TRENTON – A small town in Missouri might be the last place you’d expect to find a Passover plate of bitter herbs (maror), apples and nuts (charoset), and shank bone (zeroa) in celebration of Passover. And students from the local two-year college might be the ones you’d least expect to be holding those plates. But Campus Missionary Christina Boatright felt that a seder was exactly what the kids in her ministry needed this spring.
“A seder gives a more accurate depiction of what Jesus’s last meal was like and why they were breaking bread and drinking wine,” she says. “We don’t have a good understanding of any of that culturally as Christians.”
Boatright, who lived in Israel among Messianic Jews in the summer of 2018, compiled knowledge from research, interviews, and her time in Israel to compile a meal plan and accompanying study. She found that doing a seder “is kind of difficult when you’re in Midwest Missouri,” she says. “I had to do some supplemental work because lamb is surprisingly hard to find, so we did chicken thighs instead of lamb shank. Outside of that, everything we ate was part of the seder plate.”
After spending a day preparing the traditional Passover food, Boatright gathered with roughly fifteen students in the BSU building. She explained that the meal they were eating was like what Jesus would have eaten during the Last Supper. She explained the context and significance of each element on the table.
“I talked about what each piece means, what it meant to them during the Old Testament culturally and how it represents Christ currently,” says Boatright. “Each piece has parts of that. Apples and nuts were part of not being slaves again and how Christ makes us free from slavery from sin. Different things like that—the broken lamb, the lamb had to be sacrificed for us. All of that is very relevant for us Christians too.”
After they ate, Boatright led the students through a focused time of reflecting on the death and resurrection of Christ. She wanted to help them understand the significance of Communion and how to prepare for it. Part of Communion, she says, is supposed to be dealing with sin and preparing the heart to receive the body and blood of Christ. “I think a lot of young Christians don’t understand why that’s so important,” she says. “It’s our remembrance of our salvation.”
To practice that, she had the guys and gals separate for a time of confession of sin and prayer over one another. This, to her, was the greatest win of the evening. Confessing sin and praying together isn’t an abnormal habit for their ministry; they often conclude their Bible studies this way. But “this one was just really potent, confessing sin more than just ‘I didn’t read my Bible today,’” she says. “It was really cool for me to see this group of guys at the table—all different types, basketball players, baseball players, unconventional nontraditional students who are older young men in their twenties, really introverted ones, really extroverted ones—praying over one another, arms over each other.”
To her surprise, the students went back for more food, consuming the leftovers just about everything she had made, including the bitter herbs. “I kind of laughed at this,” she says. They ended the evening with an Easter egg hunt, which brought a surprising measure of hilarity to the conclusion of the event as students raced around the BSU building hunting for eggs.
The seder accomplished a powerful purpose in Boatright’s discipleship of the students: connecting the Scriptures “from Exodus to the New Testament” and linking them to Christ. “That’s really hard,” she says. “I have kids who’ve never cracked the Old Testament before. I’ve been trying when we do Bible studies to do an Old Testament and New Testament passage together. Doing the seder really connected those two for them. Passover, the reason it’s so important, is the lamb that’s sacrificed and being free from our sins. It shows how Christ fulfilled all of that once and for all.”