“Then Moses took the blood and cast it towards the people.” (Exodus 24:8)
In Sunday’s first reading, Moses threw the blood of the sacrificed animals towards his people as a sign of their union with God through his covenant: the blood was a blessing, as it had been on Passover night when it saved them from death.
Jesus fulfilled this foreshadowing by shedding his blood for us and then taking it to heaven in his risen body’s veins and arteries. But we need his blood here below to spiritually protect and cleanse us. How can he "cast" it down upon us?
Jesus in his love finds a way: through the <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/considering-the-solemnity-of-corpus-christi-through-raphaels-stanza-della-segnatura/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">real presence of his Precious Blood in the Blessed Sacrament</mark></a> which we can receive in Holy Communion. In every drop of consecrated wine, Jesus makes all his blood wholly present.<br><br>Likewise, in every consecrated host of bread, the whole body of Jesus is really present, along with his blood, soul and divinity.
Every time we receive Holy Communion, whether under the appearance of bread or of wine, Jesus casts his blood upon us in a blessing which is much greater than that given by Moses: "how much more effectively the blood of Christ, who offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit, can purify our inner self from dead actions so that we do our service to the living God" (Hebrews 9:14).
For the Jewish mind, the blood of a living being contains its life (Leviticus 17:14), so when Jesus poured out his blood and then gave it to us, he was not only giving up his life but was gifting it to us: we share divine life through his blood. We become "blood relatives" of Jesus by receiving his own life into ours.
But in order to pour out his blood, Jesus’s body needed to be broken by the soldier’s lance – he could not share his life without first losing it. <br><br>In the Eucharist, Jesus’s death and resurrection is made present, including his total loss of blood. This detail is also, in a sense, visible in the Mass: just as every drop of Jesus’s blood left his body on Calvary, so in the Holy Mass his body and his blood are made present under separate appearances. <br><br>We can also think of the "breaking" of Jesus’s body by the guard’s spear at Calvary when the priest breaks the consecrated host: that brutal event is made present in the Holy Mass and the gesture of the priest even makes it, in a way, visible.
Let’s ask to be spiritually broken, to <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcast/the-problems-posed-by-private-revelations-with-simon-caldwell/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">shed our blood supernaturally</mark></a>, so we can feed others with our lives. The more we receive the life of Jesus through the Eucharist and Holy Communion, the more fully we can give ourselves to others, as he did.
