WINE AND
BLOOD
As soon as they had eaten the lamb
with the bread and the bitter herb, Jesus filled the common cup for the third
time and gave it to the Apostle nearest Him, "Drink ye all of It; for
this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many." (Matt. 26:28)
His blood, mixed with sweat, had not
yet fallen on the ground, under the olives, and had not yet dropped from the
nails upon Golgotha. But His desire to give life with His life, to redeem with
His suffering all the sorrows of the world, to transmit at least a part of His
substance to His immediate heirs; this desire to give Himself up wholly for
those whom He loves is so great that from this moment on, He feels the
immolation complete and the gift possible. If bread is the body, blood is in a
certain sense the soul. The Lord said to Noah: "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof,
shall ye not eat." (Gen. 9:4) With blood as visibly representing life,
the God of Abraham and of Jacob had established the covenant with His own
people. When Moses had received the law, he had sacrificed oxen, took half of
the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he sprinkled on the
altar: "And Moses took the blood,
and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant
which the Lord bath made with you concerning all these words." (Exod.
24:8)
But after a trial of many centuries,
God had announced by the voice of the prophets that the Old Covenant was
obliterated and abrogated, and that another was henceforth necessary. The
blood of animals sprinkled upon stubborn heads and upon blaspheming faces had
lost its virtue; another Blood, purer and more precious, was needed for the New
Covenant, for the Last Covenant of the Father with His perjured children. In
many ways He had already tried to lead His first-born towards the narrow door
of salvation; the rain of fire on Sodom, the washings of the waters of the
flood, the Egyptian slavery, hunger in the desert, had terrified them without
reforming them.
And now there had come a Liberator at
once more divine and more human than the old Captain of Exodus. Moses also
saved a people, spoke upon a mountain, and announced a promised land. But Jesus
saves not only His people, but all peoples; *writes His laws not upon stone,
but upon human hearts which acted as stone; and His promised land is not a
country of rich grazing-land and vineyards, with great clusters of grapes, but
a Kingdom of holiness and eternal joy. (Changes-New meanings and new sights) Moses
had killed a man, and Jesus brought the dead to life; Moses changed water into
blood and Jesus, after having changed water into wine at the wedding banquet,
changed wine into blood, into His own blood, at the melancholy last supper of
His marriage with death. Moses died full of years and honors on a solitary
mountain top, glorified by his people; and Jesus was to die among the insults
of those whom He loved.
The blood of oxen, the impure blood of
earthly animals, involuntary and inferior victims, is no longer sufficient. The
New Covenant was established that night with the words of Christ, who under the
appearance of wine shed His own blood and His own soul: "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for
you." (Luke 22:20)
It was shed not merely for the Twelve
who were there; they represent in His eyes all of humanity alive at that time
and all those to be born thereafter and for those that awaited His coming
looking forward in faith to His arrival. The blood which was to be shed the
next day, on Golgotha, was real blood, actual, warm blood congealing on the
cross in clots which all the tears shed by Christians can never wash away. But
the blood of the Last Supper represents a soul which gave itself up to make
over into His own likeness, the souls shut up in the bodies of men: which was
given to those who asked for it and to those who fled away from it, which had
suffered for the sake of those who had received it and for those who had
blasphemed it. This baptism of blood which came after the baptism of water by
John, after the baptism of tears by the women of Bethany, after the baptism of
spitting by the Jews and by the Romans, this baptism of blood, red as the
baptism of fire announced by the prophet of fire, and mixed with the tears shed
by women over His blood-stained body, this is the greatest sacrament, revealed
to His betrayers, by Him who was betrayed.
I have broken bread for you, daily bread
for which you pray every day to the Father, as my body will be broken tomorrow,
and I offer you now my blood in
this wine which I drink for the last
time on earth, If you always do this in memory of me, you will feel no hunger,
no thirst. There is no food better than wheat-bread, and no drink better
than wine, but the bread and wine which I
have given you tonight will feed
you and quench your thirst for all your lives, by virtue of my
sacrifice and of that love which makes me seek for death and which reigns
beyond death.
Ulysses advised Achilles to give the
Achaians, before they went into battle, "bread
and wine that they should have strength and courage." For the Greek
the strength of his members came from bread and homicidal courage from wine.
Wine was to intoxicate men so that they should destroy each other and bread was
to strengthen their arms so that they could battle without weakness. The bread
given by Christ does not strengthen the flesh, but the soul, and His wine gives
that divine intoxication which is Love, that Love which the Apostle,
scandalizing the descendants of Ulysses, was to call in his Epistle to the
Corinthians, "the foolishness of
God." (1 Cor. 1:25)
Judas also ate that bread and
swallowed that wine, partook of that body, in which he had trafficked, drank
that blood which he was to help shed, but he had not the courage to confess his
shame, to throw himself down weeping at the feet of Him who would have wept
with him. Then the only friend remaining to Judas warned him, "Verily I say unto you, that one of you
shall betray me." (John 13:21)
The eleven were capable of leaving Him
alone in the midst of Caiaphas' guards, but they never could have brought themselves
to sell Him for money, and at this they shuddered. Everyone looked in his
neighbor's face, almost dreading to see in his companion the livid look of
guilt, and all, one after the other, said, "Lord,
is it I?" (Matt. 26:22)
Even Judas, hiding his increasing
confusion under the appearance of offended astonishment, was able to force his
voice to say, "Lord, is it I?"
But Jesus, who the next day would not defend Himself, would not even bring an
accusation and only repeated the sad prophecy in more definite words, "He that dippeth his hand with me in
the dish, the same shall betray me." (John 13:26) And while they all
still gazed at Him in painful doubt, for the third time He insisted, . . . "The hand of him that betrayeth me is
with me on the table." (Luke 22:21) He added no more, but to follow
the old customs up to the last, He filled the cup for the fourth time and gave
it to them to drink. And once more the thirteen voices rang out in the old
hymn, the "great hallel"
which ended the liturgy of the Passover. Jesus repeated the vigorous words of
the Psalmist which were like a prophetic funeral oration for Him, pronounced
before His death. "The Lord is on my
side; I will not fear; what can man do unto me? . . . They compassed me about
like bees: they are quenched as the fire of thorns. . . . I shall not die, but
live. . . . The Lord hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto
death. Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will
praise the Lord: . . . The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone
of the corner. . . . Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the
altar." (Psa. 118:6, 12, 17-19, 22, 27)
The victim was ready and the next day
the inhabitants of Jerusalem were to see a new altar of wood and iron. But
perhaps the Disciples, sleepy and confused, did not understand the new meaning
both melancholy and triumphant of the old canticles.
When the hymn was ended they left the room and the
house, at once. Therefore not the Passover, but a new meal for the Church. As
soon as they had emerged from the house Judas disappeared into the night. The
remaining eleven silently followed Jesus, who, as was His habit, made His way
to the Mount of Olives.
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