so! There is too much for me to explain here, and there is a wealth of information online. Just type in Messianic Seder Dinner and see what comes up.

Just then, friends showed up at the door. I was torn. Do I invite them in or practice social distancing? I decided to at least show them my set up and matzo bread. I was quite pleased with it and friend starved. It was nice to have someone other than family to share my pretty table display with. Then, suddenly the chicken was done. I whipped up a colourful vegetable salad and made a decision. God brought guests to our Easter Seder; who was I to send them home? I set three more places and pulled out the Hagaddah I had just printed offline. We were going to do this!

The McKenzies and the six of us Wathens sat down and went through the whole Hagaddah, a feat we have never achieved before, (doubtless aided by the brevity of this particular version, at only 7 pages long. Some have been known to last for three hours).
It was a wonderful time and the children, (yes, the ones usually glued to a screen), genuinely enjoyed it. They asked questions (and not just the scripted ones!) and made connections to relevant Biblical passages, my 15 year old noting with some excitement how the breaking of the matzo and drinking the cup was so much like communion! Just so. The chicken was delicious, as was the matzo, salad, challah, and wine, and everyone but my nine year old even liked the bitter herbs! It was truly the best Easter/Passover we have ever had, and it was entirely spontaneous... down to the guests.

But, now as I look back on it, I think it was planned. Nothing ever turns out so perfectly by accident. I suspect 'Wathen Seder' was jotted down on God's calendar. In fact, after dinner, as I was cleaning up and our guests had left, my oldest came back into the dining room and looked around in the dark. "Mom, I really felt like God was here tonight. Like, I felt His presence. Thank you for doing this." Talk about heart melting! I nearly cried. God did show up. All day. We, He and I, put it together. I may be creative, but this was unprecedented. This was God.

Happy Easter, friends...

and next year in Jerusalem!