Let us see the course of the devil’s spite and the result of his crafty plans against Christ. The devil had implanted in the leaders of the Jewish synagogue envy against Christ, which even leads to murder. This disorder always leads, so to speak, to the guilt of murder. At least, this is the natural course of this vice. It was this way with Cain and Abel, and it clearly was so in the case of Joseph and his brothers. The divine Paul also very clearly makes these sins neighbors and relatives of one another. He spoke of some as full of envy and murder.^[1] The Jewish leaders sought to murder Jesus at the instigation of Satan, who had implanted this wickedness in them and who was their captain in their wicked projects. Satan is himself the inventor of murder, the root of sin and the fountain of all wickedness.

What was this many-headed serpent’s invention? It says, He entered Judas Iscariot, who was one of the Twelve. Why did he not rather enter blessed Peter, James, John, or some other of the rest of the apostles? Why Judas Iscariot? What did Satan find in him? Satan could not approach any of those we have mentioned here, because their heart was steadfast and their love to Christ immovable. There was a place for Satan in the traitor. The bitter disease of greed, which the blessed Paul says is the root of all evil,^[1] had overpowered him. Satan is crafty in working evil. Whenever he gains possession of anyone’s soul, he does not attack him by means of general vice. He rather searches for that particular passion that has power over him and by its means makes him his prey.

Judas lost heaven for a little silver. He missed the crown of immortality and the desirable honor of the apostleship. He missed to be numbered among the Twelve to whom Christ somewhere said, You are the light of the world.^[1] He did not care to be a light of the world. He forgot Christ, who says, You who have followed me in my temptations, when the Son of man shall sit upon the throne of his glory, you also will sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.^[2] Judas did not want to reign with Christ. What a confusion of error blinded the mind of that greedy man! The Evangelist says, Satan entered him. His pathway and door was the passion of greed. There is great gain in godliness with contentment.^[3] The sacred Scripture says, We neither brought anything into the world, nor can we carry anything out.^[4] Those who seek to be rich, fall into numerous and unprofitable lusts, which sink people in pitfalls and destruction. The disciple who became a traitor is a clear proof of this, because he perished for the sake of a few miserable coins.

Jesus Christ our Savior has been crucified. The author of this crime and father of this wickedness is, without doubt, the devil. It is written: When, however, the devil had entered the heart of Judas Iscariot that he should betray him. The devil is the father of sin. He fathered Judas as his first son in this wickedness, but Judas alone could not execute the betrayal. What then is written? Judas departed, Scripture says, to the scribes and Pharisees and chief priests and said to them: ‘What will you give me, and I will deliver him to you?’^[1] The third and fourth generation of sin was born from Judas.

By its shadows, the law prefigured from of old the mystery of Christ. He is himself the witness of this when he said to the Jews, If you would have believed Moses, you would have also believed me, for he wrote concerning me.^[1] Christ is presented everywhere by means of shadows and types, both as slain for us, as the innocent and true Lamb, and as sanctifying us by his life-giving blood. We further find the words of the holy prophets in complete agreement with those of most wise Moses. Paul says, When the fullness of time was come,^[2] the only-begotten Word of God submitted to the emptying of himself, the birth in the flesh of a woman, and subjection to the law according to the measure that was fitting for human nature. He was also then sacrificed for us, as the innocent and true lamb on the fourteenth day of the first month. This feast day was called Pascha, a word belonging to the Hebrew language and signifying the passing over. . . .

The name of the feast on which Emmanuel bore for us the saving cross was the Pascha.

Someone may ask, Why did Christ not plainly mention the man to those whom he sent? He did not say, ‘When you go to such and such a person, whoever it might be, there prepare the Pascha for us at his house.’ He simply gave them a sign: a man bearing a pitcher of water. What do we reply to this? Look, Judas the traitor had already promised the Jews to deliver Christ to them. Judas continued in his company to watch for a good opportunity. While still making profession of the love that was the duty of a disciple, he had admitted Satan into his heart and was travailing with the crime of murder against our common Savior Christ. Jesus gives a sign to prevent Judas from learning who the man was and running to tell those who had hired him. There will meet you, he says, a man carrying a pitcher of water.

Perhaps Christ speaks this as symbolizing something mystical and necessary. Wherever waters enter, the waters of holy baptism, Christ stays there. How or in what way does this happen? They free us from all impurity, and they wash us from the stains of sin. They do this so that we also might become a holy temple of God and participants in his divine nature, by participation of the Holy Spirit. So that Christ may rest and stay in us, let us receive the saving waters, also confessing the faith that justifies the wicked and raises us high so that we might be counted as an upper room. . . . He that would say that the soul of every saint is an upper room would not miss the truth.

