celebrating these paschal days, the Jews, as opponents of this splendid manifes¬
SERMON 229C
ON THE HOLY DAY OF EASTER
Date: uncertain1
The Jews, celebrating the passover, do not acknowledge what it signifies
1. While we, as whose Passover Christ has been sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7), are celebrating these paschal days, the Jews, as opponents of this splendid manifes¬ tation of light, are still carrying on with various nocturnal foreshadowings of theirs, and still dreaming as the day nears its end.2 They too, you see, claim to be celebrating the Pasch,3 and while they continue perversely to chase the shadows of the truth, they are blinded by the night of error. Every year they kill the sheep according to the ritual of the ancient solemnity, and fail to acknow¬ ledge what that sheep signified, even after Christ had been killed by their ancestors. They read the story that is told without understanding that something is being foretold; so they hear when what has been told is chanted, but they fail to notice when what was foretold is fulfilled. They have the law and the prophets (Lk 16:29), and they refuse to recognize through the prophets what the law was prefiguring with the Passover. As the law commanded, the people fed them¬ selves by slaughtering a sheep; as the prophet foretold, Christ like a sheep was led to the slaughter (Is 53:7).
What the earlier Israelites, set free from Egypt, prefigured in their festivity, the later Israelites, taken captive by the devil, accomplished in their iniquity. They were even carrying out the rites of the Passover itself at the very moment Christ was slain by them; the truth was at variance with their impiety, and the same truth was in harmony with their solemnity; the sheep was being slaugh¬ tered for their food at the very moment that Christ was being killed by their tongues and teeth; what their custom signified, their crime accomplished.
Thus it is that Christ himself, prefigured in the animal, fully expressed in the man,4 kills them as they feast, feeds us as he is killed.5 And still their descen¬ dants, belching out the old leaven of their ancestors in futile indigestion,6 go on priding themselves on their feast of unleavened bread; not realizing that by that food, kneaded without the old leaven, the new kind of life is signified, and that while this was prefigured in the type, it is only fully revealed in Christ.