The text of the Lamb of God is quite straight forward: Except it is the paschal lamb, Jesus, who is sacrificed to feed us, body and soul. The Agnus Dei in liturgy is that stark and that real. In order for us to live, some other living thing must be sacrificed. There is an unfortunate distance that now exists between many of us and the sources of our food - be it animals that are butchered or crops or gardens that are harvested - and this gives us an impoverished understanding of the Mass. It came as such a shock that some could not even bring themselves to eat it. The local grocer asked for a day to procure the lamb, and when people saw the leg of lamb, it dawned on them that it had been scampering around the hillsides of Tuscany only the previous day. Once, when I was travelling in Italy with friends, we decided to cook lamb for supper one night. Nothing could be further from the usage of the word in the expression Lamb of God, Agnus Dei. The problem comes that when most people, unfamiliar with raising sheep, think about a lamb, we think of a gentle, young animal, beginning its life. I wanted to start here because this acclamation of the people is sung during the fraction rite, and if we don’t understand the eucharistic theology behind the rite, we won’t understand the fraction, or indeed how the Eucharist is related to the sacrificial nature of every meal that we eat. “I have often talked about the desire to tame Jesus this composition will help you to remember that the image of the Lamb of God has nothing to do with a petting zoo and a lot to do with a butcher.” After this comes the Invitation to Communion, which begins, “Behold the lamb…” Lamb of God as sacrificeīut what does it all mean? In an upcoming commentary in Today’s Liturgy on the chapter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church related to Jesus, I made a particularly graphic reference to the Agnus Dei in the Duruflé Requiem Mass: It designates the liturgical texts sung or said at the fraction rite in the Catholic Church, when the eucharistic species of the bread, now the Body of Christ, is broken, and a small portion is added to the chalice. The definition of Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, is quite straightforward.

Agnus dei midi