Behold the Lamb of God Upon the Altar of Mount Moriah

“This is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld. Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed.”

Holy Week 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

You might readily see the irony of my invoking the haunting passage above. It is from the Exultet, that wondrous proclamation of Salvation History as the Paschal Candle is blessed at the doors of the church in the liturgy for the Easter Vigil. The imagery of Christ breaking the prison bars of death may understandably have deep meaning for me. The excerpt recalls a scene from Holy Week that I once wrote about in “To the Spirits in Prison: When Jesus Descended into Hell.”

That post tells the story referenced in the Second Letter of Saint Peter, about what happened to Jesus on what we now call Holy Saturday, that period of darkness between the Cross and the Resurrection. And I just now realized, looking back at that post from several years ago, that I cited that same passage from the Exultet in its opening.

Back in February 2025, I wrote a post entitled “On the Great Biblical Adventure, the Truth Will Make You Free.” It mentioned my recent acquisition of the much anticipated Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament edited by Dr. Scott Hahn. That post also referred to a recent and surprising resurgence of biblical interest throughout the free world. I learned of that explosion of interest when Ignatius Press placed me on a waiting list for that particular bible which is now in its fourth or fifth printing. I have been lugging the weighty hardcover tome, consisting of 2,314 pages, around with me for two months at this writing. I don’t seem to be able to part with it for long. It is a treasure trove of biblical insight and truth, filled not only with readable and scholarly translations of Sacred Scripture, but also with scholars’ notes on the biblical texts. From a historical perspective it draws clear connections between the Old and New Testaments. From a spiritual perspective it is as though a lamp has been relit opening for me, and hopefully also for you, a world of deeper meaning embedded within the texts. As I mentioned in a previous post, my goal has been two-fold: to educate, or rather reeducate myself on the story of God and us, and to avoid dropping the very heavy book on my foot in the process.

The interpretation of a religious text is a study called exegesis. It seeks to convey and understand both the literal and spiritual sense of biblical truths. Neither should be sacrificed in pursuit of the other. I have often described it this way: There is a story on its surface, which is true, and a far greater story in its depths which points to even greater truths. One way in which the spiritual truth of Scripture is expressed is in allegory. Jesus told many allegorical accounts in parables. Most readers are clear that the truth in these precious accounts is in the lesson they convey. Two of the most famous examples are the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” and the “Parable of the Prodigal Son.” You know these stories well, and they need no explanation.

Most of Sacred Scripture is not conveyed in parable form, but as a historical narrative. Allegory is still very much a part of that narrative, and we are cheating our understanding of a text when we suppress its allegorical content. We should start by accepting both truths: the truth of the historical content of Scripture and the equal and sometimes even greater truth in its allegorical content. In this sense allegory refers to a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or religious one. In the 19th and 20th centuries, fundamentalist Scripture scholars stripped allegory from their interpretations of the text, but at great cost. More modern scholars have restored it. One of them has been Dr. Scott Hahn.

When I cited an excerpt from the Exultet Proclamation from the Easter Vigil liturgy as I opened this post, I later realized that the Second Reading for the Easter Vigil Mass is one that I have pondered for a very long time. It is from Genesis 22:1-19, the story of God calling upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son. “So momentous is this event in its outcome,” wrote Scott Hahn, “that it stands as one of the defining moments of Salvation History.” I have set out to study the great depths of this account and they are astonishing.

Abraham and Isaac

Isaac is a Hebrew name, of course, and it means “He laughs.” It has its origin in Genesis 17:16-17: “ ‘I will bless (Sarah) and moreover I will give you a son by her; I will bless her and she shall be the mother of nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’ Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’ ”

Abraham apparently gave little thought to the wisdom of falling to the ground and laughing at God. The fact that he “said it to himself” is no guarantee that God would not have heard it loud and clear. And so it was that the Word of God came to give the son of Abraham and Sarah the name “Isaac,” which means “He laughs.”

Abraham was apparently not the only one laughing. God seemed to get a chuckle out of it as well.

As the story progressed, the significance of Isaac’s birth was immediate. He was to be the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Isaac was to be the bearer of the covenant into future generations: “I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for him and his descendants after him” (Genesis 17:19). Then the drama of the Book of Genesis reaches its greatest intensity with the heart-wrenching story of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice as a burnt offering his beloved son upon the heights of Mount Moriah. Had Abraham shown anything less than heroic faith and obedience the grand narrative of the Bible would have developed very differently thereafter. Here is the Genesis account which became the Second Reading of our Easter Vigil liturgy.

From the Book of Genesis 22:1-18:

After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, “Take your son, your only begotten son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and went to the place of which God had told him. … Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on the shoulders of his son to carry, and he took in his own hands the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. Isaac said to his father, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order, and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham! Do not lay your hand on your son or do anything to him for now I know that you have not withheld your only begotten son from me.” Abraham then lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. So Abraham went and took the lamb and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place YHWH YIR’EH, in Hebrew, “The Lord will see.”

It is from this very account that, twenty one centuries later, the Gospel of John (1:29) proclaims “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

I have always felt that this account in Genesis was a presage, a looking far ahead, to the sacrifice of Jesus upon Golgotha. It is allegorical in that sense. The account is true on its literal face but it is also true that it echoes the Greatest Story Ever Told which will come many centuries later. All the elements are there. The Second Book of Chronicles (3:1) identifies Moriah as the site upon which, nearly one thousand years later, Solomon would build the Jerusalem Temple, and Calvary, where the only begotten Son of God was crucified, is a hillock in the Moriah range. So for the Hebrew reader of the story of the Crucifixion, there is a powerful sense of déjà vu: the place, the mount, Abraham placing the wood for sacrifice upon the back of Isaac, and is not the ram caught by its horns in the thicket highly reminiscent of the Crown of Thorns? But we cannot reminisce backwards. This amazing account from Genesis is a mysterious example of the power of biblical inspiration. Only in the mind of God, in the time of Genesis, was the story of Christ evident.

From Sheol to the Kingdom of Heaven

In the Old Testament, “to die” meant to descend to Sheol. It was our final destination. To rise from the dead, therefore, meant to rise from Sheol, but no one ever did. The concept of Sheol being the “underworld” is a simple employment of the cosmology of ancient Judaism which understood the abode of God and the heavens as being above the Earth, and Sheol, the place of the dead, as below it. This is the source of our common understanding of Heaven and hell, but it omits a vast theological comprehension of the death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus and the human need to understand our own death in terms of faith.

If, up to the time of Jesus, “to die” meant to descend into Sheol, then Jesus introduced an entirely new understanding of death in his statement from the Cross to the penitent criminal, Dismas, who pleaded from his own cross, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus responded, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). This is an account that I once told entitled, “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.”

It is by far the most widely read of our Holy Week posts, and not just at Holy Week. On the Cross, where the penitent criminal comes to faith while being crucified along with Jesus, God dissolves the bonds of death because death can have no power over Jesus. It is highly relevant for us that the conditions in which the penitent Dismas entered Paradise were to bear his cross and to come to faith.

It was at the moment Jesus declared, in His final word from the Cross, “It is finished,” that Heaven, the abode of God, opened for human souls for the first time in human history. The Gospels do not treat this moment lightly:

“It was now about the sixth hour [3:00 PM], and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Saying this he breathed his last.”

— Luke 23:44-46

“And behold, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the Earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised ... When the centurion, and those who were with him keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake, and what took place, they were filled with awe, and said, ‘Clearly, this was the Son of God.’”

— Matthew 27:51-54

The veil of the Temple being torn in two appears also in Mark’s Gospel (15:38) and is highly significant. Two veils hung in the Jerusalem Temple. One was visible, separating the outer courts from the sanctuary. The other was visible only to the priests as it hung inside the sanctuary before its most sacred chamber in which the Holy of Holies dwelled (see Exodus 26:31-34). At the death of Jesus, the curtain of the Temple being torn from top to bottom is symbolic of salvation itself. Upon the death of Jesus, the barrier between the Face of God and His people was removed.

According to the works of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, the curtain barrier before the inner sanctuary that was torn in two was heavily embroidered with images of the Creation and the Cosmos. Its destruction symbolized the opening of Heaven, God’s dwelling place and the Angelic Realm, to human souls.

In ancient Israel in the time of Abraham and Isaac the concept of Sheol after death was closely connected with the grave and pictured only as a gloomy underworld hidden deep in the bowels of the Earth. There human souls descended after death (Genesis 37:35) to a joyless existence where the Lord is neither seen nor worshipped. Both the righteous and the wicked sank into the nether world (Genesis 44:31). Despite the apparent finality of death, Scripture displays great confidence in the power of God to deliver his people from its clutches. That confidence was made manifest in the deliverance of Jesus from his tomb after he displayed the power of God to the one place where he had always been absent, the realm of the dead. “For Christ also died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and declared to the spirits in prison who did not formerly obey when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” (1 Peter 3:18-20)

The essential point for us could not be clearer or more hopeful. Besides Jesus himself, the first to be sanctioned with a promise of paradise was a condemned prisoner who, even in the intense suffering of his own cross, refused to mock Jesus but rather came to believe and then place all his final hope in that belief. As I ended “Dismas, Crucified to the Right” Dismas was given a new view from his cross, a view beyond death away from the East of Eden, across the Undiscovered Country of Death, toward his sunrise and eternal home.

I have written many times that we live in a most important time. The story of Abraham told above took place twenty one centuries before the Birth of the Messiah. We now live in the twenty first century after. Christ is now at the very center of Salvation History.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Here are some recommended posts along a similar theme.

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

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Our “From Ashes to Easter” feature will be retitled after the Easter Season to become “Salvation History.” We will adding other Scripture-based posts at that time.

News Alert: When we tried to share some of these Holy Week posts in several Facebook Catholic groups, Facebook characterized them as “SPAM” and then disabled our account. There is no easy way to communicate with Facebook about this. We have opened an “X” account (formerly Twitter) and find it a much more accepting platform for Catholic or traditional viewpoints. Please follow us there at BeyondTheseStoneWalls.

With many thanks and Easter Blessings,

Father Gordon MacRae

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands

“Ecce Homo!” An 1871 painting of Christ before Pilate by Antonio Ciseri depicts a moment woven into the fabric of salvation history, and into our very souls.

“So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd saying, ‘I am innocent of this righteous man’s blood.’”

— Matthew 27: 24

A now well known Wall Street Journal  article, “The Trials of Father MacRae” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (May 10, 2013) had a photograph of me — with hair, no less — being led in chains from my 1994 trial. When I saw that photo, I was drawn back to a vivid scene that I wrote about during Holy Week two years ago in “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.” My Holy Week post began with the scene depicted in that photo and all that was to follow on the day I was sent to prison. It was the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, September 23, 1994, but as I stood before Judge Arthur Brennan to hear my condemnation, I was oblivious to that fact.

Had that photo a more panoramic view, you would see two men shuffling in chains ahead of me toward a prison-bound van. They had the misfortune of being surrounded by clicking cameras aimed at me, and reporters jockeying for position to capture the moment to feed “Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests.” That short walk to the prison van seemed so very long. Despite his own chains, one of the two convicts ahead of me joined the small crowd in mockery of me. The other chastised him in my defense.

Writing from prison 18 years later, in Holy Week 2012, I could not help but remember some irony in that scene as I contemplated the fact of “Dismas, Crucified to the Right.” That post ended with the brief exchange between Christ and Dismas from their respective crosses, and the promise of Paradise on the horizon in response to the plea of Dismas: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This conversation from the cross has some surprising meaning beneath its surface. That post might be worth a Good Friday visit this year.

But before the declaration to Dismas from the Crucified Christ — “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43) — salvation history required a much more ominous declaration. It was that of Pontius Pilate who washed his hands of any responsibility for the Roman execution of the Christ.

Two weeks ago, in “What if the Prodigal Son Had No Father to Return To?”, I wrote of my fascination with etymology, the origins of words and their meanings. There is also a traceable origin for many oft-used phrases such as “I wash my hands of it.” That well-known phrase came down to us through the centuries to renounce responsibility for any number of the injustices incurred by others. The phrase is a direct allusion to the words and actions of Pontius Pilate from the Gospel of Saint Matthew (27: 24).

Before Pilate stood an innocent man, Jesus of Nazareth, about to be whipped and beaten, then crowned with thorns in mockery of his kingship. Pilate had no real fear of the crowd. He had no reason to appease them. No amount of hand washing can cleanse from history the stain that Pilate tried to remove from himself by this symbolic washing of his hands.

This scene became the First Station of the Cross. At the Shrine of Lourdes the scene includes a boy standing behind Pilate with a bowl of water to wash away Pilate’s guilt. My friend, Father George David Byers sent me a photo of it, and a post he once wrote after a pilgrimage to Lourdes:

“Some of you may be familiar with ‘The High Stations’ up on the mountain behind the grotto in Lourdes, France. The larger-than-life bronze statues made vivid the intensity of the injustice that is occurring. In the First Station, Jesus, guarded by Roman soldiers, is depicted as being condemned to death by Pontius Pilate who is about to wash his hands of this unjust judgment. A boy stands at the ready with a bowl and a pitcher of water so as to wash away the guilt from the hands of Pilate . . . Some years ago a terrorist group set off a bomb in front of this scene. The bronze statue of Pontius Pilate was destroyed . . . The water boy is still there, eager to wash our hands of guilt, though such forgiveness is only given from the Cross.”

The Writing on the Wall

As that van left me behind these stone walls that day over thirty years ago, the other two prisoners with me were sent off to the usual Receiving Unit, but something more special awaited me. I was taken to begin a three-month stay in solitary confinement. Every surface of the cell I was in bore the madness of previous occupants. Every square inch of its walls was completely covered in penciled graffiti. At first, it repulsed me. Then, after unending days with nothing to contemplate but my plight and those walls, I began to read. I read every scribbled thought, every scrawled expletive, every plea for mercy and deliverance. I read them a hundred times over before I emerged from that tomb three months later, still sane. Or so I thought.

When I read “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized,” Pornchai Maximilian Moontri’s guest post from Thailand, I wondered how he endured solitary confinement that stretched for year upon year. “Today as I look back,” he wrote, “I see that even then in the darkness of solitary confinement, Christ was calling me out of the dark.” It’s an ironic image because one of the most maddening things about solitary confinement is that it’s never dark. Intense overhead lights are on 24/7.

The darkness of solitary confinement he described is only on the inside, the inside of a mind and soul, and it’s a pitch blackness that defies description. My psyche was wounded, at best, after three months. I cannot describe how Pornchai endured this for many years. But he did, and no doubt those who brought it about have since washed their hands of it.

For me, once out of solitary confinement, the writing on the walls took on new meaning. In “Angelic Justice: St Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed,” I described a section of each cell wall where prisoners are allowed to post the images that give meaning and hope to their lives. One wall in each cell contains two painted rectangles, each barely more than two by four feet, and posted within them are the sole remnant of any individualism in prison. You can learn a lot about a man from that finite space on his wall.

When I was moved into this cell, Pornchai’s wall was empty, and mine remained empty as well. Once this blog began in 2009, however, readers began to transform our wall without realizing it. Images sent to me made their way onto the wall, and some of the really nice ones somehow mysteriously migrated over to Pornchai’s wall. A very nice Saint Michael icon spread its wings and flew over to his side one day. That now famous photo of Pope Francis with a lamb placed on his shoulders is on Pornchai’s wall, and when I asked him how my Saint Padre Pio icon managed to get over there, he muttered something about bilocation.

Ecce Homo!

One powerful image, however, has never left its designated spot in the very center of my wall. It’s a five-by-seven inch card bearing the 1871 painting, “Ecce Homo!” — “Behold the Man!” — by the Swiss-born Italian artist, Antonio Ciseri. It was sent to me by a reader during Holy Week a few years ago. The haunting image went quickly onto my cell wall where it has remained since. The Ciseri painting depicts a scene that both draws me in and repels me at the same time.

On one dark day in prison, I decided to take it down from my wall because it troubles me. But I could not, and it took some time to figure out why. This scene of Christ before Pilate captures an event described vividly in the Gospel of Saint John (19:1-5). Pilate, unable to reason with the crowd has Jesus taken behind the scenes to be stripped and scourged, a mocking crown of thorns thrust upon his head. The image makes me not want to look, but then once I do look, I have a hard time looking away.

When he is returned to Pilate, as the scene depicts, the hands of Christ are bound behind his back, a scarlet garment in further mockery of his kingship is stripped from him down to his waist. His eyes are cast to the floor as Pilate, in fine white robes, gestures to Christ with his left hand to incite the crowd into a final decision that he has the power to overrule, but won’t. “Behold the Man!” Pilate shouts in a last vain gesture that perhaps this beating and public humiliation might be enough for them. It isn’t.

I don’t want to look, and I can’t look away because I once stood in that spot, half naked before Pilate in a trial-by-mob. On that day when I arrived in prison, before I was thrown into solitary confinement for three months, I was unceremoniously doused with a delousing agent, and then forced to stand naked while surrounded by men in riot gear, Pilate’s guards mocking not so much what they thought was my crime, but my priesthood. They pointed at me and laughed, invited me to give them an excuse for my own scourging, and then finally, when the mob was appeased, they left me in the tomb they prepared, the tomb of solitary confinement. Many would today deny that such a scene ever took place, but it did. It was thirty years ago. Most are gone now, collecting state pensions for their years of public service, having long since washed their hands of all that ever happened in prison.

Behold the Man!

I don’t tell this story because I equate myself with Christ. It’s just the opposite. In each Holy Week post I’ve written, I find that I am some other character in this scene. I’ve been “Simon of Cyrene, Compelled to Carry the Cross.” I’ve been “Dismas, Crucified to the Right.” I tell this story first because it’s the truth, and second because having lived it, I today look upon that scene of Christ before Pilate on my wall, and I see it differently than most of you might. I relate to it perhaps a bit more than I would had I myself never stood before Pilate.

Having stared for three years at this scene fixed upon my cell wall, words cannot describe the sheer force of awe and irony I felt when someone sent me an October 2013 article by Carlos Caso-Rosendi written and published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the home town of Pope Francis. The article was entitled, “Behold the Man!” and it was about my trial and imprisonment. Having no idea whatsoever of the images upon my cell wall, Carlos Caso-Rosendi’s article began with this very same image: Antonio Ciseri’s 1871 painting, “Ecce Homo!” TSW reader, Bea Pires, printed Carlos’ article and sent it to Pope Francis.

I read the above paragraphs to Pornchai-Maximilian about the power of this scene on my wall. He agrees that he, too, finds this image over on my side of this cell to be vaguely troubling and disconcerting, and for the same reasons I do. He has also lived the humiliation the scene depicts, and because of that he relates to the scene as I do, with both reverence and revulsion. “That’s why it stay on your wall,” he said, “and never found its way over to mine!”

Aha! A confession!

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Note from the Editor: Please visit our Holy Week Posts Page.