Passover ends at sunset and The Feast of Unleavened Bread begins and lasts for 7 days. This began when the Israelites fled from Egypt, they made bread to take with them on the Exodus but did not have time to let the dough rise (leaven). The Feast of Unleavened Bread is to be celebrated and points us to the time in Exodus when the Israelites were freed as slaves from Egypt.

As it’s so closely related to Passover, the names of the two holidays are often interchanged. During Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Jewish people remove all leaven from their homes and eat unleavened bread, or matzah. Leaven in Scripture is often symbolic of sin because of the way it spreads, perpetuates itself, and puffs things up. Because of Jesus, we Christians can be released from sin!

This feast is the first of the 3 pilgrimage feasts that the Jews always made pilgrimage to The Temple in Jerusalem to attend. It was at this feast that Jesus when he was 12 years old, got separated from his parents, and thinking he was with friends they started home without him, when they realized he was missing, they went back to Jerusalem searching everywhere and found him in The Temple. So Jesus attended this feast. (Our Gospel reading).

Three instructions were given for the observance of the Feast:-

1. Special sacrifices were to be offered in the Temple each day of the feast.
2. The 1st and 7th days of the Feast (no matter what day of the week it was) were to be considered Sabbath's and no regular work was to be done by the people.
3. No leaven a.k.a. Yeast was to be eaten by anyone, so no regular bread. Instead they would eat bread made without yeast or rising agents. Passover, matzah bread or our modern version, wraps or pita bread. But it went to a greater extreme, not only was no yeast to be in the food they eat at this time but all yeast was to be removed from every home and none found within the borders of the entire country.

Unleavened Bread, or bread without yeast has another name, The Jews call it, 'The Bread of Suffering” a reminder of the great suffering of slavery endured by their ancestors in Egypt. We call it “the body of Christ” because the Passover Seder was the last meal Jesus ate before his death, 'The Last Supper' and he took the 'Bread of Suffering” and broke it and said, “this is my body, broken for you”. The next day, his body, endured the torture and suffering of the cross. It was no accident that Jesus chose the bread of Passover, symbolic of sinlessness (without yeast) and suffering, as a representation of his body.