When the disciples had prepared the Pascha, Christ ate it with them. Christ was patient toward the traitor, and from his infinite lovingkindness condescended to admit him to the table. Judas was already a traitor, because Satan was staying within him. What did Christ also say to the holy apostles? I have desired a desire to eat this Pascha with you. Let us examine the deep meaning of this expression. Let us search out the meaning concealed in there, and let us search for what the Savior intended.

I have already said that the greedy disciple was seeking an opportunity to betray Christ. So Judas might not deliver him to his murderers before the feast of the Pascha, the Savior did not openly state either the house or the person with whom he would celebrate the feast. He explains to them the cause of his unwillingness to tell them openly with whom he would lodge. He says, I have desired a desire to eat with you this Pascha, apparently meaning, I have used every effort to enable me to escape the wickedness of the traitor, that I might not endure my passion before the time.

From the moment when he broke his body for his disciples and gave it^[1] to his apostles, three days are numbered during which he was counted among the dead, like Adam. Although Adam lived for many years after having eaten of the fruit of the tree,^[2] he was still numbered among the dead for having broken the commandment. God spoke to him, The day on which you eat of it you shall die.^[3] Scripture also says, Your descendants will dwell there for four hundred years,^[4] and the years were numbered from the day on which this word was pronounced. The same way of counting applies likewise to our Lord.^[5] Alternatively, the sixth day must be counted as two and the sabbath as one. It was because he had given them his body to eat in view of the mystery of his death that he entered their bodies, as afterwards he entered the earth. Our Lord blessed and broke the bread,^[6] because Adam had not blessed the fruit at the time when, as a rebel, he gathered it. The bread entered them, making up for the greed by which Adam had rejected God. The three days might also be counted from the descent into hell and the ascent: the sixth day, the sabbath, and the first day of the week.

Above all, however, I wish to remind you and myself along with you that the Lord does not want us to come irreverently or unprepared to the Easter feast. We must have our doctrine straight, follow the proper liturgy, and do all things properly. The historical record of Israel’s feast tells us, No foreigner, no slave purchased with money, no uncircumcised man, may eat the Passover.^[1] It is not supposed to be eaten in just any house. There is a proper place. He also commands it to be done in haste, because we were once groaning under the sorrow of our bondage to Pharaoh and the commands of the taskmasters. In the old days, the children of Israel were considered ready to receive the feast, which was the type, only if they had followed the instructions. That type was the forerunner of our feast, although the feast was not established because of the type.

When the Word of God was ready to establish the feast, which is the fulfillment of all, he told his disciples, I have longed very much to eat this Passover with you. The account of how the Passover was to be celebrated, as given to us in the Scriptures,^[2] presents a marvelous word picture of what the festivity must have looked like.

On its way to Jerusalem, Israel was purified in the wilderness and was trained to forget the customs of Egypt. Similarly the Word has graciously prescribed for us the holy fast of forty days of Lent. Let us make it a time of purification and purging, so that after the fast we will be prepared to go to the upper room and eat with him, to be partakers of the joys of heaven. There is no other way for us to be prepared to go up to Jerusalem and eat the Passover but to apply ourselves to the forty-day fast.

Again, in another place Christ said, I have greatly desired to eat this Pasch with you. Why then did he say this Pasch even though at other times he had observed this feast with them? Why then? Because the cross would follow this Pasch. And again he said, Father, glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify you.^[1] To be sure, in many places we find him foretelling the Passion,^[2] desiring that it come to pass^[3] and saying that this was the reason he had come into the world.^[4]

He said, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until the kingdom of my Father, to show that he foresaw his imminent departure from them. He said, until the kingdom of my Father, that is, until his resurrection. Simon Peter revealed in the Acts of the Apostles, After his resurrection, during a period of forty days, we ate with him and we drank,^[1] on this first day of the week. This agrees with what he had said, They will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,^[2] and after six days that was accomplished.

