The Lamb's Supper

by Scott Hahn

  STEALING MY THUNDER

  In heaven right now! The Fathers of the Church showed me that this wasn't my discovery. They had preached about it more than a thousand years ago. I was, however, convinced I deserved credit for the rediscovery of the relationship between the Mass and the Book of Revelation. Then I discovered that the Second Vatican Council had stolen my thunder. Consider the following words from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy:

  In the earthly liturgy we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. With all the warriors of the heavenly army we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory.

  Wait a minute. That's heaven. No, it's the Mass. No, it's the Book of Revelation. Wait a minute: it's all of the above.

  I found myself trying hard to go slowly, cautiously, careful to avoid the dangers to which converts are susceptible; for I was fast becoming a convert to the Catholic faith. Yet this discovery was not the product of an overwrought imagination; it was the solemn teaching of a council of the Catholic Church. In time, I would discover that it was also the inevitable conclusion of the most rigorous and honest Protestant scholars. One of them, Leonard Thompson, has written that “Even a cursory reading of the Book of Revelation shows the presence of liturgical language set in worship. . . . [T]he language of worship plays an important role in unifying the book.” The images of liturgy alone can make that strange book make sense. Liturgical figures are central to its message, Thompson writes, revealing “something more than visions of “things to come.' ”

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  The Book of Revelation was about Someone Who was to come. It was about Jesus Christ and His “Second Coming,” which is the way Christians have commonly translated the Greek word Parousia. Through hour after hour in that chapel in Milwaukee in 1985, I came to know that that Someone was the same Jesus Christ Whom the Catholic priest lifted up in the host. If the early Christians were correct, I knew that, in that very moment, heaven touched down on earth. “My Lord and my God. That's really You!”

  Still, serious questions remained in my mind and heart—about the nature of sacrifice, about the biblical foundations of the Mass, about the continuity of Catholic tradition, about many of the small details of liturgical worship. These questions would define my investigations through the months leading up to my reception into the Catholic Church. In a sense, they continue to define my work today. These days, however, I ask not as an accuser or a curiosity seeker, but as a son who approaches his father, asking the impossible, asking to hold a bright and distant star in the palm of his hand.

  I don't believe Our Father will refuse me, or you, the wisdom we seek regarding His Mass. It is, after all, the event in which He seals His covenant with us and makes us His children. This book is more or less a record of what I have found while investigating the riches of our Catholic tradition. Our heritage includes the whole of the Bible, the uninterrupted witness of the Mass, the constant teachings of the saints, the research of the schools, the methods of contemplative prayer, and the pastoral care of the popes and bishops. In the Mass, you and I have heaven on earth. The evidence is overwhelming. The experience is a revelation.

  TWO

  Given for You

  THE STORY OF SACRIFICE

  THE PHRASE in the Mass that knocked me out was the “Lamb of God,” because I knew that this Lamb was Jesus Christ Himself.

  No one has to tell you that. Perhaps you've sung or recited the words a thousand times: “Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” Just as many times you've seen the priest elevate the broken Host and proclaim, “This is the Lamb of God . . .” The Lamb is Jesus. This is not news; it's the kind of fact we gloss over. Jesus is many things, after all: He is Lord, God, Savior, Messiah, King, Priest, Prophet . . . and Lamb.

  Yet, if we were really thinking, we wouldn't gloss over that last title. Look again at that list: Lord, God, Savior, Messiah, King, Priest, Prophet—and Lamb. One of these things is not like the others. The first seven are titles with which we could comfortably address a God-Man. They're titles with dignity, implying wisdom, power, and social status. But Lamb? Again, I ask you to divest yourself of two thousand years of accumulated symbolic meaning. Pretend for a moment that you've never sung the “Lamb of God.”

  ON THE LAMB

  The title, then, seems almost comical in its inappropriateness. Lambs don't usually rank high on lists of most-admired animals. They're not particularly strong, clever, quick, or handsome. Other animals would seem more worthy. We can easily imagine Jesus, for example, as the Lion of Judah (Rev 5:5). Lions are kingly; they're strong and agile; nobody messes with the king of beasts. But the Lion of Judah makes only a cameo appearance in the Book of Revelation. Meanwhile, the Lamb dominates, appearing no less than twenty-eight times. The Lamb rules, occupying heaven's throne (Rev 22:3). It is the Lamb Who leads an army of hundreds of thousands of men and angels, striking fear in the hearts of the wicked (Rev 6:15–16). This last image, of the fierce and frightening Lamb, is almost too incongruous to imagine with a straight face.

  Yet, for John, this matter of the Lamb is serious. The titles “Lamb” and “Lamb of God” are applied to Jesus almost exclusively in the books of the New Testament that are attributed to John: the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Revelation. Though other New Testament books (see Acts 8:32–35; 1 Pet 1:19) say that Jesus islike a lamb in certain respects, only John dares to call Jesus “the Lamb” (see Jn 1:36 and throughout the Apocalypse).

