Why Did Jesus Die At Easter?

Unsurprisingly, I wanted to offer an Easter reflection this weekend, and the question that sprang to mind was this one. I suppose the obvious answer would be a Calvinist-friendly “because God willed it” (backed up by Romans 5:6: “Christ came at just the right time and died for us”). But while that’s clearly a “yes,” what I’m really after is, why at Easter specifically? The sense of the Greek word (kairos) seems to be “the appropriate” time. So what was it about Easter that made it appropriate, versus any other time in the year?

Clearly, there may have been no particular reason in God’s sovereign design for the timing at Easter, but it seems somewhat unlikely. Let’s take the more logical approach of assuming that there was, indeed, a significance to Jesus’ death and resurrection occurring at that time.

If we allow context to take its rightful place in relation to this question, the first thing we notice is that Easter corresponds to the Jewish festival of Passover. There were several Jewish festivals each year at the time of Jesus. The three principal ones were all ‘pilgrimage’ festivals, when faithful Jews would journey to the temple in Jerusalem: the springtime Pesach (Passover), the summertime harvest festival of Shavuot, and Sukkot in the autumn.

Slightly confusingly for the outsider, not only do we see festivals and events having more than one name but also at times following on from one another and celebrating/memorialising more than one thing.

For example, Sukkot is also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths. It begins five days after Yom Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, lasting two days, which begins ten days of repentance leading up to Yom Kippur.

Shavuot, meanwhile, is the Feast of Weeks (from the Hebrew word for ‘weeks’ or ‘seven’), otherwise known as the Day of the First Fruits. We know it as Pentecost, from the Greek word pentekostē, meaning fiftieth, coming as it does on the fiftieth day (or, seven weeks—a ‘week of weeks’) after Passover.

Confused? Hang in there, and keep these connections in mind.

The point is that it would have been entirely natural in God’s providence for the death and resurrection of Jesus to be timed to coincide with one of these three major festivals. Firstly, Jerusalem would be crowded with faithful Jewish pilgrims at those times. Secondly, Jesus’ Jewish followers would have been sure to read a significance into the timing—a divinely-intended correspondence between the efficacy of Jesus’ death and resurrection and what the original festival was commemorating.

In terms of the candidates, Shavuot is now best-known for celebrating the giving of Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai after the Israelites left Egypt at Passover. The timing could therefore have been linked to Jesus as the ‘new Torah’ hinted in Jeremiah 31:33; celebrating the ‘new covenant’ by analogy to—and in continuity with—the prior covenants. However, that link to Torah really only began in rabbinic tradition following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Prior to that, in the time of Jesus, it was an agricultural festival celebrating the giving to God of the ‘first fruits’ of the coming harvest. Could that have become a link to Jesus’ resurrection as first fruits of our future resurrection? Certainly—Paul uses that analogy in 1 Corinthians 15:20; 23. But it appears God was saving the first fruits analogy for something else.           

This leaves us with two (though we’ll come back to Shavuot).

There are two fascinating things about Sukkot. The first is that it celebrates the Jewish New Year—how easily could that have been linked to ‘new life’ in and through Jesus for his followers? 2 Corinthians 5:17 or Romans 6:4, anyone? But even more so is the potential to make a link to Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement. If Jesus’ sacrificial death was “all about sin” (as an offering for sin) then what better to correspond it to in Jewish festival terms?

Except that, as we know, that’s not what happened. The festival chosen to identify with Jesus’ sacrifice was Passover—which both preceded sin offerings in the subsequent Torah and in which the sacrifice involved was of a different kind: ratifying God’s covenantal commitment to Israel, signifying his protection as “covered by the blood of the lamb” (daubed on the lintels and doorposts to identify them as his people as the angel of death ‘passed over’) and their imminent release from slavery—captivity to the hostile power of Pharoah. The analogy—compared to that which the festival of the Day of Atonement would bring to mind—is entirely different.

Release from slavery as a picturing of Jesus’ saving work is attested to by many more New Testament verses—all of the ones that speak of Jesus “ransoming” us, “redeeming” us, or “paying the price” for us are speaking of that—than the few which picture it in “sacrifice for sin” language (though that can certainly be found—for example, Hebrews 9:26 and 10:12). In any event, it clearly seems that the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection in terms of a parallel in what it accomplished is being signposted towards Passover rather than Yom Kippur.

A now-retired faculty member at the London School of Theology first pointed me to this (specifically, the surprising choice not to link to the Day of Atonement—surely a divine oversight, if Jesus’ death was “all about sin” as most evangelical renderings of the good news would have it). He had an idea—for which I can find no substantiation, so it remains imaginative speculation—that Jesus was born on Yom Kippur. That would be ‘nice’ (certainly from an evangelical perspective), but to my knowledge, it remains out of reach.      

Finally, I said we would come back to Shavuot (Pentecost). Given the time involved in travelling in the Ancient World, pilgrims who would come to Jerusalem for Passover would likely stay around for Shavuot (a bit like we might between Christmas and New Year). But either way, since both were pilgrimage festivals, it explains why on the Day of Pentecost Acts 2:5 tells us “there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem” at the time. So, not only was Jerusalem jam-packed with faithful Jews at the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection at Pesach (Passover)—able to take the message to diaspora Jewish communities in the Mediterranean world—the same was true of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. So there was a “double helping” of good news to take back in that divine timing.

Moreover, Shavuot was the Day of the First Fruits. Paul describes the presence of the Holy Spirit as first fruits in Romans 8:23 (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:5), which is what we see happening on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. Only on this occasion, God is the one giving first fruits of a harvest to come, rather than people giving to God. Since the first fruits are the divine presence, that tells us the nature of the future harvest, which is pictured (all these things are communicated in pictures!) in the new heaven and earth in Revelation 21:3: “God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” The passage continues in verse 4 by picturing what that presence of God will bring: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” The presence of the Holy Spirit as first fruits gets a lot more attention from charismatic Christians concerning his gifts than it does in relation to his desire to wipe away tears and pain during this present time of “the old order of things.” We will do well to align ourselves with that element of the Spirit’s mission as well, as indeed the early community of Jesus followers anointed by the Spirit appear to have done, from the evidence of Acts 2:42–47 and Acts 4:32–37.

Footnote: When I use the phrase (not) “all about sin,” I am not suggesting that Jesus’ death was not at all about sin. Far from it. Sin is a major enemy of human well-being, with great destructive power and consequences. I’m saying that sin is one element in Jesus’ work—one facet—which in turn needs to be understood in multiple ways (healing, defeating, taking away, etc.). That the New Testament offers us many pictures, models, and metaphors to understand the width and depth of what Jesus achieved for us speaks to that broader recognition. Jesus “saves” through the entirety of his incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension (not solely his death). Moreover, we need to understand sin more broadly than just a list of things each of us has personally done wrong—through a “law court” metaphor—but that’s for another day (or read about it in Reading The Bible With Its Writers and Telling The Old, Old Story).