Today’s Passover

Today’s readings: Exodus 24, 3-8; Heb. 9, 11-15; Mark 14, 12-16.22-26.

In the context we live in today, pressured as we are on one side by the consumerist craze and on the other side by the obligation to hold back, it is pertinent to ask what the true and needed nourishment of the world could be and what food could most appropriately meet our real needs?

The Jews had their Passover; Jesus and his disciples also had their Passover; and we too need to identify what our Passover is. Otherwise it will take us all unaware.

From today’s three readings it transpires clearly enough that the Eucharist we are celebrating today is much more than just the ritual we’ve made it to be. The Scriptures speak of the blood of the covenant, of passages in life and choices which entail ‘blood’, and which are very often ‘live or die’ experiences.

In Exodus, sprinkling blood on the people was a premonition of what God’s people were being called for. In the gospel, Jesus ate the Passover with his disciples “when the Passover lamb was sacrificed” as a premonition of what he was to go through.

The letter to the Hebrews reads all this theologically, seeing Jesus as entering the sanctuary once for all, meaning definitively, in a way that was to mark permanently all those called to his discipleship.

The assembly of Sinai in Exodus culminates in oaths of allegiance and obedience. In response, the people declared “We will obey”. It is not the law that qualifies the relationship of covenant between God and his people but love.

Love, as Walter Brueggemann observes, is a dense term. “It is a covenant word that means to acknowledge sovereignty and to keep one’s oath of loyalty, on which the covenant is based.”

Our covenant with God is not of a political nature, in which case the law would have been exclusively its basis. At the heart of Israel’s obligation to Yahweh is the desire to please him and that keeps Israel’s obligation from becoming a burden. Rather than a burden, the declaration “We will obey” is simply living out Israel’s true character and identity.

In our times we feel confused whenever we turn to the issue of our true character and identity. Being a Eucharistic people does not simply mean having the Eucharist at the centre, but becoming ourselves the Eucharist for others and for the world.

In Hebrews we read that “The blood of Christ, who offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit, can purify our inner self”.

These are indeed troubled times for the Church. The more the Church is inward looking, fearing for its own security, led by a worldly survival instinct, the less will it be in a position to convey the true meaning of the ‘perfect sacrifice’ of Christ.

Those who scrutinise the Church from a distance and with a sceptical eye may seem to us as exact-ing the pound of flesh from the Church. That may make us flee to the underground.

But Jesus spoke of his blood “to be poured out for many”. There was one thing he was always clear about: I lay down my life of my own free will, no one takes it from me.

Celebrating Corpus Christi today, we are solemnly making a statement which goes far beyond our liturgical parametres. It is rather a statement about a Church that needs to be more Eucharistic, freely and boldly laying down its life for the nourishment of people.

That is our Passover today. It is a Passover which, if faced with fear, will lead nowhere; it will only prove right all those who are critical of the Church.

If this Passover is encountered in the true dimension of God’s covenant, then it will be a perfect sacrifice, it will be purifying and it will crystallize for the world the true character and identity of the Church in the footsteps of its Master, perpetuating a memory which is dangerous but redeeming.