It’s now called Holy Week for Christians, but it was Passover Week for Jews. The religious leaders wanted to arrest Jesus and destroy Jesus…but not during the Passover!

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.” (Mark 14.1, 2, ESV)

Of course, God has set up the Passover way back in Exodus 12 precisely to foreshadow Jesus’ death on the cross:

Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. (Exodus 12.5 – 7, ESV)

It’s not hard to imagine a cross shape, is it?

The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1.29, ESV)

So when did the crucifixion occur? On Passover. Jewish days started in the evening, carrying through to the next day.

And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” (Mark 14.12, ESV)

Jesus eats the Passover with the disciples, then becomes the Passover lamb, all on the fourteenth day of the month, just as it says in Exodus 12.

So much for the leaders’ desire that Jesus not be killed on Passover.

Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. (Acts 4.27, 28, NIV)

…Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. (1 Corinthians 5.7, ESV)