Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to go into Jerusalem and prepare a Passover supper.

At the heart of the Passover meal was the eating of a lamb, which had been sacrificed, in remembrance of the lambs of the original Passover, whose blood had been smeared on the doorposts of the Israelites’ homes in Egypt. Making his Last Supper a Passover meal, Jesus was signaling the fulfillment of John the Baptist’s prophecy that he, Jesus, would be the Lamb of God and the definitive sacrifice.

This sacrifice is made sacramentally present at every Mass—not for the sake of God, who has no need of it, but for our sake. In the Mass, we participate in the act by which divinity and humanity are reconciled, and we eat the sacrificed body and drink the poured-out blood of the Lamb of God.