What's Up With the Seder Meal

[Ryan&Amber2013]

Okay, I'm getting really confused with some reformed people. What's up with the now Seder (passover) meals Presbyterians are doing? I thought these things are clearly not compatible with reformed teaching. Why have Communion and the Passover? Jesus fulfilled it. I guess I'm too narrow minded for the modern church. Eehhh...

 

[Ploutos]

Although I have never yet done so, I would observe or participate in such an activity as an educational or historical exercise to help shed light on some of the Old Testament stories. This presumes, of course, that the Seder meal is done similarly to how it was done in the OT, or in such a way that the differences would be easy to explain. In that vein, it would be similar to acting out a Bible story or building a cardboard mockup of the tabernacle.

Once you attach liturgical or religious significance to it, though, I would say it becomes somewhat questionable. I'd want to know what the motivation is. At the very least, I would think it needs to be done with some sort of explicit teaching on the other ceremonial obligations imposed on Israel under the Mosaic law and the fact that all such things - including the Seder meal - have been fulfilled in Christ.

If it's just another fad by Christians seeking to fill the theological/spiritual/intellectual/liturgical vacuum left by modern evangelicalism - along the lines of Protestant churches celebrating Ash Wednesday or doing foot-washings - well then, thanks for the invite but I'll be at home eating pork and listening to another episode of "Larger for Life".

 

[Joshua]

Vanity. Will-worship. Voluntary "humility." A regression to the once-commanded shadows pointing to Christ, now fulfilled and passed, showing a dissastisfaction with the fulness of Christ our Head, His ordinances & commandments.

"After that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain," (Gal 4).

 

[Sam Jer]

I suppose it must have gotten really bad if it got all the way to Presbyterians.

I assume it started in the Messianic and Hebrew Roots movements, spread from there to Dispensational Evangelicalism (possibly with influence from people who visited or studied in Israel and were effected by Israeli Messianic Judaism, which celebrates the Rabbinic liturgical calendar but is often closer to American Evangelicalism than foreign Messianics), and from there somehow to some unprincipled Presbyterians.

Theologically, there are two problems here:

1. The Temple Feasts, of which Passover was one, were given until the Seed should come. They were signs and seals pointing to a future redeemer. However, the only redeemer of God's elect already came, and so we need a smaller number of simpler signs & seals pointing backwards towards the redeemer who came, died, rose, ascended and shall return to judge.

2. The Rabbinic Seder tradition has very little to do with God's original commandment. Sure, they kept the unleavened bread and bitter herbs, but there are a ton of new elements and traditions of human origin and one thing is starkly missing - the actual passover! There is no lamb for there is no temple, and the idiots who try to get sheep to the right mountain every year are arrested for bringing livestock to a mosque without permission.


We have no warrant introduce fake versions of temple feasts out of plastic and human imagination, and it doesn't matter if we call it Pesakh or Easter.

 

[SolaScriptura]

I've killed it wherever I've gone. It's the sad (unprescribed) meal of a people who missed the day of their visitation and is therefore beneath the dignity of those who, by virtue of faith in Christ, are called to keep the Lord's Supper as the sacramental meal of the New Covenant, in perpetual celebration and remembrance of Christ's finished work on our behalf.

Further, since all the writings describing and explaining the Seder are from later than the time of Christ, I don't accept unquestioningly that the meal Christ shared in the upper room was a Seder.

 

[NaphtaliPress]

Christ fulfilled the OT feasts, which at least had the pedigree of God's command. Christ also fulfilled what those foreshadowed. There is one prescribed holy meal as there is one prescribed holy day for the NT church.

 

[John Nyberg]

I've killed it wherever I've gone

 

[JvMill]

They did these at my Nazarene church growing up. Most memorable part was my dad daring me to eat a spoonful of horseradish.

Ouch

 

[Ploutos]

They did these at my Nazarene church growing up. Most memorable part was my dad daring me to eat a spoonful of horseradish.

Ouch

Food is just something you put underneath the horseradish to hold it up.

The same philosophy goes for hot sauce.

 

[Pictet]

Although I have never yet done so, I would observe or participate in such an activity as an educational or historical exercise to help shed light on some of the Old Testament stories. This presumes, of course, that the Seder meal is done similarly to how it was done in the OT, or in such a way that the differences would be easy to explain.

Part of the issue, of course, is not merely that we don't know how the meal was done in OT times; we don't, to my knowledge, have good information about how it was done in NT times.

I've sat through a good number of sermons explaining how you need to understand the Seder meal to understand the last supper.

But the earliest evidence for much of it (things like the four cups) comes from the Mishnah, so c. 200AD, when Judaism has been substantially altered by the fall of the temple, the end of the Sadducees, the new dominance of the Pharisees, etc etc.

If the Bible writers expected that level of familiarity with the tradition, they'd have written it down.

 

[darrellmaurina]

Food is just something you put underneath the horseradish to hold it up.

The same philosophy goes for hot sauce.

Unless you are Korean, and the hot sauce and kimchi and even stronger things are the whole purpose of the meal...

Oh, but maybe that was your point!

More seriously, I really appreciate @Sam Jer and his comments here. It has been at least 22 years since the last time I attended a church with a Seder meal, but I honestly hadn't considered the differences between the Seder and communion. The churches I've seen that had Seder meals regarded them as being an ethnic Jewish version of communion, not in principle much different from using rice cakes rather than bread in some Asian churches, particularly in the 1800s when bread as we use it in the West was rare and strange to new believers but rice cakes made sense.

This is not a subject I've spent much time considering. The people who were having Seder meals were certainly from a more evangelical background than me, often connected to Jews for Jesus, but at least one of the ministers involved was theologically Reformed and up until Sam's post I hadn't really thought through the issues. I've seen plenty of "looser Reformed" churches having Seders though generally not in places where I was living at the time.

Way too many Reformed churches are loose with many things about the Lord's Supper and simply have not been taught, so it shouldn't surprise me that a Reformed church that doesn't have a good understanding of the Lord's Supper will add things to it that don't belong, some of which are probably far worse and have less biblical justification than the Seder.