I believe when God established the Feasts in Leviticus Chapter 23, He had Yeshua in mind; and when He sent Jesus to the earth, He had the Feasts in mind. Certainly this fits the little known, but powerfully important Feast of Firstfruits, Yom HaBikkurim in Hebrew. There is some religious controversy concerning the timing of this Feast, dating back to the time of Yeshua. According to Leviticus 23:11, it was to be celebrated “on the day after the Sabbath.” However the Sadducees and Pharisees had different interpretations of what was meant by Sabbath.
While the Sadducees believed only in the written Word of God, the Pharisees also embraced the oral traditions which had been passed down through the centuries, which eventually became part of the Talmud. So the Sadducees subscribed to the meaning of Sabbath in the scheduling of this Feast as the literal seventh day Sabbath. That results in HaBikkurim always falling on a Sunday.
Conversely, the Pharisees, the forerunners of modern day rabbinic Judaism, followed the oral tradition that the first day of a feast was considered a different kind of Sabbath, a High Sabbath. Since Firstfruits occurs within the Feast of Passover/Unleavened Bread, which start on the 14th and 15th of Nisan on the Hebrew Calendar, the day after the Sabbath was determined to be the 16th. That could fall on any day of the week. More on this below.
We do know Jesus was raised from the dead on a Sunday, the Sunday during Passover. Therefore, if reckoned precisely with the Word of God, as per the Sadducees, Resurrection Day took place on HaBikkurim.
This is acutely embellished by the Jewish Apostle Paul. Writing in First Corinthians 15:20, he made the connection between Resurrection Day and the Feast of Firstfruits, “But now Messiah is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Firstfruits was a barley harvest feast. The understanding was to bring the beginning of the harvest to the Lord in anticipation of a great harvest yet to come. Likewise, Yeshua’s resurrection set the stage for a great resurrection yet to come.
Furthermore, as God gave instruction about the various Feasts in Leviticus 23, He aligned the starting times with days of the month according to the Hebrew calendar. For example, Passover is the 14th of Nisan. That means it can be any day of the week. Compare that to the 4th of July which is similarly justified by a day of the month, not a day of the week.
But not so with the Feast of Firstfruits (and the following Feast of Shavuot). It is not reconciled to a day of the month. God didn’t ordain it on the 16th day of Nisan, but rather on a day of the week, the day after the Sabbath. Compare that to Thanksgiving which always occurs on a Thursday, not on a particular day of the month.
I believe that’s because God wanted to anchor the timing of Resurrection Day to Firstfruits.
Remember, my Jewish brethren follow the Pharisees in the dating of HaBikkurim. That means they will deny the association to Yeshua. But take note, even if they are correct, it is possible, since no one knows the exact year, the 16th of Nisan was a Sunday back then, which would keep the astounding connection in tact.
Our Messiah was born so that He could die, shedding His blood for our atonement and bearing our sin in His body. But He also had to die so He could be resurrected!
Look how Yeshua pictured His resurrection. In John 12:24, He said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” While there are a number of other passages where He discusses His death and resurrection, this one is poignant in that He explains why.
By comparing Himself to a seed, He was detailing how His mission required Him to die, going into the depths, so that He could sprout forth in resurrection power. Immediately prior to His grain reference, Jesus said, “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.”
The ultimate glorification was His resurrection. So while He had to die in order to be resurrected, His death itself had it’s own significance. As would seem obvious, it also weighed heavily on Him.
As He said in continuing His comments in John 12:27-28, “Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.”
Yeshua specifically said He was sent to earth in the form of a human to suffer and die on the cross. That flies in the face of the antisemitic sayings of some of the early Gentile church leaders. While our Messiah was pronouncing the glory of His death and resurrection, they were blaming Jewish people for His death, calling them disparaging names such as “Christ killers.”
Central to the whole theme of Messiah’s death and resurrection is the Jewish sacrificial system, especially as it ties in to the Feasts of Passover and Yom Kippur. Leviticus 17:11 proclaims, “It is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.” But all the sacrificial offerings had to be sinless because you can’t atone for sin with a sinful offering. For Jesus to fulfill the ultimate sacrifice as atonement for the sins of the whole world, He had to have human blood.
While animals don’t sin, humans do. So prior to Yeshua, human sacrifice was not acceptable to God. But since humans are the highest order of creation, the perfect sacrifice would be sinless human blood. That’s why Jesus didn’t appear as an angel, or a Spirit, but was born of a woman so He had human blood, allowing His atonement to be once for all.
At the Last Supper (which was a Passover Seder), Yeshua took the cup after supper saying, “This cup is the New Covenant in My blood, which is shed for you.” He was referencing the Prophet Jeremiah’s declaration that the Lord would provide a New Covenant which would “ forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” The perfect, sinless human blood of Jesus enacted the New Covenant.
At Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in addition to the blood sacrifices, the High Priest laid his hands on the head of a live goat, confessing into it all the sins of Israel, then sent it out of the camp, never to return. The goat took the sins away.
In 1 Peter 2:24, the Jewish Apostle referred to Yeshua as fulfilling the live goat by writing, “Who Himself bore our sins in His own body.” Isaiah predicted this in 53:6, “And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” The Jewish Apostle Paul summarized in 1 Corinthians 5:21, “ For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.”
Just like the goat of Yom Kippur, Jesus took our sin into His sinless body, then took the sin away. But unlike the goat, which never came back, Yeshua came back in resurrection power.