Pasch

And on the first day of the Azymes, the disciples came to Jesus, saying: Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the pasch? But Jesus said: Go ye into the city to a certain man, and say to him: the master saith, My time is near at hand, with thee I make the pasch with my disciples.

NOW the feast of unleavened bread, which is called the pasch, was at hand.

Victor, bishop of Rome, A. D. 192, thus writes: ‘[…] (we find) the catholic church celebrate ^([sic]) pasch, not on the fourteenth of the moon, with the Jews, but from the fifteenth day to the twenty-first. […]’

That the pasch must be taken in its usual sense of paschal lamb is clear from the words of the evangelists […]. The foregoing writers impugned the Judaizing Quartodecimans, […] the very existence of their adversaries attests an ancient tradition in the church that Jesus had eaten the pasch on the fourteenth day of Nisan. This error on the part of the orthodox champions must have arisen from the principle that Jesus is our true pasch, stated by St. Paul […].

For this reason the Hundred and Fourteenth Psalm is written, because it is the recompense of love; whence the pasch of the Lord received its manner of celebration at the fourteenth moon; since, he who celebrates the pasch ought to be perfect;[…]

[…] after a few words in which the pasch has not as yet been mentioned by name, he adds, “And thus shall you eat it: with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staffs in your hands; and you shall eat it in haste. It is the pasch of the Lord.”

The Man-God had scarcely returned to His Father when the Apostles hastened to establish a solemn festival to commemorate His pasch, that is to say, His glorious passage from death to life.

The immediate future of his pasch is his saving death, through which humanity is reconciled. The long-term, eschatological future is found in the promise of his resurrection and embraces the whole future of the life of the Church […]