Meditation for March 18, The Lamb

Thou holy fount, whence flows
The sacred sevenfold flood,
Where we our filthy robes may cleanse
In the Lamb's saving Blood:
(En Ut Superba Criminum)
(Matins for the Feast of the Sacred Heart)

Already in Passion Week, the Church puts on the lips of Christ this word of Jeremias: I was as a meek lamb, that is carried to be a victim (XI, 19). She repeats with Isaias, He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before His shearer, and He shall not open His mouth (LIII, 7).

In the Preface of Easter she will sing: He is the true Lamb that took away the sins of tke world, and in the hymn at vespers, Now at the Lamb's royal feast, in robes of saintly white we sing, through the Red sea in safety brought by Jesus, our immortal King.

As early as the third century, Christian art alluded to the five wounds by representing the Lamb, with side pierced, letting the blood flow into a chalice from which it escaped in five streams. The lamb was also represented in the center of a cross thus giving us one of the first sketches of the crucifix.

John, who leaned on the divine Lamb at the Last Supper, was one of the two disciples to whom the Precursor had said in pointing out Jesus: Behold the Lamb of God. He must have retained the expression because it appears as many as thirty times in the Apocalypse.[1] Note at least this example: Only the virgins follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.

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[1] Apoc. xiv, 4; iii, 17; iv, 11; v, 6-12; vii, 17; xii, 11; xiii, 8; xix, 7-9; xxi, 23-27, etc.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)