At the beginning of the Levitical liturgical year, the people of Israel, and the multitude of nations in their midst, would observe the Passover, the Feast of Deliverance (lev. 23:5-8). Their year began with the memorial of their redemption from the house of slavery. They were what they were as a people because God had rescued them from the power of death. He had applied blood to the doorposts of their homes and passed-over them.
Six months later, in the seventh month of the year, halfway across the annual cycle from Passover, the Children of Israel celebrated the Feast of Booths (called “Sukkot”, Lev. 23:33-44). During this time the people gathered branches and made small tents or tabernacles or booths and went “camping” together all around the foot of the mountain of God, just like their forebears had done in the wilderness. This was a joyous feast, with meals and sacrifices, and songs. It was to be a sabbath-of-sabbaths smack-dab in the middle of the year.
If Passover celebrated what Yahweh had done to deliver them, Sukkot celebrated that what Yahweh had done had lasting implications for them as a people.
Now, no Christian flinches when lines or meaning are drawn between Passover and Easter. The fact that Jesus “cried-out” on the Cross just as all over Jerusalem the multitude of Passover lambs were also crying-out and being slain we find self-evident. “This (pointing to Jesus’ death) is a fulfillment of that (pointing to death of Passover Lamb)” we say. It’s good exegesis. The Yahweh who delivered Israel from the House of Slavery under Pharaoh has come down in the Person of Jesus to deliver the whole world from the Dominion of Sin and Death.
What lies “on the other side of the annual cycle” from Easter in the Christian year? Allhallows —the collection of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. Like Sukkot, the people of God stand halfway across the calendar and look back to God’s deliverance and celebrate that what happened then makes us a peculiar kind of people now. Allhallows faces the darkening year and says “What happened at Easter was not a dream, nor was it meaningful only to a handful of people at the time. It makes us who we are and gathers us into a body.”
If Easter celebrates God’s deliverance over Sin and Death, the greater House of Bondage, Allhallows celebrates the implications this has for us as the people who follow in the wake of his victory.