The Lamb Of God - Ash Wednesday (Posted a day late by accident)

I thought this posted yesterday but I was wrong.   So I'm posting it a day late.

THE CHRISTIAN IDENTIFICATION of Jesus as the Pascal Lamb is something I have always found unsettling, enough so that I never much thought about it seriously.  The timing of the trial and execution of Jesus in regard to the Passover meal forces the question as to why was it followed on the day of the slaughter of so many lambs, probably thousands in Jerusalem alone, lambs such as the one which, no doubt, Jesus and his followers ate at the Last Supper.  The traditional answer that Jesus was the unique sacrifice, making later such sacrifices unnecessary never sat right with me.  But, then, I grew up in the Christian milieu in which such sacrifices of animals was left behind more than nineteen centuries before I was born.  Of course most People don't think of the animals they eat as being sacrifices, they think of them as objects to be killed and eaten.  That makes the identification of the crucified Jesus with one especially fraught, if you think about it which I have to admit I'm doing for the first time in my life.

When I made the change from my decades long vegetarian diet to veganism it was in response to two things, a speech that the Chief Rabbi of Dublin made in which he said that the world situation, especially climate change made veganism a moral duty, as well as the moral duty to treat sentient beings well.  The second followed on reading that speech, I remembered a poem by the early 20th century Maine Poet Holman Day about a farmer selling calves to be slaughtered, something which I've posted here before, if I recall correctly.   Growing up on a farm I know baby cows are extremely appealing animals, as are baby goats and lambs, I remember a women I knew who raised goats telling about a Greek family who bought a kid from her right before Orthodox Easter and how when they bound its legs to transport it to be killed she was so appalled that she gave them their money back and kept the animal, her husband slaughtered goats but she knew he'd do it humanely.  Though I don't think there's any such thing as a humane method to kill a sentient creature.  

I know from growing up on a farm and among farm people that there is no such a thing as raising animals for food which doesn't involve killing them, whether as young adults or as juveniles.  The number of male chicks killed as soon as they're hatched is appalling as, in fact, is that it's not uncommon for them to be sorted from females and sent into a shoot where they are chopped to pieces.  That's something you should know about even if you only eat eggs and not flesh.  Even before I became a vegan I'd only eat eggs from our hens which were never slaughtered but allowed to die of natural causes (though in some cases those natural causes were raccoons and dogs and foxes.  And the slaughter of baby mammals can't be separated from the consumption of milk products.  The calves, kids, etc. are superfluous to the goal of making their mothers lactate so humans consume the milk instead of the babies they give milk for.  That is until the still fairly young cows are considered less profitable and they are sent to slaughter, as well, something that happens even sooner for chickens in an egg factory.  The cruelties of the dairy industry are extensive and inescapable.  It's not as if that paused for even a second as ritual sacrifice of animals was left behind with the destruction of The Temple and the adoption of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity.  The people who have refused to eat all animal products for moral reasons is probably one of the smallest groupings of human beings in the history of our species.

What does it mean for God incarnated as a human being to so obviously take the role, not of Moses but of a sacrificed baby animal?  A human being who did not resist the  slaughter he knew was coming before he even started out for Jerusalem.   What are Christians supposed to conclude from that?  That's a real question, I don't know the answer to it.  I'd think that we're supposed to think hard and without regard to what we want about what it means not only for us, human beings, but also as to how we treat animals.  As a vegan I know what I'd want to conclude about it though that's complicated by the passage in which Jesus is given a piece of fish to eat after he appears to his followers after the Resurrection.  

The meaning of the Eucharist, instituted by Jesus breaking the bread and passing a cup of wine telling his followers to eat and drink his body and blood must tie his sacrifice to our eating and drinking, though I'm somewhat heretical in thinking that it was in the sharing of food and drink that contains his essence as much as the bread and wine.  I think any time food is shared has  Eucharistic content embedded in it, especially when it is vitally needed food and drink.  

Ash Wednesday's most notable sacramental of anointing with ashes, being told to remember that our bodies came from unliving matter and our bodies will return to unliving matter has to tie into that too.   The traditional expectation of so many Christians that our bodies will be resurrected goes against that declaration, though people can know that their bodies will decay or be burned up into ashes before there's any such resurrection.