In the biblical presentation of the Passion of Christ, a closing image is an opening.

St. John's Gospel records that one of the soldiers pierced, opened Christ's side with a spear,

and at once there came out blood and water.

From the end of Christ's life, we have a new opening, a new beginning.

Beyond the immediacy and centrality of Calvary, the death of Christ needs to the life of the sacraments.

Thomas Aquinas cites this specific biblical scene to illustrate the connection between the

passion of Christ and the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Thomas writes in quotation 1A of your handout,

It is manifest that the sacraments of the church especially have power from the passion of Christ,

whose power in a certain way is joined to us through the reception of the sacraments.

As a sign of this, from the side of Christ hanging on the cross flowed water and blood,

of which one pertains to baptism and the other to the Eucharist, which are the principal,

or most powerful pontissima sacraments. Although there are moments when Thomas explicitly

accepts the link between Christ's resurrection and the sacraments, his overwhelming

sacramental focus is the passion.

According to Thomas' biblical and theological analysis, the link between Christ's sacrifice

and sacraments results from God's repeated use of symbolic action and representation.

We see this theme in the three signs or sets of signs in Thomas's text here.

First, Christ's pierced body is a sign of the saving love of God that animates Christ's life

and the entire sacramental economy. Second, the blood and water are signs of Eucharist and baptism.

Lastly, those two sacraments are signs for the entire seven-fold sacramental dispensation.

What I would like to examine this afternoon is the formal and material overlaps between the passion and the sacraments.

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