But don’t you think they would wonder what happened to the order of their Religious Year? Where are the Feasts? Oh, sure, the Church has feasts. But they are not just new. They are not just improved. They are complete replacements. As though the church went from DOS to Mac in one generation (if you will pardon my attempt at analogy). Put analogously another way, it is as if the church went from Thai to Tex-Mex simply because… why?
I would argue that there was a replacement of feasts, but the same basic thought behind the feasts. Let’s look first at the main Jewish feasts of New Testament times:
There were three pilgrimage feasts:
- Passover
- Pesach
- Massot
- First Fruits
- Pentecost – Shavuot
- Feast of Tabernacles – Sukkot
Other important feasts, but not every possible feast:
- Rosh Ha-Shanah – New Year Festival
- Yom Kippur – Day of Atonement
- Hanukkah – Feast of Lights or Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, commemorating events in the Book of Maccabees
- Purim – Feast of Lots, commemorating the events of the Book of Esther
Other important events mentioned in Scripture, but which are not necessarily feasts:
- Sabbath – the every week day of rest for the people, the land, and the animals
- Sabbath Year – the every seven years rest of the land
- Year of Jubilee – the forgiveness of all debts, an additional year of the rest of the land, the release of all Jewish slaves, etc. In other words, a full year of rest
But, without spending time on the details, let me just say that if one looks through those feasts, every one of them either has to do with a great salvation event of God or with the Word of God. But, every one of those feasts was fulfilled in Our Lord Jesus Christ. So, what happens in the New Testament? Well, part of what happens is the conviction that there is no necessity to celebrate the feasts because they have been fulfilled.
In the New Testament some replacements are already taking place. Every time there is a day associated with celebrating the Lord’s Supper, it is the first day of the week. Sunday takes over from the Sabbath before the New Testament is even finished. Sunday becomes the new day of rest. The Resurrection is the guarantee that, as Hebrews says, there yet remains a further day of rest that is pre-figured in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The feast of Pentecost is mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. But, it is not mentioned among Jewish believers, it is mentioned among Greek believers. This means that this Jewish feast is now being celebrated as a Christian feast of the Holy Spirit.
Again, in a development fully and completely parallel to the development of the various Jewish feast days, the great Christian feast days develop. And, they are fully parallel to the Jewish feasts in one great detail. They demonstrate the deliverance of God, but through Our Lord Jesus Christ. Rather than celebrating God’s deliverance in great historical events, they celebrate God’s deliverance in both the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the lives of the Theotokos, Our Lady, and other figures important to New Testament salvation history such as the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist.
Thus, the Christian liturgical year follows the same philosophical underpinning as the Jewish liturgical year, but is now oriented around the Messiah.
[Later edit: Scott makes the good point that, as Christians, we should teach about how the Old Testament feasts were fulfilled in the New Testament. This is an excellent point. But, he asks whether the feasts ought to still be celebrated today. The problem is that the old feasts only pointed to Christ in shadow form. Not only are they fulfilled now, but they actually do not clearly teach all that needs to be taught, and contain elements in them which might mislead believers into thinking that the older system temple and sacrifices was still valid. Thus Tertullian says: “Being, therefore, observers of seasons for these things, and of days, and months, and years, we Galaticize. Plainly we do, if we are observers of Jewish ceremonies, of legal solemnities: for those the apostle unteaches, suppressing the continuance of the Old Testament which has been buried in Christ, and establishing that of the New. But if there is a new creation in Christ, our solemnities too will be bound to be new. . .”]
Fr Ernesto: “So, what happens in the New Testament? Well, part of what happens is the conviction that there is no necessity to celebrate the feasts because they have been fulfilled.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake, Christmas has been fulfilled, but we still celebrate that! Easter: fulfilled, still celebrated (although now in America with bunnies and chocolate, but perhaps I digress).
The fulfillment in the acts of Jesus should only serve to EMPHASIZE the purposes underlying those feasts, not obviate the necessity of them.
I promise not to forget to comment on the Christian Year.
Fr Ernesto: “Sunday takes over from the Sabbath before the New Testament is even finished. Sunday becomes the new day of rest.”
Why did Peter and John (and presumably every Apostolic-generation believer) still keep the Sabbath if our Lord meant for the first day of the week to become the new Sabbath? Did the Apostles get it wrong?
Sunday only became the new day of rest when the successive generations developed amnesia about the purpose of the seventh day. As far as we know, every believer in that early time (at least, every Jewish believer) kept BOTH the Biblical Sabbath AND a first-day celebration. Once the church became almost completely gentile, we see the replacement. It seems only foreordained in hindsight.
May I emphasize that the questions I am asking are either questions that I myself am struggling through as I shuffle hesitantly down the path toward the Church, or questions that my well-intentioned and more-intelligent-than-I Evangelical co-laborers are asking and which I am not answering.
I am not pining for debate or argument at this stage in my life. I really want what I see as legitimate objections or questions to have reasonable answers.
Now, about Mary…
OK, Mary coming up in a future posting.
