Today at our Eucharist, we will re-enact the Jewish Passover Meal, or ‘Seder’. The Passover Seder is a ritual feast at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover and was the backdrop to the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The ritual involves the retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from ancient Egypt, taken from the Book of Exodus.

We are all familiar with the story. The Egyptian Pharoah orders that all first-born Israelite males must be killed, as there were too many Israelites living in Egypt. But God appears to Moses and asks him to go to Pharaoh and demand he lets the Israelites go. But Pharaoh refuses, and so God sends a series of plagues on Egypt, the last of which consists of the angel of death killing Egyptian first-born children.

But the angel is unable to distinguish between Israelite and Egyptian children. So, to protect their own first-born, the Israelites mark the doors of their homes with lamb’s blood, so the angel of death will know to pass over them.

As well as retelling the Exodus story, Seder customs include drinking four cups of wine, eating matzah, partaking of symbolic foods, and celebrating one’s freedom.

The picture shows a 19th century Ukrainian print of the Seder table.