Fr Lino Moreira OSB
At the foot of Mount Sinai, the people of God, who had just been set
free from slavery in Egypt, promised to obey all the commandments given to them by the Lord (cf. Ex 24:3). Then Moses sprinkled the blood of sacrificed animals – first on the altar, which represented God, and then over the people, saying: ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words (Ex 24:8).’
By virtue of this ritual God and Israel became a single family sharing a
common life. But no sooner had the people made their promise than they broke it by committing the sin of idolatry. They fashioned a golden calf and prostrated themselves before it as the god who had brought them out of Egypt (cf. Ex 32: 8). And from then on they never ceased to violate the divine covenant bringing upon themselves a series of disasters.
God, however, remained true to his pledge, and eventually he
announced through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts’ (Jr 31:31.33). And about the same time God also addressed his people through the prophet Ezekiel as follows: ‘I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws’ (Ezk 36:26-27).
This promise of a new covenant was fulfilled when, on the eve of his
Passion, Jesus gathered his disciples to eat the Passover with them (cf. Mk 14:12.16). At that moment our Lord anticipated the sacrifice he would be consummating on the cross by giving his followers bread and wine, and saying: ‘Take; this is my body. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’ (Mk 14:22.24).
The phrase ‘this is my blood of the covenant’ is almost a quotation of
what Moses said at Sinai, and the words that follow echo what is written about the Suffering Servant in the Book of the prophet Isaiah: he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors; for he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Is 53:12). So, at the Last Supper, Jesus fulfilled the core expectations formulated in the Scriptures and the worship of Israel in that he offered himself as a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the whole world (cf. 1 Jn 2:2), and presented his own blood as the
seal of an everlasting covenant with his disciples and the entire human race.
That is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews calls Jesus Christ the high priest of the good things that have come (cf. Heb 9:11) and the mediator of a new covenant (cf. Heb 9:15), saying as we have heard: He entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption (Heb 9:12).
Indeed Moses, the mediator of the old covenant, helped the Israelites to escape from Pharaoh’s tyranny, but Jesus, the one mediator between God and humankind (cf. 1 Tm 2:5), sets us free from slavery to sin in order to live according to the Spirit, which is the new law written by God in our hearts of flesh (cf. Ezk 36:26-27, Jr 31:33): the blood of Christ will purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God (Heb 9:14) – says again the sacred author. So let us our minds and hearts be cleansed as we receive from the altar of the Lord his own body as our food and his own blood as our drink, for only that can give us the strength to obey the promptings of the Spirit, which calls us to offer our very selves as a sacrifice of praise to the one true God through Jesus Christ, his Servant and Son.