THE PASCHAL VICTIM

A MESSAGE FOR EASTER SUNDAY

The Jewish tradition of the Passover Seder meal commemorates the deliverance of the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt.  Moses had been trying in vain to persuade the Pharaoh to free them from their bondage, but in spite of commands by God himself to “Let my people go,” the Pharaoh was stubbornly unrelenting.  With nine plagues, God smote the Egyptians, but still he refused.  There followed the tenth and most terrifying of the plagues in which the firstborn of every living creature was slain by the Angel of Death.  God warned the Hebrews that in order to escape this fate and be delivered from their bondage, they must sacrifice a lamb without blemish, sprinkling its blood on the doorposts of their houses.  The Angel of Death proceeded to “pass over” their dwellings, as the Pharaoh finally relented and the Hebrews were freed from their bondage.

Our Lord followed the traditional Jewish tradition of eating the Passover lamb when he took his final meal, his Last Supper, with his twelve apostles.  It was at this meal that he instituted the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which was to be the new and everlasting covenant between God and man.  The following day, Good Friday, that covenant was ratified by the shedding of his blood, the blood of a new lamb, the Lamb of God, who was sacrificed that the chosen people may be delivered from the bondage of their sin.  This new Paschal Lamb that took away the sins of the world, appeased the wrath of God, and we his people were free to resume our journey to the Promised Land of heaven.

Meanwhile the Old Covenant came to an abrupt end.  The sacrifice of the Paschal Victim at the temple of Jerusalem had been interrupted that year as the veil of the temple was rent asunder at the death of God’s Son.  The temple sacrifices were of no more value, and soon, even the temple itself would be destroyed.  As for the Paschal Victim, it would continue to be commemorated until the end of time, no longer as a foreshadowing by an actual lamb in the temple, nor symbolically by the Seder meal, but in their fulfillment as the perfect Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Paschal Lamb that we would consume at the Mass in Holy Communion would no longer be a symbol, but the actual Body of Christ, the Lamb of God.  This would be no mere commemoration of a human act that occupied a single moment of a dimly remembered past, but the perpetual representation of an act of God, eternal in nature and as fresh and full of grace today as it was on Calvary.

And so, fellow Christians, we hasten to the Paschal Victim, as it says in the sequence of today’s Mass, offering our thankful praises.  “The Lamb the sheep redeemeth, Christ by sin undefiled, reconcileth sinners to the Father.”