Passion Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Is 50:4-7
Second Reading: Phil 2:6-11
Gospel Reading: Mk 14, 15
Holy Week begins this Sunday. It includes Holy Thursday and Good Friday, when Jesus definitively accomplished our salvation.
About 1300 BC, God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through the Pasch, in which each household slaughtered an unblemished male lamb or kid “in the evening twilight” on the 14th of the month of Nisan. They drained the body of blood, roasted it whole, ate it, and sprinkled its blood around the doorway.
That night, God killed the firstborn in each Egyptian family, but “passed over” the homes where the lambs had been sacrificed instead. From then on, at his explicit command, the Jews commemorated the Pasch, or Passover, annually.
That is what Jesus did on Thursday and Friday, but the ritual was somewhat different.
First: 14 Nisan was a Friday that year, but Jesus ate his Passover meal on Thursday, the night before.
Second: There was no ordinary lamb at this Passover meal. Instead, Jesus gave his apostles bread, saying, “Take; this is my body,” and a cup, saying “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.”
By those words, Jesus, God the Son, actually accomplished what they meant: changing bread into his body, given for us, and wine into his blood, shed for us - separated from each other as in a sacrifice. (In fact, the Greek for the evangelists’ “given” and “shed” could just as well be translated as “is being given” and “is being shed.”)
Third: the Last Supper ended without the final cup of wine, for Jesus declared that he would not drink it until he drank it “new in the kingdom of God.” Accordingly, he refused the wine offered him on the way to Calvary, accepting it only at the end, just before he “breathed his last.”
Thus Jesus instituted the new Passover. He began it sacramentally with the Last Supper on Thursday, under the appearances of bread and wine; he finished it with his “bloody” death as the sacrificed “Lamb of God” on Friday - all, by Jewish reckoning, on the same day, which began and ended at sunset.
The new Passover, like the old, comprised a sacrifice and a meal. The meal revealed the death to be a sacrifice, not an execution, while the death revealed the meal to be a sacrament.
Without the meal, “we would have never been able to grasp how the carrying out of his being condemned to death could have been in fact the act of perfect worship, pleasing to the Father,” Pope Francis explained. “Only a few hours after the Supper, the apostles could have seen in the cross of Jesus, if they could have borne the weight of it, what it [had] meant for Jesus to say, ‘body offered,’ ‘blood poured out.’”
Then, like God at the old Passover, Jesus commanded, “Do this as a commemoration of me.” Accordingly, from the beginning, Christians started celebrating the Mass.
They never regarded it as merely a staged imitation of the Last Supper/Crucifixion, for its “liturgical celebration” makes it “in a certain way present and real,” re-presenting it to us sacramentally, perpetuating its memory, and applying its saving power to the forgiveness of our daily sins, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In the Mass, we re-live the Paschal Mystery, not just remember it. “A vague memory” of it would be useless, Pope Francis noted; we must be present.
With the eyes of faith, we see the sacrifice of Calvary at the consecration, when Jesus appears on the altar as the Lamb of God sacrificed - body and blood separated under the appearances of bread and wine. At Communion, we eat the Lamb’s body.
Accordingly, if people ask us on Holy Thursday where we are going, we can truly say “to Christ’s Last Supper.” If they ask on Good Friday Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? we can truly answer “Yes!”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of the presentation next week is Holy Week. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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