'Your Passover Invitation' Is A Call To Jewish-Christian Comity

Biblical Excavations, a division of The Isaiah Projects, has just released a free digital resource for Christians celebrating what it calls the Festival of Freedom. The resource is titled Your Passover Invitation. “We wanted to help Christians identify with Exodus narrative of 3,300 years ago as part their biblical memory,” David Nekrutman said, the founder of Biblical Excavations. He added, “I have often found that there is a disconnect with the stories of the Hebrew Bible as part of Christian identity. This is a way to bridge that gap.”

Some Christians during Eastertide mark the Jewish holiday of the Passover, when God preserved the Jews as they left Egypt and head back to the land of their fathers in present-day Israel. Elements of the traditional Passover meal are associated with Jesus’ sacrifice and suffering. In the Catholic and Orthodox perspective, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ during the Mass or Divine Liturgy. A release from The Isaiah Projects said: "Although The Last Supper took place on Passover, and the wine and unleavened bread (Matzah) from that meal would become the elements of Communion. “Jesus’ celebration of Passover was about the event that took place 1,300 years prior with the slavery and redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt,” observed Nekrutman.

Nekrutman is one of the Jewish advisors to The Chosen, the popular series on television. He is the first Orthodox Jew to graduate from a Pentecostal Christian university's graduate theology program - Oral Roberts University. He was made Goodwill Ambassador for Jewish-Christian Relations by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Department of World Religions. As an Orthodox Jew, Nekrutman has served the calling of Jewish-Christian relations for nearly 25 years.

Isaiah Projects produces resources for Christians to understand the Judaic roots of their faith. The purpose of Biblical Excavations is creating a homeschool Bible curriculum that "fuses critical thinking skills with the study of Scripture. A release said that  "our Passover Invitation utilizes a script that explores the themes of biblical memory, covenantal time, and the importance of narrative to help Christian families reenact a past biblical redemptive episode in the present moment." It can be accessed here: https://www.biblicalexcavations.com/your-passover-invitation.