He says, I will no longer come near to such a Pascha as this, one that consisted in the typical eating. A lamb of the flock was killed to be the type of the true Lamb until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God, that is, until the time has appeared in which the kingdom of heaven is preached. This is fulfilled in us, who honor the worship that is superior to the law, even the true Pascha. A lamb of the flock does not sanctify those who are in Christ. Christ sanctifies us. He was made a holy sacrifice for us, by the offering of bloodless offerings and the mystical giving of thanks, in which we are blessed and enlivened. He became for us the living bread that came down from heaven, and he gives life to the world.

When he came to his passion, he wanted to declare to Abraham and those with him the good news of the opening of the inheritance. After he gave thanks while holding the cup and then drank from it . . . he promised that he would again drink of the produce of the vine with his disciples. Christ thus showed the inheritance of the earth, in which the new produce of the vine is drunk, and the physical resurrection of his disciples. The new flesh that rises again is the same that received the new cup. He cannot be understood as drinking the produce of the vine when established on high with his own, somewhere above the heavens. Those who drink it are not only spirits, because it belongs to flesh and not to spirit to receive the drink of the vine.

Christ is also within us in another way by means of our partaking in the sacrifice of bloodless offerings, which we celebrate in the churches. We received from him the saving pattern of the rite, as the blessed Evangelist plainly shows us in the passage that has just been read. He tells us that Jesus took a cup, gave thanks and said, Take this, and divide it with one another. His giving thanks meant his speaking to God the Father in the manner of prayer. Christ signified to us that he, so to speak, shares and takes part in the Father’s good pleasure in granting us the life-giving blessing that was given to us then. Every grace and every perfect gift comes to us from the Father by the Son in the Holy Spirit. This act, then, was a useful pattern for us of the prayer that should be offered whenever the grace of the mystical and life-giving sacrifice is about to be spread before him by us. Accordingly, we are accustomed to do this. First, offering up our thanksgivings and joining in our praises to God the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, we come near to the holy tables. We believe that we receive life and blessing spiritually and physically. We receive in us the Word of the Father, who for our sakes became man and who is life and the giver of life.

We should eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord as a commemoration of the Lord’s obedience unto death. They who live might then no longer live for themselves but to him who died for them and rose again.

Receive the communion of the spotless mysteries of Christ, believing in fact that they are the body and blood of Christ our God, which he gave to the faithful for the forgiveness of sins. On the same night when he was betrayed, he ordained a new covenant with his holy disciples and apostles and through them for all that should believe on him. He said, ‘Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you, for the forgiveness of sins.’ In the same way he also took the cup and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink all of this. This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.’ He, the Word of God, is quick, powerful and working all things by his might. He makes and transforms the bread and wine of the sacrifice through his divine operation into his own body and blood, by the visitation of the Holy Spirit, for the sanctification and enlightenment of those who eagerly participate in it.

Israel ate the meat of a dumb lamb to complete the Passover. Having done so, they smeared their doorposts with blood and laughed at the destroyer. We eat of the Word of the Father, the Son, our Savior. We have the lintels of our hearts sealed with the blood of the new covenant.^[1]

By uniting flesh that was subject to death to himself, the Word being God and life drove corruption away from it. Christ also made it to be the source of life. The body of him who is the life must be this.

Do not doubt what I have said but rather accept the word in faith, having gathered proofs from a few examples. When you place a piece of bread into wine, oil, or any other liquid, you find that it becomes charged with the quality of that particular thing. When iron is brought into contact with fire, it becomes full of its activity. While it is by nature iron, it exerts the power of fire. The life-giving Word of God, having united himself to his own flesh in a way known to himself, likewise endowed it with the power of giving life. . . . When we eat the holy flesh of Christ, the Savior of us all, and drink his precious blood, we have life in us. We are made one with him, abide in him, and possess him in us.

It was suitable for him to be in us divinely by the Holy Spirit. It was also suitable for him to be mingled with our bodies by his holy flesh and precious blood, which we possess as a life-giving Eucharist, in the form of bread and wine. God feared that seeing actual flesh and blood placed on the holy tables of our churches would terrify us. Humbling himself to our infirmities, God infuses into the things set before us the power of life. He transforms them into the effectiveness of his flesh, that we may have them for a life-giving participation, that the body of life thus might be found in us as a life-producing seed. Do not doubt that this is true. Christ plainly says, This is my body. This is my blood. In faith, receive the Savior’s word. Since he is the truth, he cannot lie. You will honor him. The wise John says, He that receives his witness has set his seal that God is true. For he whom God sent speaks the words of God.^[1] The words of God, of course, are true. In no way whatsoever can they be false. Although we cannot understand how God does that, yet he himself knows the way of his works.