Brothers and sisters, whenever we hear that “the LORD made Pharaoh obstinate” the line can jar us. It sounds as though God were meddling with Pharaoh’s freedom, pulling the strings so the king could not repent even if he wished. Yet in the Hebrew idiom “to harden” (“hazaq”) often means to strengthen what is already there. Pharaoh had already dug in his heels; the plagues simply revealed and confirmed the inner choice he had made. Far from cancelling freedom, the Lord exposes the cost of a freedom that turns inward, so that His own people—and even Egypt—may know who truly liberates. Hard-heartedness is self-inflicted; God’s action is to bring it to light so that all may see both its danger and the possibility of mercy.
That mercy appears in the very next breath, when the Lord instructs every household to prepare “a lamb … from either the sheep or the goats.” The Hebrew word seh means a small animal of the flock—lamb or kid alike. Why give two options? A sheep was the more prized sacrificial animal, but a kid was cheaper. No family, rich or poor, was to be left out of the Passover. Even the poorest could place blood on the lintel and share the roasted flesh. Universality, therefore, is a theme built into this saving ritual that God is prescribing: one victim offered, no leftovers, eaten together at twilight so that all may set out as one people.
John the Baptist will point to Jesus and cry, “Behold, the Lamb of God”—not the Lamb of a few select households but of the whole world. In Him the distinction between sheep and goats is not erased, but its meaning shifts. At the Last Judgement Jesus speaks of Himself as the shepherd-king who separates “sheep from goats” according to whether they have recognised Him in the hungry and the stranger. Just as the rite itself, which is a foreshadowing of the universal mercy and eventual judgement of God, so too our verdict will depend on how we have thought of the less fortunate, the brokenhearted, the slighted and anyone who was at a disadvantage.
Today’s gospel pushes the same issue. The disciples pluck grain on the sabbath because they are hungry. The Pharisees see a rule broken; Jesus sees people who need to be fed. He reminds them how David once ate the holy bread, how priests work on the Sabbath and remain innocent, and then He declares, “Something greater than the temple is here … the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.” In other words, the true sanctuary is not a stone building but the very body of the One who offers Himself. Mercy is not a loophole in the law; mercy is the law’s deepest meaning.
At every Mass the Passover command is renewed: “Take and eat … take and drink.” We stand like those ancient Israelites—sandals on, staffs in hand, pilgrims on the move—because the Eucharist is food for a journey out of slavery. It reminds us of Jesus’ admonition that when we commit sin we become enslaved to it, and the obligation to confess and allow God to purify us is a big part of the way he continually liberates us even as we prepare to receive the Lamb. We eat the flesh of the Lamb who was offered once and can never be offered again; therefore nothing is left over, nothing is wasted. We lift the cup of salvation, echoing the psalmist, and it becomes the new covenant in His blood, traced no longer on doorposts but on hearts. The Lord still passes through the land of bondage, striking down whatever would reduce human beings to objects, and He still “passes over” those marked by the blood of Christ, not to spare us suffering but to draw us through it into freedom.
In most countries like Canada and the United States —vast, diverse, blessed yet wounded by all kinds of social injustice—the command to include both sheep and goats challenges us. Around this altar there must be room for the affluent and the barely-getting-by, the visibly devout and the quietly curious and the most vulnerable among us. Remember the Israelites preparing to be liberated out of Egypt were a tortured and crushed group of people. They are a summons to acknowledge how we are all sacred, from conception to natural death, to the exclusion of none. The Lamb makes us one household. And the separation of sheep and goats in Matthew 25 warns us that the Eucharist received without mercy lived will be exposed as mere ritual. The Jesus we receive under the signs of bread and wine is the same Jesus who waits not only in the unborn, but in the refugee claimant, in the family searching for affordable housing, in the senior who fears being forgotten, in the young who struggle to find meaning and purpose. Hard hearts turn the Eucharist into merely a private comfort; soft hearts will discover it as the source of our power to love. We could be blessed with receiving our Lord for many years and decades, but if there is still room for hate in our lives and a lack of forgiveness, what has it served us? Judas loved and ate and heard and saw Jesus performing miracles this world has never seen, yet not allowing God’s grace to work interiorly created a blockage.
So let us allow the Lord to strengthen, not our obstinacy, but our willingness to be changed. Let us come to the table aware that He chose to be the Lamb so that no one would lack a share in the feast. Let us hear again His voice—“My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me”—and answer by taking up His mercy as our daily work, until the journey is complete and the Judge who separates flock from flock greets us not as strangers but as children who already knew His tender and sacred heart.
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