Seders growing popular among church groups

DEBRA COHEN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

"I'll talk about how Jesus is our Passover lamb, that through his shed blood, Jesus passed over our sins, and how it liberates us from our bondage to sin," he said in an interview. Afterward, he will give his congregants at the 250-member evangelical church in Windham, N.H., communion, using matzo as the Eucharist.

"We wouldn't do the seder if we weren't going to give it a Christological overlay," he said, adding that his congregation wants to "celebrate the various Jewish holidays and then show how we believe those holidays have been fulfilled through Christ."

Stuart is one of a growing number of ministers and priests from nearly all denominations who are hosting Passover seders in their churches. This growing trend reflects an expanding fascination with the Jewish origins of Jesus and the likelihood that a Passover meal was his Last Supper.

According to the Christian Bible, it was during that meal that Jesus foretold his death and told his disciples that the wine they drank was his blood, and that the unleavened bread they ate was his body.

There is a wide range of ways in which different Christians present the Passover seder, and there is disagreement among Christians, as well as among some Christians and some Jews, as to how a seder should be handled in a Christian context. Toward one end of the spectrum is Stuart's approach, which has been adopted by most of the evangelical churches, such as some Presbyterians, which hold seders. Most mainline Protestant denominations have member churches that define themselves as theologically conservative and evangelical, though the majority in those movements are not.

The so-called Messianic groups, Jews who are theologically evangelical Christians, put even more of a Christological slant on the Passover seder than Stuart. Some Messianic seder leaders hold up a matzo, point to its holes and read from John's Gospels how Jesus was pierced by the Roman soldiers, said Marvin Wilson, a professor of biblical and theological studies at Gordon College, an evangelical Christian college in Wenham, Mass. That approach "may be reading too much into the seder," said Wilson, because "there's no clear New Testament validation for that interpretation."

For Julius Ciss, executive director of Canadian Jews for Judaism, an anti-missionary group, "Pesach is probably the most accessible holiday for Christians to use as hooks for the Jew." Ciss said evangelical Christians use Passover "to elevate their appreciation of their Lord's Supper, and as a tool by which they can catch the potential Jewish convert off guard."

Ciss, who was a "Messianic Jew" for five years, said he was always surprised at how many Jews attended seders at evangelical churches and "Messianic" congregations. "Jews can find it very compelling, especially if they have experiences going back to childhood of the seder being conducted in Hebrew when no one at the table understood its meaning," he said.

The church seders are condensed, in English, and led "by an enthusiastic orator with a lot of charisma," he said. "The service is preceded by many Hebrew songs, the food is wonderful, and sometimes there is even Israeli dancing and people wearing talleisim (prayer shawls)."

"It makes it very seductive, so any guilt a Jew might have felt is totally assuaged when they feel like it's more Jewish than ever to do it," Ciss said. "It's all done to make them feel less guilty about being Christian."

The Messianic orientation "completely distorts the meaning" of the seder, said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee. "They'll say that their liberation is through Yehoshua the Moshiach" instead of through God, Rudin said. "I've seen it written in their materials that Judaism is like Egypt, and Jesus gives you the freedom to break through."

Debra Cohen writes from New York.