The Flood And The Precious Blood - Vox Clamantis Editorial

Dear Faithful,

Of the many parallels which the Church draws with the Precious Blood of our Saviour, one of the most dramatic is the comparison with the Flood. In fact, today’s modem world and the world at the time of Noah are very, very similar. They were comfortably off, they had comfortable houses, many of them had servants, and everything to make life easier and more pleasant. They had built for themselves large cities and nice towns and tiny little villages and they seemed to have everything. Only one thing they didn’t have - God. They didn’t have any religion, they were completely godless. Their forefathers had been religious, very religious even and there were still the remnants of their religion in their culture and daily lives. But prayer, self-denial, honouring God publicly or privately was completely missing from their lives. And perhaps the worst thing was, they didn’t care. They had everything else, an easy life, they ate and drank and went on completely regardless of their plight.

And the thing that happens when you try to build a perfect world without God was the same then as it is becoming now. Because, in fact, you can’t build a perfect world without God. In theory, of course, it’s obviously feasible and that’s why people are trying to do it now even though experience has shown them that it’s been tried before and failed. The reason is - the reality of the creation, our dependence on God for everything, but most of all because of original sin which no amount of denial will take away. So, venial sin will become mortal sin and mortal sin will develop, after a while into every conceivable kind of abomination. Wholesale robbery and theft, murder of children inside and outside the womb, unnatural sexual relationships and so on. Now, God’s answer to that sort of society then was to wash away all the sins of the world, and indeed much of the material creation by the Flood. It was an event of such cataclysmic proportions that whole continents were shifted and the face of the earth completely changed.

Well, that was around 5,000 years ago. But you know? around 2,000 years ago things hadn’t got any better. Perhaps sin wasn’t quite so universal but it was pretty bad and so God decided once again to wash away the sins of the world. Not this time with rain but with the Precious Blood of His only begotten Son made man. If my son sheds His blood for the salvation of men, He said to Himself, I won’t need to destroy sinners along with their sins, they will be so affected by this tremendous sacrifice that God has done for them that they wall not want to sin anymore. And so in this month of July, where the weather smiles with radiant sunshine and as far removed from the way God washed away the wickedness which had corrupted the human heart the first time round as you could imagine, the Church wants us to meditate on the way in which God washed away the sin of the world the second time: the Precious Blood, the price of our redemption and a constant source of grace and help in time of temptation and indeed of any necessity.

With every good wish and blessing.

Rev. Sebastian Wall (Prior)