In the final great plague God visited upon Egypt, he killed all the first-born among animals and among every human family—but not in the community of the Jews in Egypt. In that community, each family put the blood of a lamb on its doorpost; and then the plague of the first-born passed over the Jewish families without any harm to their first-born. And so God instituted the Passover for the Jewish community. From then on, every year, the Jews were to celebrate their deliverance by offering God a lamb in the place of their firstborn, whom God spared. During the Exodus from Egypt, God also commanded the Jews not to eat the blood of anything. In Egypt, blood was smeared on the doorpost to save the Jews from death. And so meat with blood in it wasn’t for ordinary eating.
In our age, sad experience has taught us that there are things more destructive to human wellbeing than slavery in Egypt. Within every human being, there is slavery to the evil that kills beauty and joy. And there is something worse than biological death. There is a living death that never ends, and it is more to be feared than the death of the body.
And so, on Good Friday, all the old images are exploded in complicated patterns theologians have traced for ages. There is still a first-born son who dies. But now it is the first-born son of God. He dies in order to free us from our slavery not to Egypt but to sin. The death of the Paschal lamb keeps us from the living death into which our sins bury us.
And now in the liturgy we drink blood, the blood of the incarnate Son of God. When we do, that blood is not transformed into our bodies, as ordinary food is. Instead, it makes us into the body of the Lord, whose blood it is. Then his Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us, uniting us to God.
What a wild love it is that does these things, that suffers these things! What can anyone say to do it justice? Stillness before it is our best response.
Art by Martin Erspamer, OSB
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and
C). This art may be reproduced only by parishes who purchase the
collection in book or CD-ROM form. For more information go http://www.ltp.org