Primitive power of water from a corpse
There is more than meets the eye to a chant that is sung during this season of Easter. It goes with the sprinkling of the congregation with holy water. At all other times, the chant is Asperges me, Domine, “Thou wilt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed.” But now at Easter it is Vidi aquam, “I saw water flowing from the right side of the temple, alleluia; and all they to whom that water came were saved.”
What is all this about? The sprinkling of water is a reminder for the people of their baptism. Baptism, a ritual submersion in water, is a mystical burial and participation in Christ’s death, from which the person baptised rises up as a newly created being by means of his Resurrection.
That might sound primitive, irrational stuff, but the language of ritual is not by explanation, and rather by performance.
Death, resurrection and baptism are deeply explored over the holy days covering Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
On Easter day candidates are baptised and holy water is blessed at a ceremony that involves the lowering of the lit paschal candle into it. The paschal candle represents Christ, the light. Five grains of incense are pinned to it that represent the five wounds of Christ, the marks of which he retained after his Resurrection.
The chant Vidi aquam is a derived from the prophetic book of Ezekiel (chapter 47). The narrator there sees water coming out from the south side of the temple, which faced east. So it would be the right side for someone looking out from the temple, not for someone outside looking at the front.
The reason that the chant is taken from this prophetic vision is that Jesus Christ is regarded as the new temple. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” St John quotes him as saying, adding: “He spake of the temple of his body.” The passage from Ezekiel is also taken as prophetic of the blood and water that flowed from the dead body of Christ on the cross, when it was pierced with a lance.
No doubt the separation of red blood and clear watery fluid was a result of his death by crucifixion. But liturgically the water and blood are emblematic of the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.
If the water came from the right side of the temple, it would be reasonable to think it came from Christ’s right side, to our left as we face him. That is how painters such as Fra Angelico (below), Giotto and Rubens depict it. But not all agreed. Some thought that since the heart is to the left, it was there that the lance must have pierced his side.
The Englishman St Bede the Venerable realised how important it was that Christ retained the marks of his wounds after his Resurrection: it showed that he was not a spirit without a body.
Bede takes it that Christ was pierced in his right side. In early missals containing the Mass as performed in Rome, rubrics direct that the celebrant should, at the fraction of the host, break it at the right side. I’m not sure this clears up the ambiguity, for the right side, looking at the consecrated host, insofar as it represents the physical disposition of the body of Christ, would be his left side.
Because the blood from Christ’s side symbolises the Eucharist, artists often depict an angel collecting it in a chalice. I see that the station of the cross in Westminster Cathedral which shows the death of Christ has the blood being collected as it issues from his left side. That bas-relief carving is by Eric Gill, who represents the same thing elsewhere. Perhaps he explained his decision somewhere, and I’d be interested to learn if he did.