Dear friends of Gethsemane, may the Lord give you his peace!
In this Lenten season we are invited by the Lord to intensify our prayer in view of Easter, the summit of our Faith. The first Thursday of April will in fact be Holy Thursday! From this holy place, where we are all called, our prayer takes on strength and meaning in the Lord’s prayer: we help him in the mystery of Redemption. How? Certainly not according to our strengths and abilities, but invoking his precious Blood that this sacred Rock welcomed in its "palm". It reminds me of a well-known episode: the liberation of the chosen people from the slavery of Egypt, the memorial of the Passover (Ex 12). Every Israelite family had to shed some of the blood of the lamb on the doorposts. This was the sign for the angel of death who, seeing it, would not stop, but would pass over, saving the people of the Lord (Ex 12,7-13). Also in this sacred story we find: 1) the people threatened and subdued; 2) the evil represented by Pharaoh of Egypt; 3) God who delivers and saves; 4) through the blood of the lamb.
Great theologians are not needed to understand the strength of what, HERE, our Lord Jesus Christ, innocent Lamb, accomplishes in his consent to the Father "Thy will be done" (Lk 22:42). It is the real Passover!
I ask myself together with you: what can that 'sign' of blood sprinkled on the doorjambs mean? Is it a physical reference in the strict sense? Are the doors of our houses where we enter and go out? It would be a too simplistic interpretation! I find a thought consoling: the doorjambs, those doors on which must be 'shed' the 'sign' of his Blood are each of us. It is the "garment of our soul" made white by the Blood of the Lamb! (Rev 7:14). It is our forehead, our heart, our shoulders, in the sign of the only Cross that saves us. And the Lord Jesus is as if he were telling us again: "For this reason I was born and came into the world, for you and your salvation... listen to my voice" (cf. Jn 18:37).
As we recite a beautiful prayer, in this special month, we invoke this sublime Gift of his and say: "Behold, I receive you, O Blood of my Jesus, and I pour you out upon the Church, upon the world, upon sinners, upon purgatory..." over all of humanity.