  We know that the Lamb is central to both the Mass and the Book of Revelation. And we know Who the Lamb is. However, if we want to experience the Mass as heaven on earth, we need to know more. We need to know what the Lamb is, and why we call Him “Lamb.” To find out, we have to go back in time, almost to the very beginning.

  WELL BREAD

  To ancient Israel, the lamb was identified with sacrifice, and sacrifice is one of the most primal forms of worship. As early as the second generation described in Genesis, we find, in the story of Cain and Abel, the first recorded example of a sacrificial offering. “Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions” (Gen 4:3–4). In due time, we encounter similar burnt offerings from Noah (Gen 8:20–21), Abraham (Gen 15:8–10; 22:13), Jacob (Gen 46:1), and others. In Genesis, the patriarchs were forever building altars, and altars served primarily as places of sacrifice. In addition to burnt offerings, the ancients sometimes poured “libations,” or sacrificial offerings of wine.

  Of the sacrifices in Genesis, two deserve our most careful attention: that of Melchizedek (Gen 14:18–20) and that of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22.

  Melchizedek appears as the first priest mentioned in the Bible, and many Christians (following the Letter to the Hebrews 7:1–17) have seen him as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ. Melchizedek was both priest and king, an odd combination in the Old Testament, but one that would later be applied to Jesus. Genesis describes Melchizedek as king of Salem, a land that would later become “Jeru-salem,” meaning “City of Peace” (see Ps 76:2). Jesus would arise one day as king of the heavenly Jerusalem and, again like Melchizedek, “Prince of Peace.” Finally, Melchizedek's sacrifice was extraordinary in that it involved no animals. He offered bread and wine, as Jesus would at the Last Supper, when He instituted the Eucharist. Melchizedek's sacrifice ended with a blessing upon Abraham.

  MORIAH CARRY

  Abraham himself would revisit the site of Salem, some years later, when God called upon him to make an ultimate sacrifice. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham: “Take your son, your only son
Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains” (v. 2). Israelite tradition, recorded in the 2 Chronicles 3:1, identifies Moriah with the future Temple site in Jerusalem. There Abraham traveled with Isaac, who carried upon his back the wood for the sacrifice (Gen 22:6). When Isaac asked where was the victim, Abraham replied, “God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (v. 8). In the end, the angel of God did stay Abraham's hand from sacrificing his son and provided a ram to be sacrificed.

  In this story, Israel would discern God's covenant oath to make Abraham's descendants a mighty nation: “By myself I have sworn . . . because you . . . have not withheld your son . . . I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven . . . and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves” (Gen 22:16–17). That was God's IOU to Abraham; it would also turn out to be Israel's life-insurance policy. In the desert of Sinai, when the chosen people earned death by worshiping the golden calf, Moses invoked God's covenant oath to Abraham in order to save them from divine wrath (see Ex 32:13–14).

  Christians would later look upon the story of Abraham and Isaac as a profound allegory for the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross. The similarities were many. First, Jesus, like Isaac, was a faithful father's only beloved son. Again like Isaac, Jesus carried uphill the wood for His own sacrifice, which would be consummated on a hill in Jerusalem. In fact, the site where Jesus died, Calvary, was one of the hillocks on Moriah's range. Moreover, the very first line of the New Testament identifies Jesus with Isaac as “the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). To Christian readers, even Abraham's words proved prophetic. Recall that there was no punctuation in the Hebrew original, and consider an alternate reading of verse 8: “God will provide Himself, the Lamb, for a burnt offering.” The Lamb foreshadowed, of course, was Jesus Christ, God Himself—“that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the gentiles” (Gal 3:14; see also Gn 22:16–18).

  ANIMAL MAGNETISM

  By the time of Israel's enslavement in Egypt, it is clear that sacrifice occupies an essential and central part of Israel's religion. Pharaoh's overseers taunt that the Israelites' frequent sacrifices are merely an excuse for avoiding work (see Ex 5:17). Later, when Moses makes his appeal to Pharaoh, chief among his demands is the Israelites' right to offer sacrifice to God (see Ex 10:25).

  What did all these offerings mean? Animal sacrifice meant many things to the ancient Israelites.

  • It was a recognition of God's sovereignty over creation: “The earth is the Lord's” (Ps 24:1). Man acknowledged this fact by giving back to God what is ultimately His. Thus, sacrifice praised God from Whom all blessings flow.

  • A sacrifice could be an act of thanks. Creation is given to man as a gift, but what return can man make to God (see Ps 116:12)? We can only give back what we ourselves have received.

  • Sometimes, sacrifice served as a way of solemnly sealing an agreement or oath, a covenant before God (see Gen 21:22–32).

  • Sacrifice could also be an act of renunciation and sorrow for sins. The person offering sacrifice recognized that his sins deserved death; he offered the animal's life in place of his own.

  COUNTING SHEEP

  But the pivotal sacrifice in Israel's history was the Passover, which precipitated the Israelites' flight from Egypt. It was at the Passover that God instructed each Israelite family to take an unblemished lamb without broken bones, kill it, and sprinkle its blood on the doorpost. That night, the Israelites were to eat the lamb. If they did, their firstborn would be spared. If they didn't, their firstborn would die in the night, along with all the firstborn in their flocks (see Ex 12:1–23). The sacrificial lamb died as a ransom, in place of the firstborn of the household. The Passover, then, was an act of redemption, a “buying back.”

