Passion Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Is 50:4-7
Second Reading: Phil 2:6-11
Gospel Reading: Mk 14, 15

This Sunday, which begins Holy Week, we hear St. Mark’s account of Christ’s passion, death, and institution of the Holy Eucharist. On Holy Thursday evening, which begins the Sacred Triduum (“three days”), we hear the account of the first Passover and St. Paul’s description of the institution of the Eucharist. On Good Friday we hear St. John’s account of Christ’s passion and death.

The Church calls these events the Paschal Mystery. The early Christians called Good Friday “the Pasch of the Crucifixion” and Easter Sunday “the Pasch of the Resurrection.” We call the Easter candle “the paschal candle.” In Italian, “Easter” is Pasqua; in Spanish, Pascua: and in French, Pâques.

At the centre of the Paschal Mystery is the Eucharist. In fact, as Father Raniero Cantalamessa (preacher to the pontifical household) says, “the whole history of salvation is present in the Eucharist and the Eucharist is present in the whole history of salvation.” Before Christ, it was present as a prefiguring or foreshadowing; in Christ’s time, as an event; and now, as a sacrament.

At the Last Supper, Jesus and his apostles were commemorating the Pasch, or Passover, which had occurred about 1300 BC in Egypt, where the Jews were slaves. God commanded each Jewish household to sacrifice an unblemished lamb or kid on the 14th day of the month of Nisan, sprinkle its blood on the doorpost, and eat it. Then he told an angel to kill the oldest male in every Egyptian family, but to “pass over” the Jewish homes without harming them. As a result, the Jews were set free.

Thus the first Passover foreshadowed what Christ, whom John the Baptist called the “Lamb of God,” did for us. He was sacrificed for us like the paschal lamb, and his blood frees us from slavery to sin and death as the lambs’ blood freed the Israelites.

At God’s command, the Jews commemorated the Passover every year from then on. By Jesus’ time, the commemoration had two distinct stages: the lambs were sacrificed in the Temple on the afternoon of 14 Nisan and eaten during the Passover meal in each family the next night.

Clearly, the evangelists recognized the same two stages in the life of Jesus during Holy Week. However, St. John focusses on the sacrifice, while St. Mark focusses on the meal.

For John, the new Passover took place on the cross, when Jesus, the true Lamb of God, was sacrificed. In fact, John notes, Jesus died about 3 p.m. on the afternoon of 14 Nisan, precisely the moment when the sacrifice of the lambs began in the temple. For Mark, the new Passover took place the night before, at the Last Supper, when Jesus sacramentally anticipated his imminent death.

John stresses the real sacrifice on the cross, while Mark stresses the mystical sacrifice at the Supper. However, the two are the same event, for at the Supper, Jesus said over the bread, “This is my Body, which will be given up for you,” and over the wine, “This is my Blood, which will be shed for you.”

Then, just as his Father had commanded the Jews to eat the sacrificed lambs at the first Passover, Jesus told us to eat his sacrificed Body and Blood. Moreover, just as his Father had commanded the Jews to commemorate the first Passover, he told us to do what he had done “in remembrance” of him.

Accordingly, 2,000 years later, what Jesus did on Holy Thursday and Good Friday – what the first Passover foreshadowed – the Mass re-presents for us sacramentally. Like the foreshadowing, like the event, it is both a sacrifice and a meal.

“Mysteriously,” Father Cantalamessa says, it makes us “contemporaries of the event: the event is present for us and we are present at the event.” When we hear the hymn Were You There When They Crucified My Lord, we can truly answer “Yes!”