The road to Easter It is not possible to approach the paschal mystery in an integral way without first knowing the process of the Passion and Death of Christ.
Each step narrated in the Gospels, and confirmed again and again by archaeology and documentary sources of the time, takes on full meaning in the light of faith and history.
Penance and Lent
Catholics began a few days ago the season of LentIt is a time not so much - or not only - of penance but, like Advent for Christmas, of preparation.
At first, in the early Church, Lent was conceived as a time of greater preparation for Easter in which the catechumens who would receive baptism during the Easter Vigil. The practice of fasting was directed above all to them and the fasting itself did not have a penitential purpose, but an ascetic-illuminative one.
Only later, from the third century onwards, the experience of the Lenten season was extended to the whole ecclesial community, especially to penitents (those who had committed serious sins and needed to be reconciled and readmitted into the community, and those who aspired to greater perfection). For this reason, they began to be assigned a special place in the church, close to that of the catechumens, and outside the sanctuary. There they remained dressed in mourning (a practice still in force among the confraternities of penitents), with their skulls shaved and covered with ashes until Holy Thursday. On this day, the penitent was solemnly reconciled by the imposition of hands by the bishop or priest and a prayer imploring God to readmit the sinner to the community from which he had separated.
Moving decisively towards Easter
However, a fundamental characteristic of both ancient and modern Lent is not so much the cultivation of penitential practices such as fasting, but living these practices with reference to Christ.
The forty days of Lent, with the practices observed during them, have the fundamental purpose of commemorating the forty days of Jesus in the desert before the beginning of his public mission, forty days in which Christ fasted and was exposed to temptation.
St. Francis de Sales writes that fasting in itself is not a virtue. Lent itself, therefore, is a mortification. "virtuous" only if it has as its goal the final push towards Easter; as St. Paul would say about the athletes who prepare their body to obtain a corruptible crown, while Christians temper their body and spirit through penance to obtain an incorruptible one.
In the Gospel of Luke (Paul's disciple), we read that, "when the days were completed in which he was to be taken up to heaven, Jesus made the decision to go to Jerusalem." therefore, towards his Passover.
It is interesting to note that the Greek text of Luke uses the expression "ἐστήριξε τὸ πρόσωπον-.stêrizéin ton prosopon".i.e, "harden the face" to head towards Jerusalem, which here has the meaning of taking a firm decision, with an attitude that we could even say, hostile.
If we also take into account the reference to the prophet Isaiah, in which the prophet himself proclaims: "so I hardened my face like flint, knowing that I would not be disappointed."We can go back to the original Hebrew expression which, literally, would be: "I hardened my face like flint.". We know that flint, lapis ignis in Latin, is a particular type of stone used to produce the sparks needed to ignite firearms, but also, in ancient times, simply to light fires. To produce sparks, however, the stone must be struck.
Luke also uses the verb stêrizéin in another passage of his Gospel, when Jesus, addressing Peter, orders him to confirm (stêrizéin) to his brethren once he had repented, and in Acts, when speaking of Paul confirming all the disciples in the faith.
In fact, in imitation of Christ and his disciples, in the period leading up to Easter, Christians and catechumens seem to be called upon to "harden like flint", that is, to move resolutely towards the goal of their journey, which is not only Jerusalem, but eternal life, trusting in God and knowing that they will not be disappointed.
Easter
We know that the culmination of Jesus Christ's mission was his Passover, which would take place on the Jewish festival of that name.
Passover was one of the main celebrations of the Jewish year, in fact, it was the main one. It was part of the so-called "pilgrimage festivities".together with Pentecost (Shavu'òt) and the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkôt). On the occasion of these three feasts, every male Israelite who had reached a certain age was obliged to go to the Temple in Jerusalem.
This holiday was, and still is for today's Jews, the commemoration of the passage (passover) of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt to freedom and the Promised Land, a step that was achieved through the sacrifice of the firstborn of the Egyptians and the lambs of the Jews.
In Hebrew, however, passover also means the sacrificial victim, a lamb without blemish that was sacrificed in place of the firstborn of each family. Therefore, the Passover is also the lamb.
The Easter Calendar
Passover (Hebrew, Pesach) is celebrated in the month of Nisan (between mid-March and mid-April), on the afternoon of the 14th, in conjunction with the "Feast of the Unleavened Bread" or unleavened bread, which was celebrated from the 15th to the 21st. These eight days (from the 14th to the 21st) were therefore called both Passover and Unleavened.