  Yet God did not merely rescue the firstborn sons of Israel; He also consecrated them as a “kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Ex 19:6)—a nation He called His own “firstborn son” (Ex 4:22).

  The Lord told the Israelites, then, to commemorate the Passover every year, and He even gave them the words they should use to explain the ritual to future generations: “When your children say to you, “What do you mean by this service?' you shall say, “It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when He slew the Egyptians” (Ex 12:26–27).

  Entering the Promised Land, the Israelites continued their daily sacrifices to God, now guided by the many prescriptions of the Law, which we see enumerated in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. (See, for example, Lev 7–9; Num 28; Dt 16.)

  ALTARED STATE: JERUSALEM AS ROYAL CAPITAL

  With the establishment of the Temple at Jerusalem around 960 B.C., Israel offered its daily sacrifices to Almighty God in a majestic setting. Each day, the priests sacrificed two lambs, one in the morning and one in the evening, to atone for the sins of the nation. Those were the essential sacrifices; but, throughout the day, the smoke rose from many other, private offerings. Goats, bulls, turtledoves, pigeons, and rams were offered on the huge bronze altar that stood in the open air at the entrance to the inner court of the Temple. The “Holy Place” of the Temple was just beyond that altar, and the “Holy of Holies”—the dwelling place of God—was farther still. The “altar of incense” stood immediately before the Holy of Holies. Only priests were permitted into the inner court of the Temple; only the high priest was permitted in the Holy of Holies, and even he could enter only briefly, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. For even the high priest was a sinner and thus unworthy to abide in God's presence.

  The Jerusalem Temple brought together all the strains of sacrifice that had gone before. Built on the site where Melchizedek had offered bread and wine, and where Abraham had offered his son, and where God had sworn His oath to save all nations, the Temple served as the enduring place of offerings, principal of which was identical with that most ancient sacrifice of Abel: the lamb.

  For the great day of sacrifice remained the feast of Passover, when as many as two and a half million pilgrims thronged Jerusalem, coming from the far corners of the known world. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus records that, on Passover in the yearA.D. 70—only months before the Romans destroyed the Temple, and some forty years after Jesus' ascension—the priests offered more than a quarter of a million lambs on the Temple's altar—256,500, to be precise.

  INSIDE AND OUT

  Was all of this sacrifice merely empty ritual? No, although the burnt offering, by itself, was clearly not enough. God demanded an interior sacrifice as well. The psalmist declared that “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit” (Ps 51:17). The prophet Hosea spoke for God, saying, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6).

  Yet the obligation to offer sacrifice remained. We know that Jesus observed the Jewish laws regarding sacrifice. He celebrated the Passover every year in Jerusalem; and presumably He ate the sacrificed lamb, first with His family and later with His Apostles. After all, it wasn't optional. Consuming the lamb was the only way a faithful Jew could renew his covenant with God, and Jesus was a faithful Jew.

  But Passover had more than an ordinary importance in Jesus' life; it was central to His mission, a definitive moment. Jesus is the Lamb. When Jesus stood before Pilate, John notes that “it was the day of preparation of the Passover; it was about the sixth hour” (19:14). John knew that the sixth hour was when the priests were beginning to slaughter the Passover lambs. This, then, is the moment of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

  Next, John recounts that none of Jesus' bones were broken on the cross, “that the Scripture might be fulfilled” (19:36). Which Scripture was that? Exodus 12:46, which stipulates that the Passover lamb must have no broken bones. We see, then, that the Lamb of God, like the Passover lamb, is a worthy offering, a perfect ful
fillment.

  In the same passage, John relates that the onlookers served Jesus sour wine from a sponge on a hyssop branch (see Jn 19:29; Ex 12:22). Hyssop was the branch prescribed by the Law for the Passover sprinkling of the lamb's blood. Thus, this simple action marked the fulfillment of the new and perfect redemption. And Jesus cried out, “It is finished.”

  Finally, in speaking of Jesus' garment at the time of the crucifixion, John uses the precise term for the vestments the high priest wore when he offered sacrifices such as the Passover lamb.

  VICTIM'S RITES

  What can we conclude from this? John makes it clear to us that,in the new and definitive Passover sacrifice, Jesus is both priest and victim. This is confirmed in the other three Gospels' accounts of the Last Supper, where Jesus clearly uses the priestly language of sacrifice and libations, even as He describes Himself as the victim. “This is My body which is given for you. . . . This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood” (Lk 22:19–20).

  Jesus' sacrifice would accomplish what all the blood of millions of sheep and bulls and goats could never do. “For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Heb 10:4). Even the blood of a quarter of a million lambs could not save the nation of Israel, never mind the world. To atone for offenses against a God Who is all-good, infinite, and eternal, mankind needed a perfect sacrifice: a sacrifice as good and unblemished and boundless as God Himself. And that was Jesus, Who alone could “put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Heb 9:26).