said, 'Thus the Word, prefigured in the animal, fully expressed in the man," etc. His use, indeed,
SERMON 229C 277
The Christian passover fulfills that of the Old Testament
2. So let us then, as whose Passover Christ has been sacrificed, celebrate the feast, as the apostle says, not in the old leaven and that of wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor 5:7-8); and let Christianity in its celebrations show to be fulfilled what the law in antiquity foretold would come. In this way let us observe that they have remained in the shadows, and rejoice that we have attached ourselves to the light.
NOTES
1. We have had Augustine preaching against the errors of the Jews several times, in connection especially with the passion of Jesus Christ. But that he should devote the whole of a very brief sermon on Easter Sunday to the subject is surely bizarre. The only explanation I can think of is that in the year when he preached it the Christian Easter coincided exactly with the Jewish Passover. The style, elaborate even in so short a sermon, inclines me firmly to posit an early date, between 391 and 400. So if the experts in calendar calculations can find a year in or about that period when Easter and Passover did exactly coincide, that will give us, I suggest, the exact date of this sermon.
2. The day is, I think, the Christian era, which is nearing its end, declinato, because the end of the world is not far off. The nocturnas quasdam figuras of the Jews are their rituals and feasts, such as Passover, whose whole raison d'etre was to prefigure the Christ event. The Jews are still dream¬ ing—meaning that they have slept throughout the day, the times of Christ and the Church; dreaming of a Messiah, a Christ, still to come.
3. The Latin and Greekpascha means both Jewish Passover and Christian Easter. English, having separated the two by importing the wholly pagan term "Easter" for the Christian Pasch, makes the translator's task here almost impossible.
4. As usual he is treating "Christ" as a divine name. It would have been more accurate if he had said, 'Thus the Word, prefigured in the animal, fully expressed in the man," etc. His use, indeed, of the word expressus indicates that he was thinking of the Word.
5. A very strange and harsh statement, that Christ kills them as they feast, illos occidit epulatos. I suppose he means that in eating the Passover while killing Christ they are, in Paul's words, eating and drinking judgment on themselves (1 Cor 11:29). The Passover is no longer in any way a means of grace for them.
The savage way he puts it may be echoing the story of Num 11:31-35, when the people were struck by a plague from the Lord in the very act of gorging themselves on the quails.
6. He puts it the other way round: "in undigested futility," indigesta vanitate. Whichever way it is put, it is the result of, and means, their failure to interpret the Passover as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, their failure to digest its meaning. Undigested in that way, it is a vain and futile and meaningless ritual.