At the time of Jesus, the Jewish calendar was quite elastic, an elasticity on which probably depends a discrepancy between the synoptic gospels and that of John.
Indeed, the official Temple calendar was not accepted throughout Palestine and by all Jewish sects.
In addition to this luni-solar calendar there was a different liturgical calendar, corresponding to the ancient priestly calendar of 364 days, later replaced in 167 B.C. by the Babylonian lunar calendar of 350 days.
In addition, there was also a dispute between Pharisees and Sadducees (specifically, the Boethians, i.e., the followers of the family of Simon Boethius, high priest between 25 B.C. and 4 A.D.). The latter used to move certain dates of the calendar by one day according to the year, especially when the Passover fell on Friday or Sunday.
It so happened, for example, that the Sadducees (the class of the "high priests") and the wealthy classes, if the Passover fell on Friday, postponed by one day the sacrifice of the lamb and the Passover supper (which were on the previous day, Thursday), while all the people, who used to take the Pharisees as a reference, followed the Pharisaic calendar, continuing with the sacrifice of the lamb and the Passover supper on Thursday.
In the year in which Jesus died, Passover regularly fell on Friday, although John, perhaps following the ancient priestly calendar, writes that this day was Parasceve. The priests mentioned in his Gospel postponed the Passover meal by one day (that Friday was Parasceve for them). Jesus and the disciples, on the other hand, seem to have followed the Pharisaic calendar.
The Jewish celebration
As of 10 or 11 a.m. on the morning of the 14th of Nisan, every small piece of leavened bread (jametz) was to disappear from all Jewish homes. From that moment on and during the following seven days, it was obligatory to consume only unleavened bread. Also on the 14th, in the afternoon, the immolation of the lambs took place in the inner court of the Temple. The head of the family was in charge of taking the victim to be sacrificed to the Temple, and then brought it back home skinned and stripped of some internal parts.
The blood, on the other hand, was given to the priests, who sprinkled it on the altar of burnt offerings.
It is almost impossible to imagine the stench and the tumult that was created on those occasions. There were tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, in fact, of Jews from both Palestine and the Diaspora who flocked to Jerusalem for the feast; so many, in fact, that shifts had to be established so that all could perform the sacrifice of the lamb.
The historian Flavius Josephus made a calculation on behalf of the Roman authorities in the time of Nero (in the year 65 approximately), showing that only on the evening of the 14th of Nisan of that year no less than 255,600 lambs were sacrificed.
The slaughtered lambs were roasted that evening for the Passover feast, which began after sunset and lasted at least until midnight. At each banquet there were no less than ten people and no more than twenty, all reclining on low couches concentric to the table.
At least four ritual cups of wine circulated, in addition to other non-ritual cups that could pass before the third ritual, but not between the third and the fourth. All the participants in the banquet had to drink from the same cup (kiddush ritual), a large cup.
The dinner began with the pouring of the first cup and the recitation of a prayer to bless the banquet and the wine.
This was followed by unleavened bread, bitter herbs and a special fruit and nut sauce (haroset) in which the herbs were dipped. After this, the roast lamb was served and then it was the turn of the second cup. The head of the family would then make a short speech explaining the meaning of the feast, usually in response to a question from a son. For example, the son might ask: "Why is tonight different from the others?" o "Why is it that every other night we go to sleep after dinner and tonight we stay up?". And so, the head of the family, in accordance with what is an imperative duty of the Jewish people, memory (zikkaron), reminded the family of the benefits God had bestowed on Israel by delivering them from Egypt.
Then the roasted lamb, together with the bitter herbs dipped in the sauce, was eaten in haste, while the second cup was circulated. This was followed by the recitation of the first part of the Hallel (hence the term alleluia), a hymn composed of Psalms 113 to 118 (which, in the Catholic Church, are also sung during the Liturgy of the Hours on Sundays) and a blessing was recited with which the banquet proper began, preceded by the washing of hands.
After pouring the third ritual cup, a prayer of thanksgiving and the second part of the hymn are recited. Hallel. Finally, the fourth ritual cup was poured.
It is interesting to conclude with the aforementioned identification, at Easter, between the "step" from slavery to freedom and the sacrificial victim, a lamb without blemish sacrificed in the place of the firstborn, which, in the Christian vision, coincides with the identification between the "step" from death to life and a new Lamb without blemish, sacrificed in place of sinners.
Writer, historian and expert on Middle Eastern history, politics and culture.
The road to Easter 
