Sermon 229C

Sermon 229/C

OF HOLY EASTER

The Jews celebrate Passover but do not recognize what it prefigured.

As we celebrate these days of Easter, during which Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed, the Jews, who are the enemies of this luminous manifestation, still engage in certain nocturnal figures and, even as day declines, continue to dream. For they also say they celebrate Passover, and while they perversely follow the shadows of truth, they are blinded by the night of error. They kill a lamb every year following the rite of ancient solemnity, and they do not recognize what that lamb signified, even when Christ was killed by his own parents. While they read what was said, they do not understand what was foretold, they hear when the words are recited, and they do not see when the prophecies are fulfilled. They have the Law and the Prophets, and they do not want to acknowledge through the Prophets what the Law prefigured about Passover. By the command of the Law, the people were fed on the killing of the lamb; by the prophecy, Christ was led like a lamb to be slain. What the earlier Israelites prefigured with the feast in their deliverance from Egypt, the later ones, enslaved by the devil, performed in their wickedness. They were even celebrating Passover when Christ was killed by them; impiety was at odds with truth, and the celebration was in harmony with truth; at the time their food was the lamb that was sacrificed, when Christ was killed by their tongues and teeth. What they symbolized with custom, they completed by crime. Hence Christ himself, prefigured in the lamb, expressed in the man, killed those who feasted on him, and feeds us who are killed. And still their children, belching the undigested vanity of their fathers, glory in unleavened bread; they do not understand that in that food without the old leaven they are signifying the new life, which is foreshadowed in the type revealed in Christ.

What the ancient solemnity foretold as future, the Christian solemnity showed as fulfilled.

We, therefore, for whom Christ has been sacrificed as our Passover, let us celebrate the feast, as the Apostle says, not with the old yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth; so that what the ancient law foretold would come, the Christian celebration may show to be fulfilled, and thus we might see that they remained in shadows, but we rejoice to have clung to the light.