You are listening to the St. Jose Maria Institute podcast.

Please enjoy today's meditation.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I do you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord,

my guardian angel intercede for me.

Today we begin our prayer with that iconic phrase from St. John, Chapter 19.

When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, it is finished.

And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.

Jesus took that wine.

He took it from a sponge, a dirty sponge that had been raised up to him on a reed of Hesop, which was the greatest of instruments to raise up, but it was very similar

to that read of Hipsip used to place the blood on the door lintels in the book of Exodus

chapter 12.

That blood there was a sign of a Jewish household so that the angel of death would

spare them. Now we see that the blood of Jesus seals the new covenant just as Moses used

also a hip-his-a-branch to sprinkle blood of animals to seal the old covenant.

Let's picture now the scene of the crucifixion.

Early Christian iconography did not like to show the body of Jesus dead or kind of sagging

from the cross. He's always shown alive with that reed and that painful spear, a kind of a javelin

that was thrust into his side. One was done when he was still alive, the reed, when he was still thirsting from his torturers.

The other, the spear, the lance, was thrust into his side when he was already dead to ensure that he was in fact dead.

But then out of his side came water and blood, a symbol both of his humanity and his divinity.

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