Jesus is the Pascal Lamb: Homily for Palm Sunday of the Passion, April 13, 2025

This whole week, starting today, is about Jesus as the Pascal Lamb who brings salvation to the entire world. We are asked to enter into living and experiencing these great events of faith. Through them all, we ask Jesus to remember us and taking us to paradise. Readings for Today.

Jesus is the Pascal Lamb

Is it estimated that during Passover, in the time of Christ, thousands of lambs were slaughtered so that the pilgrims who came to Jerusalem could in fact celebrate Passover in Jerusalem. This was a lifelong goal of every devout Jew. The Passover Seder even ends with the toast, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

And so in the Temple during the week we call holy, there was much slaughtering of lambs. But there was one specific lamb to be slaughtered. The one for the High Priest. This lamb was slaughtered four days before Passover.

Think of this timeline. If the Last Supper is on a Thursday, the preparation of the Lamb four days before would be on a Sunday. And before the resurrection of Jesus, Sunday is the first workday of the week.

So think of the symbolic importance of the timeline. The lamb of Passover is called the Paschal Lamb, based upon the word Pesach (PAY-SOCK), the word used for Passover.

It is not unfamiliar to many Christians to hear of Jesus as the Paschal (Passover) Lamb. The lamb of the high priest prepared four days before, mirrors Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which we celebrated with today’s first gospel.

But very quickly things switch. As Holy Week progresses, we will see that the scene gets darker and darker for Jesus, leading to his death on Good Friday.

The parallels between Jesus as the Lamb of God and Passover are striking. The move of Jesus from triumphal entry to passion and death is reminiscent of Isaiah 53:7, where the lamb is led trustingly to slaughter. 

Jesus, with total trust in the Father, is himself led to slaughter. Jesus is the Lamb for the Great Feast. Jesus, the Lamb of God, deliberately changes the meaning of Passover by making the reference to himself. Eat my body. Drink my blood.

And since on Good Friday, since we always hear the passion according to John, it is important to note that Jesus dies on Preparation Day when the lambs are prepared for the slaughter. 

Just as the lambs are slaughtered for Passover, the Paschal feast, Jesus too is slaughtered for Passover. But there is more. I looked up the time for sunset in Jerusalem, and it is just after 7 pm. 

Why is that important? Because Jewish holidays start at sundown. In order to be prepared, and to clean the Temple, it would likely have started at mid-afternoon.

With all of the slaughtering of the lambs, the Temple would have been filled with blood. So, to clean the Temple before sundown, when they could not work, they often threw big buckets of water, which flowed out of holes in the side of the Temple.

So blood and water flows out the sides of the Temple. Blood and water flows from the sides of Christ. John’s point is clear. While the original Passover celebrates the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, the New Passover, the Lamb of God, celebrates our ultimate freedom from sin and death.

And so the point of the readings we read and the stories we hear is the focus on Jesus. He is the major focus of these stories, and this week is the only week we hear the details in the gospels of his death.

We celebrate what the gentle Lamb of God means for us. We witness the gentle Lamb’s complete surrender to the Father, and his total self-gift to us.

In the other persons in the readings we hear this week, we see ourselves. For we can be as fickle as the crowds who cheered Jesus on Sunday, and sought is death on Friday.

We recognize that without the grace of God, we too can take matters into our own hands. Taking control, like Judas, only to make things terribly worse.

We see that like Peter, we too can find it hard to stand up for Jesus. We can lose our courage, even pretending with do not know Jesus.

But we can also see ourselves in the women and Saint John, standing at the foot of the cross. We can be like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus caring for the body of Jesus.

But perhaps most of all, we can see ourselves as the soldier who says, “Truly this was the Son of God.” We can see ourselves in the thief who recognizes the generous gift of Jesus for salvation. With him, we too pray. “Lord, remember me in paradise.”

And it is Jesus who makes all this possible.

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