In the EOC, the Shabbat is still honoured: there is, technically, no fasting on Saturday (it means, in current practice, that even lent is lightened up a little). There is no prostration on Saturday *or* Sunday. There are special services for Saturday that, naturally, are not often seen in a Sunday-centred world, but they do surface in Holy Week and the day before Palm Sunday.
Shabbat is seen as a rest – a needed rest – in this world. Sunday is seen as the “8th day”, the eschaton. This “one-two” “here-eternity” hinge is the reason we have a weekend 🙂
Current research reminds us that on the Hebrew (and the Christian liturgical) calendar, the day begins at sunset. Pauline references to “on the Lord’s day” are probably Saturday night eg “preaching to midnight” makes more sense this way. (See John Koenig’s “Feast of the World’s Redemption”.)
As to the feasts being “fulfilled”, I think that may be stretching it.
I think we’re seeing a 21st century understanding being projected backwards.
St Paul clearly gave permission for the Gentile Christians to not have to follow the Jewish calendar. St John and his school, at least until the 2nd Century, were being more “Jewish” in their observance. In the second century, a crucial event happened: a council of Rabbis declared a Jewish General to be the Messiah and he led a revolt against Rome. Although the Christians found themselves on Both Sides in this war, split between Jewish Christians and their Gentile compatriots and Christians trapped in the Roman Army, both groups of Christians could agree that Bar Kochba was *not* the Messiah. Christian support of Jewish claims suddenly vanished. This is commemorated in the 19th benediction against traitors, still said in the synagogue liturgy. I think this may be the dividing point: from that moment forward the idea of doing anything on the Jewish pattern was no longer really a viable option within the now-largely Gentile Christian community. The Gentiles continued to develop their own festivals and ideas at this point – including the idea that the church was the “real” Israel and the Jews were nothing more than another group of heretics.
In my previous church experience, it seemed that the Jewishness of Christianity was entirely “forgotten”, along with any other historic sensibilities, or acknowledged but dismissed, or, in a minority of cases, acknowledged with an attempt to integrate it, but from outside rather than from inside, and thus being somewhat confusing. I was one of those in the third category for a long time; having rejected most of church history, I was nonetheless longing for a historic connection.
From what I’ve been able to gather, it was early in the second century that the final rift between Christian Jews an non-Christian Jews came, not only with the Bar Kochba rebellion, but in other ways. There were levels of discomfort on both sides before that, and it was mostly the the non-Christian Jews who ejected the Christian Jews from the Jewish communities rather than vice-versa.
In Orthodox liturgy, I see so many threads leading back to Judaism, not only to the days of the Temple, but some all the way back to the Tabernacle. The similarity/dissimilarity NT Wright talks about wrt how Jewish doctrine changed with the Resurrection is also present in what Huw describes, the Holy Table, the candlesticks, architectural orientation, etc. – and now I’m finding with the Lenten readings, as Genesis, Isaiah and Proverbs sum up the whole Tanakh. It has all been transformed post Resurrection into that which was pointed at in the years before.
Fr. Ernesto, I would be very happy to read whatever you might care to write on typology!
Dana
Orthodox catechumen
The other interesting development from “33AD” to the final rift between Judaism and the followers of the Messiah — to add to the Temple’s destruction, the Bar Kochba rebellion, and the influx of Gentiles (oh, there are many, many more wedges, to be sure) — is the language of the Scriptures. The Jews tossed out the Septuagint in favor of Hebrew-language scriptures. They also tossed out the so-called apocrypha, didn’t they, at around this time? Put another way round, they settled on their 39 Hebrew books and said it was done. Add to this the anathemas in their prayers, and you have a religion which pretty much sets itself as opposed to Christianity.
Right, Scott & Dana: the problem becomes not the sins of one, but the sins of both.
I think the Church – as we have her now – is a grace (and she should always be): it’s not that what we have is perfect, or that our history is perfect, but rather that where were are is where God has brought the church despite her history, her failures and her errors.
Nicely put Huw. When all is said and done, it is grace, grace, grace. The great Orthodox scholars all say that our part in synergy is but minuscule in comparison to God’s grace. They would probably go even farther and say that there is no comparison possible. It is His Great Mercy.
The Jesus and Jewish Feasts Collection of books is available for pre-order from Logos Bible Software. I thought you might be interested!
Jesus and Jewish Feasts Collection (3 Vols.)
When do the Sabbath Years take place in the next 20 years?
Sadly, the Sabbath Year is one of the observances that disappeared from both the Jewish and the Christian calendar.
Ah, that is one proof that the Old Covenant is ended – either failed, as an atheist would argue, or fulfilled.
On the other hand, sabbatical year is fulfilled in every Christian who lives from Providence, and that and year of jubilee in every Christian who remits large debts.
I read in a Dictionnaire Apologetique de la Foi Catholique that Hillel inventing a pilpul to curcumvent the sabbatical year was one of the items that justified Christ’s charge: “with your traditions, you annul the law”