“Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8).
Some of the most important moments in the Bible have a strange way of becoming the most familiar to us. Passover is one of them. Most Christians know the outline of the story. Israel is trapped in Egypt. A lamb is sacrificed. Blood is brushed across the doorposts. Families sit inside their homes while judgment moves through the land.
It’s one of Scripture’s great redemption scenes, and yet it can quietly become part of the furniture of our faith. We know it. We believe it. But it no longer startles us. It no longer presses in on the way we live.
The apostle Paul refuses to let Passover sit quietly on the shelf. Writing to the Corinthians about a very messy situation in their church, Paul suddenly reaches all the way back to that night in Egypt and drops a sentence that should make us stop in our tracks: “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Now, that’s not just a clever illustration. Paul is saying something far bigger than that. He’s telling the church that the entire Passover story — every lamb, every drop of blood, every hurried meal eaten with sandals on — was always pointing somewhere. It was pointing to Jesus.
To see why, we have to go back to Exodus 12. Israel had been living under Pharaoh’s oppression for generations. Slavery had become normal life. But on that night, God was about to act. Judgment would fall on Egypt, and the people of God would walk free.
But there was a problem.
Judgment does not politely skip over sinners.
If God’s justice swept through Egypt unchecked, Israel would not survive the night any more than Egypt would. So God provided a substitute. Every family was told to take a lamb, an unblemished one, and sacrifice it. The blood of that lamb was brushed onto the doorposts of the house, and that blood meant something.
When judgment came through the land, God would see the blood and pass over that home. The lamb died so the firstborn could live. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
The Exodus was never the final rescue. It was a rehearsal. The real Passover was still to come. And on the cross, it arrived. Just as the lamb stood between Israel and judgment, Christ now stands between the people of God and the wrath our sins deserve.
But unlike the lambs in Egypt which had to be sacrificed again and again every year, Jesus dies once. And that one sacrifice is enough. Judgment has passed over God’s people forever. But Paul doesn’t bring up Passover simply to explain the cross. He brings it up because of how Christians live.
Because for Paul, Passover is not just something we believe. It is something we live. That is why he immediately says, “Cleanse out the old leaven.” And suddenly we’re talking about bread. It might seem like a strange turn in the conversation, until you remember what came after the Passover night.
Once Israel walked out of Egypt, something else happened immediately. God told them to clean their houses. Not with brooms and dustpans, but with attention to something far smaller: leaven.
For seven days, every trace of yeast had to be removed from their homes. No leavened bread. No hidden crumbs of yesterday’s dough. Nothing that carried the old fermentation of Egypt. Why? Because leaven has a way of spreading. You don’t need much of it. A small piece works its way through the whole batch. Before long, the entire loaf is affected. Paul knows that.
And when he looks at what is happening in Corinth, he sees something that should worry every church: sin that people have learned to tolerate. Paul reaches for the Passover story again and says, “Cleanse out the old leaven.” Don’t miss his order of reasoning. Paul does not say, clean yourselves up so that Christ might become your Passover.
He says something even more profound: “Cleanse out the old leaven — as you really are unleavened.” In other words: live like what you already are. That’s the logic of the gospel. Christ redeems his people first. Then he calls them to live like redeemed people. Grace comes before transformation.
This is where Passover stops being ancient history and starts becoming everyday Christianity. Because when Paul says, “Let us therefore celebrate the festival,” he’s not talking about a week on the Jewish calendar. He’s talking about the whole shape of the Christian life.
The church now lives in the long aftermath of Passover. Christ has been sacrificed. Judgment has passed over us. The doorposts of our lives have been marked by the blood of the Lamb.
The question is no longer simply, do we believe the story? The question is: Will we live like people who have been passed over by grace?
Eric Russ serves as pastor of outreach at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina.