Don't get stuck on Good Friday

I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking recently about the Eucharist, specifically in John 6. As I was sitting in the pew before the the Easter Vigil mass on Saturday I was browsing through the readings for the mass. I noticed that the readings highlighted a number of important parts of salvation history, e.g. the creation account, the crossing of the Red Sea, etc. I found myself wondering why none of the readings referenced the Eucharist. I thought, Easter occurs at the Jewish feast of Passover, and Jesus made the Eucharist the new Passover, so why don't any of the Easter readings refer to the Eucharist? After all, isn't the Eucharist the most important part of Easter? For a moment, I almost convinced myself that the Church had missed something here.

Thankfully, God brought my moment of pride to a crashing halt.

Certainly, the Eucharist is a very important part of Easter. However Easter is not really about the feast of Passover. That is for Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Easter is about Sunday, it is about the Resurrection of Jesus, and of us. Think about this: I don't think the Passover was necessary because God had some blood thirsty desire to kill the first-borns of Egypt. The Passover was necessary to set the Israelites free from slavery. Likewise, the Eucharist (the new Passover) was established not because God had some desire to kill His son, but rather because it is necessary to set us free from slavery to sin.

In St. Augustine's Tracates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 25, Augustine mentions that the Jews in John 6 came to Jesus after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand not to see more miracles, but as Jesus says, to literally eat again for free. Augustine explains that they have an earthly perspective, instead of a heavenly perspective. I think this is what happened to me. The Eucharist is a great gift of grace to us on Earth, but we can't fail to see why the Eucharist was given to us. It was given to us to save us from our sins (Matt 26:26-28), it was given to us for our salvation.

Thus the culmination of the Eucharist is not Good Friday (although that is the culmination of the new Passover) but rather the culmination of the Eucharist is Easter Sunday. Praise the Lord, He is risen!