April 18, 2019
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas
Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14
Psalm 116:12-13, 15-16bc, 17-18
1st Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15
In the summer of 1993, one year before my ordination to the priesthood, I was given the opportunity by Catholic Relief Services to visit the Church in Egypt as well as the Church in Burkina Faso, a nation in West Africa. The primary intention of the trip was for us to learn firsthand of the mission of relief and development provided through the generosity of Catholics in the United States as a means of solidarity and communion with other Catholics and people of good will throughout the world. The experience afforded me a firsthand encounter with two places, Egypt with a very old history of the authentic Catholic faith, and Burkina Faso with a very new history of the authentic Catholic faith. In fact, the very first baptized Catholic in Burkina Faso had just passed away one week before our arrival in the nation. When we arrived in Egypt, we participated in the Mass as the Mass had been celebrated there since approximately the year 40 A.D. — several years before Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians is judged to have been written.
In the Exodus account of Passover, we hear of how God’s people, Israel, is delivered out of slavery in Egypt and spared by God from death by water in the Red Sea. At the Last Supper, we see how the New Israel, God’s People, the Church, is given life by Christ putting death to death with the water of Baptism and the Sacrifice of the Eucharist.
Israel receives their exodus from slavery by following God’s way made known through a pillar of fire in the night, the light of faith. The people of Israel safely pass over the Red Sea without even getting their feet wet. Pharaoh and his army travel identically the same geographical path as Israel, but they are drowned in the water of the Red Sea. The difference between Israel and Pharaoh’s army is that Israel is following the path of the Lord as discerned according to the pillar of fire; Pharaoh’s army is marching the path of oppression bogged down by their armor of sin. This is a reminder to us that our path to salvation involves interior trust and conversion and not simply external compliance to rituals and practices.
The first Passover is violent. It is marked by the slaughter of the firstborn sons of Egypt, the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the lintels of the homes of the faithful Israelites, the Passover meal, eaten on the run, and including the sacrificed lamb and the unleavened bread with bitter herbs as shared by the households of the faithful Israelites; it includes the dry shod feet of the Israelites who pass without harm through the waters of the Red Sea safe from death.
Jesus, as a faithful Jew, was gathered with His disciples to celebrate this first Passover. Yet, there is more. Christ’s true and eternal Passover reminds us of the first Passover in that it involves the meal as a memorial of the first Passover, but it is different in that Christ’s Passover is lasting and eternal. It completes the first Passover and reveals more fully the significance of the first Passover. The first Passover is provisional. Christ’s Passover brings to fulfillment the first Passover because the first born who is slaughtered is Christ Himself, the Son of God. He is the Lamb that is sacrificed for all time. The bitter herbs are the herbs of His Passion and death. His blood is on the hands of all sinners but He places it on the lintels of our souls. It is not simply a provisional sacrifice of violent appeasement; it is an eternal sacrifice of Love.
The disciples who are gathered by Jesus around the table of His Passover are the descendants of God’s people who passed over the waters of the Red Sea without dying and without even their feet getting wet. At Christ’s eternal Passover, the Last Supper and the first Eucharist, Christ requires their feet to become wet as He washes them clean of sin and death that they might have the inheritance of eternal life promised and fulfilled by Him in His suffering, death, and Resurrection. The water with which He washes their feet gives them life and puts to death their death. It is the water of Baptism.
Yet, there is even more given by Christ than just Baptism — as essential as Baptism is. Christ gives them the Eucharist and the ministerial and ordained priesthood. The Eucharist more fully initiates them into His people by nourishing them with His own Body and Blood, making them one with Him and one with each other. The Eucharist makes them the Church. There is something incomplete about Baptism without the Eucharist; there are three sacraments of initiation, not one. Baptism introduces us into the life of faith and the Eucharist consummates us in the full life of charity. The waters of the Red Sea are parted that the Israelites who have shared the Passover meal might fully become God’s people in the Promised Land. The New Israel passes through the waters of baptism that they might receive the inheritance of eternal life in the lasting sacrifice of the Lamb of God and the eternal banquet of communion both inherent in the Mass. Christ is both victim and priest.
As the first Passover is a provisional testimony and revelation of God’s justice for His people, the eternal Passover of Christ fulfills the first as a revelation of God’s unconditional love who sacrifices His son to ransom us from slavery to sin and death. On Saturday at the Easter Vigil we shall sing in the Exultet, “To ransom a slave you gave away a son.” This sacrifice not only reveals God’s love for us but is our share in Christ’s inheritance offered in the Eucharist. This inheritance means that through the Eucharist we actually become able to love as He loves — with pure, selfless, and sacrificial love. It is particularly the love of the martyrs. It is the love of the virgins. It is the love of the confessors. It is the love of the saints. Most particularly it is the love of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Christ saves and redeems us not simply by a violent act of appeasement but by love. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes, “Of all the movements, sensations, and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal though it be. For when God loves, all He desires is to be loved in return. The sole purpose of His love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love Him are made happy by their love of Him.” The sacrifice of the Mass and our reception of the Eucharist is the only means by which we can truly love in this way.
Christ intends that the Eucharist be lovingly offered and shared as a sacrifice and banquet by priests whom He has chosen and called by name that God might be worshipped as He desires to be worshipped and not as we might prefer to worship Him. Without the Mass we can only praise God, we cannot worship Him because worship entails the subordination of one’s will to the Divine will. Christ shows us again this evening that the priesthood essentially involves service and love as He washes the feet of His disciples and tells us to go and do the same — to act as slaves acted at that time. The priest’s delivery from slavery to freedom is in sharing the slavery to love as offered us in our vocation by Christ. To share in a special manner in Christ’s gift of self in love and surrender to God’s will that sinners might be ransomed and saved for eternal life. As Pope Francis said earlier this evening in Rome in his homily at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, “the Church wants the bishop to do this each year, once a year, on Holy Thursday — to imitate the act of Jesus and likewise to do well in his example for himself, that the bishop might not be the most important, but that he must be the greatest servant. And each of you should be servants of each other.”
This evening, I wet and wash the feet of 12 of you with whom I share the inheritance offered by Christ to each and all of us as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church — not as individuals but as His people, the New Israel. I do so in poor imitation of Him and in obedience to His loving sacrifice that saves each of us from the waters of sin and eternal death. The Eucharist that we share is a communion in the love of God that requires the priesthood of Jesus Christ just as it provides the reason for the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The offering and reception of the Eucharist are both done reciprocally in remembrance of Him as He remembers each of us during His death on the Cross.
