The Paschal Victim

There is no feast in the Church’s calendar more solemn or important than today, Easter Sunday, the anniversary of our blessed Lord’s Resurrection from the dead.  Rising from the tomb, our Lord made his appearance to St. Mary Magdalene and the Apostles and they were amazed and in awe.  But most of the Chosen People had already abandoned, even betrayed their faith in the Messiah, calling down his Blood upon themselves and their descendants.  If only they had examined their own scriptures and traditions, they would have been reminded of the hidden prophecies and foreshadowings of this otherwise incredible event, the Resurrection.  The Old Testament is full of such messages for God’s people, but nowhere more than in the story of Moses.

In the days leading up to our Lord’s Resurrection, the Jews had just been celebrating their own most important feastday, that of Passover.  They began their festivities with the traditional Passover Seder, a meal during which they commemorated 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” the dwellings of those who were saved by the blood of the lamb and freed from their bondage in Egypt, as the Pharaoh finally relented.

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 death of God’s own firstborn and 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. 

The dreadful meaning of the death of the firstborn of Egypt was now revealed as the Only-Begotten Son of God was himself put to death so that man may be freed from their iniquities.  On that first Good Friday the Old Covenant came to an abrupt end.  The sacrifice of the Paschal Victim at the temple of Jerusalem was interrupted that year.  At the very moment the Jewish priests offered up their unblemished lamb in the temple, Christ died on the cross and the veil of the Jewish temple was rent asunder.  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.  And those who receive the Body of Christ are still today “passed over” by the Angel of Death, spiritual death, and receive their own deliverance from the bondage of sin, making them worthy for the life everlasting. Our Holy Sacrifice of the Mass therefore, this Mass that Bergoglio is trying so hard to abolish, is 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.

At the Jewish Seder it is traditional for the youngest male present to ask the question in Hebrew: “Ma nishtana haleilah hazeh mikkol hallaylot?”—“Why is this night different from all other nights?”  Little do they realize that their rituals and ceremony in remembrance of things lost past are in fact nothing more than the foreshadowing of a new ceremony that our Lord performed at the Last Supper and that would be continued by the New Testament priests until the end of time “in remembrance of me.”  If only they would recognize that the true answer to their question lies in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, spelled out in the Sequence of today’s Easter Mass, the Victimae Paschali, which exhorts us to “hasten to the Paschal Victim, offering our thankful praises.  For the Lamb the sheep redeemeth, Christ by sin undefiled, reconcileth sinners to the Father.”  Their ancient paschal lamb saved the Hebrews from their slavery to the Pharaoh, our true Paschal Lamb saved us all from Satan’s power, from our slavery to sin and death.  Moses showed the way, Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.