1. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. So however many of us call on the Lord, we received salvation once the Egyptians died, let us learn to eat the Passover not as the foolish Jews who still follow a shadow after the advent of the truth as each one slaughters and eats the sheep at his own house on the fourteenth day of the first month. That sheep was the shadow of the real. The true lamb of God is the Lord Jesus who takes away the sin of the world. He said, “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have life within you.” For in vain do the Jews perform this in a bodily sense because unless they do it in a spiritual sense, they could not have life in themselves, “for the law is spiritual,” as the Apostle says, “and Christ our Passover is sacrificed.”

2. Spiritual powers are prefigured in the story of Exodus. But those spiritual powers are prefigured in the history of Exodus where the Passover is told. There on the tenth day, on the fourteenth day, in the evening, there is a sacrifice of the perfect year-old male lamb. What blood applied to the doorposts means, what the gathering of neighbors is, what the sandals are, what the walking staff is, what the leaven and the unleavened bread are it is necessary to begin explaining tomorrow with the Lord’s help. Yet, only those things taken from the reading are to be grasped which cannot be explained to the catechumens present but must necessarily be opened up for neophytes. Not one but many lambs were slaughtered in the shadow of that legal Passover. Each was slaughtered at home, for one could not be sufficient for all because it was the figure, not the reality of the Lord’s passion.

3. For a figure is not the truth, but an imitation of the truth. Man also was made in the image of God, and yet is not therefore God even if he is called a god by reason of being in God’s image. How is God one by nature, many by relation? Therefore, in this truth in which we exist, one died for all and therefore feeds all the individual churches by his immolation in the mystery of bread and wine. Having been believed, he gives life to them; having been consecrated, he sanctifies those who are consecrating. This is flesh of the lamb, here is the blood. For the Bread who descends from heaven says, “the bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” He rightly expresses his blood under the appearance of wine when he says in the gospel, “I am the true vine.” He declares sufficiently that every wine is his blood since it is offered in the figure of his passion. The blessed patriarch Jacob prophesied concerning Christ, “He will wash his robe in wine and his garment in blood.” Indeed, he was to cover the robe of our body, his garment, with his own blood. Therefore, he is the Creator and Lord of natures who produced bread from the earth, and brought about his own body from bread because he can and promised. He who made wine from water also made his blood from wine.

4. Therefore, we ought to attend to the manner in which that lamb ought to be eaten from the reading, You do not eat something crude from him not cooked in water but roasted in a fire: the head with the feet with the insides. There are two spiritual lessons in these words, one of which, if you follow it, you will know both. Every portion of the divine Scriptures in both old and new testaments, contains the Son of God. Either promises that he will come in man, or having declared himself to have come, from this Blessed Phillip, having been found by Christ, finds Nathaniel and says to him, “He whom Moses wrote about in the Law, and in the Prophets. We have found Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth” And what more is there, beloved? In him is contained the whole law, old and new, or as I might say, he is the soul of the Law. He himself spoke through Moses when he said to him, “I will open your mouth and I will inspire you in what you ought to say.” He himself spoke through the Prophets when he said, “I who speak through the Prophets am present.” He himself spoke through Paul when Paul the apostle said, “Or are you seeking proof of him speaking in me, i.e. Christ?” These fleshes of the immaculate Lamb, that is, the inner parts of his teaching, should not be taken crudely without interpretation, nor boiled in water, i.e. nor have their unlocking diluted, nor boiled away. Those who flow like water from above, feeling nothing heavenly, but things roasted in the fire, that is, cooked solid by the divine Spirit. For a fire tends to rise above. Wherefore the Lord said to the Jews, “You are from below; I am from above.”

So, because we said that the Scriptures talk about the members of the Lamb, let us see what it means that the head is with the feet and inside parts, namely that you may accept the divinity in the head by the testimony of the four Evangelists. We take the feet [as indicating] incorporation, celebrated around the end of the world. For the feet are the extreme parts of the body, but in the interior parts you perceive the hidden mysteries.

5. The apostles also hear, “Let your loins be girded.” Why that is especially enjoined is recognized in the case of John the Baptist whose limbs were girder about with a hide girdle. The meaning of loins the apostle means in the Letter to the Hebrews, “Thus Levi was in the loins of this father” — that is the priestly tribe — when Melchizedek met him. To him? To whom? Holy Abraham, of course. So, the hide girdle around his loins signified the mortification of vices.

