In the last 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 there was no death among any of them. In the Exodus from Egypt, God instituted the Passover for the Jewish community. Every year, the Jews were to celebrate their liberation from Egypt by offering God a lamb, in the place of their firstborn, whom God spared. During the Exodus, 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 blood wasn’t for ordinary eating.

Now we are conscious 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. There is also 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 the 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. God himself is the Paschal lamb whose death keeps us from the living death into which our sins bury us.

Now we must drink blood on Holy Thursday, 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.

Eleonore Stump