Precious Blood - sermon

Each Friday in Lent, we are joining with the parish of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street, for Lenten Devotions, including Stations of the Cross, veneration of the relic of the True Cross, and a Votive Mass of the one of the mysteries of the Passion. Last Friday, 15 March, we meditated upon the Precious Blood of Our Lord. The sermon preached by Fr Mark Elliott Smith, rector of the church, is reproduced below.

Next Friday, 22 March, in the final iteration of our Lenten Devotions, we will commemorate Our Lady of Sorrows.

Homily for Votive Mass of the Precious Blood

[Not b]lood follow'd, but immortal ichor pure,
Such as the blest inhabitants of heav'n
May bleed, nectareous; for the Gods eat not
Man's food, nor slake as he with sable wine
Their thirst, thence bloodless and from death exempt. (Iliad V. 339–342)

Greek gods were exalted beings, and along with other immortals, it was not blood, but an ethereal golden substance, ichor, that flowed in their veins. But despite the fact that they were undying, infinitely more powerful, and living on a diet of ambrosia and nectar, they were subject to the same passions as humans, albeit writ large: love, hate, envy, lust, revenge, fear. All these featured in their dealings with each other and with the human race. Not so much a heavenly drama, more of a soap opera featuring jilted lovers, power grabs, slaughter, and poison. Generally speaking it was best not to tangle with a god if you could possibly avoid it: it rarely ended well.

But if there’s one thing which seems to run through all the drama it is the wistful yearning for immortality. Thetis, who like all mothers wanted the best for her child, wanted it for his son Achilles, and went to the trouble of dipping him into the Styx in order to achieve it, but failed to realise that the foot, by which she held him, didn’t touch the water; and it was to be his undoing when an arrow struck him in the heel and felled him.

There is a fundamental human instinct which recoils from death, and questions what lies beyond, and yearns to be part of an undying realm.

In the past few weeks, our celebration of the Stations of the Cross have focussed our hearts and minds on how Jesus has, by his Passion and Death, reconciled us to a world from which we were estranged. This is not some something we can accomplish for ourselves by our own efforts. It is nothing less than a gift. God loves us, and wants us to be his children once more.

It is blood, real blood, not ichor, that flows in the veins of the Saviour. Indeed, we can perhaps be even more specific than that. In many of the Eucharistic miracles in which such testing has been done, the blood has always been group AB, which is not a common group. The blood of Jesus Christ, God and Man, had platelets, red cells, white cells, and plasma, like every other human being.

And yet.

We pray:

Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed through his most precious blood. (‘Prayer of Humble Access’, Divine Worship: the Missal)

The Day of Atonement was the one and only day when the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies. During this long day of complicated ceremonial, involving several changes of vestments and a number of liturgical acts, the High Priest would change into simple white linen vestments and enter the Holy of Holies twice; first with the blood of a bull as a sin offering from the Priesthood, and second that of a goat as the sin offering of the people. This blood would be sprinkled before the Ark of the Covenant, or, in the Second Temple, where the Ark would have been. This yearly act was for the removal of sin and the purification of the people.

This, however, is only the shadow or type of the central mystery of our faith, and points towards it: the Blood of Jesus, poured out for us on the Cross for the forgiveness of sins, and to unite us once more to our Heavenly Father. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us “therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body” (Letter to the Hebrews 10:19).

In a world of blood lust and bloodshed, the Blood of Jesus does what no other blood can do: it reconciles us to God. In it, we see the essential unity of his one, perfect, eternal Sacrifice on Calvary, which is made present in the Mass, and Christ’s eternal Priesthood, by which He has entered the Sanctuary of Heaven and pleads for us with our Heavenly Father.

So, today, as we reflect particularly on the Precious Blood of Jesus, the Blood which pleads more eloquently than Abel’s, we do so, conscious of our own unworthiness. On the Day of Atonement, the People of Israel confessed their sins, which were then laid on the scapegoat, which was consigned to the wilderness, which in practice meant pushing it off a cliff to its death. Yes, we will say “Domine, non sum dignus…”, and we will mean it, for we are, and yet it is by the word of Jesus, who called dead Lazarus from the tomb, who calls us from the death of sin, to the life of grace, which he won for us by his most Precious Blood.

“Only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”