The hide adapted not except the death of an animal. From God’s commands we earlier learned that we should put to death the desires of the flesh and to receive the body of Christ which was sacrificed for us who are slaves in the Egypt of the world. For this reason, as the Apostle says, let a man test himself and thus let him eat from the bread and drink from the cup. He commanded that it should be eaten in haste lest we partake of sacrament of the Lord’s body and blood with a sluggish heart and a lifeless mouth. We should partake of it with all the passion the mind can muster as if truly hungering and thirsting for justice. For the Lord Jesus himself said, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice for they will be satisfied.”

6. So this reading concludes with a worthy end, “This is the Passover of the Lord.” “O the depths of the riches of knowledge of God!” He says it is the Lord’s Passover, the passing over of the Lord. So you would not think of what happened as earthly, but as heavenly through him who passed over into it, he made it his body and his blood. For what we explained above generally about eating the lamb’s flesh should be especially retained in tasting the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion so that you wouldn’t think of it as raw flesh or physical blood, as Judas did. You should not reject this by saying, “How can this man give his flesh to eat? Nor should you boil the sacrament itself in the container of a sinful heart thinking that it is common and earthly but that you should believe what was said was done by the fire of the Divine Spirit because what you receive is the body of the heavenly bread and the blood of that sacred vine. For when he [Christ] extended the consecrated bread and wine to his disciples, he said, “This is my body; this is my blood.” Let us believe him whom we have believed. Truth knows nothing of a lie.

7. So when he spoke to the surprised and grumbling crowds about eating his body and drinking his blood, they said, “This saying is hard and who can listen to it? I said before that to remove those thoughts which should be avoided through the heavenly fire, he added, “It is the Spirit who gives life for the flesh profits nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” So we are at once bidden to eat the head of his divinity with its feet and the inner mysteries incorporated. This was so we would believe everything together as it has handed on and not weaken his completely reliable saying, “This is my body; this is my blood.”

8. But if there was anything overwhelming in the feeling of each one that he did not understand in the exposition, he could be consumed with the fire of faith because our God is a consuming fire who purges, teaches, and illumines our hearts to understand divine things that we may know the cause and rationale of the heavenly sacrifice instituted by Christ when we will unceasingly give thanks for his gift. That is truly the hereditary gift of his New Covenant which he, on the night he was betrayed to crucifixion, he left as it were a guaranty of his presence. This is the food for our journey by which we are nourished and fed in the way of life until, leaving this world, we go up to him. This is why he said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.”

9. He wanted his benefits to remain with us; he wanted souls redeemed by his precious blood to always be made holy through the image of his own passion and so he commanded his faithful disciples whom he appointed as the first priests of his church that they would unceasingly conduct these mysteries of eternal life because all priests throughout the whole world should celebrate them in every church until Christ returns from heaven. This is where the priests themselves and all the faithful among the people will possess an exemplar of Christ’s passion daily before their very eyes and hold it in their hands as well as eating with their mouth and heart. Let us hold this indelible memorial of our redemption et pursue this sweet medicine of eternal protection against the poison of the Devil, as the Holy Spirit encourages us, “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.”

10. There is a twofold reason why he chose to have the sacraments of his body and blood to be offered in the form of bread and wine. First, that the spotless lamb of God might be delivered over as a pure offering to be celebrated in behalf of a purified people without roasting, without blood. Then since bread has to be taken from many wheat grains and made by water and fire, so it quite reasonably is taken as a figure of Christ’s body. We know this body was taken from the multitude of the whole human race to be made one body, made complete by the fire of the Holy Spirit.

11. For he was born of the Holy Spirit, and since it was fitting for him to fulfill all righteousness, he entered the waters of baptism to make them holy and came out of them full of the Holy Spirit who descended on him in the figure of a dove. He returned from the Jordan, as the evangelist testifies, “but Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan.” Similarly, his blood collected by him from many grapes of wine are pressed in the wine press of the cross et grows hot in spacious vessels in the faithful hearts of its recipients by its own power. All of you, who are leaving the power of Egypt and Pharaoh, that is the devil, should understand with us this sacrifice of the saving Pascha with a complete longing of a devout heart. Understand that it comes from our Lord Jesus Christ himself whom we believe to be in his sacraments. The inner recesses of our being are made holy; his inestimable power abides in us forever.