And as the love of the Crucified captures our hearts, so the grace which the believer receives from the Crucified wins for our souls forgiveness and healing and spiritual life and fellowship with God.

That grace was dramatically symbolised when Jesus died on Calvary. Before he was taken down from the Cross one of the soldiers on guard took the routine precaution of piercing his side with a spear, whereupon, as St John solemnly testifies in words which endow the happening with great significance, “…at once blood and water came out” (NRSV, John 19:32-37).

The traditional interpretation of this strange phenomenon – and one which the Evangelist, who personally witnessed it, may well have had in mind – is that the blood and the water symbolised respectively the Eucharist, in which the Blood of the New Covenant is given and received, and Baptism in which water is the symbol of the cleansing power of spiritual life. Thus the Divine grace of the two chief Sacraments flows in the first instance from the sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross.