Holy Thursday: Mass of the Lord’s Supper

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.

Holy Thursday: Mass of the Lord’s Supper

March 29, 2018
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14
Psalm 116:12-13, 15-18
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

The human condition retains the residue of original sin even though a Christian is washed clean of sin by the sacrament of Baptism. Theologians refer to this residue as concupiscence, that is to say a tendency towards sin and towards giving into temptation and towards selfishness. The freedom from concupiscence is offered to us by the Lord Jesus in His call to follow Him. Following Him includes following Him on His way of the Cross; it is not simply living one’s life by an ideal worldview that has been put together by oneself from different statements and phrases of Jesus for one’s own personal and private philosophy of life.

The first reading from Exodus speaks of the Passover. The Israelites are spared the last punishment to be visited upon Egypt. They are commanded by God first to prepare a meal to be eaten as part of a sacrifice; they are to eat with their shoes on their feet as a people in flight. They begin by fleeing and seeking refuge from the oppression of slavery. They begin their flight as a mob of refugees but it is the Covenant made between God and Moses on their behalf that makes them a people on pilgrimage to the land promised to them by the Lord God.

Tonight’s reading from John’s Gospel recounts the events of the Last Supper of Jesus and places its emphasis upon the washing of the feet by Jesus of His disciples with His command that they go and to do the same in ministry of others. The Israelites were dry shod on their Exodus but the Lord fulfills that first Covenant by having His disciples remove their shoes that He might wash their feet. Jesus is not in flight from oppression; Jesus is processing obediently and decisively to the victorious fulfillment of the Father’s mission to conquer sin and death and to destroy the prince of this world through His perfect act of obedient and sacrificial love. This is perfect charity. It is the life of the Trinity that envelops the life of the Christian.

It is the Eucharist, the sacrament of perfect charity, which establishes our belonging to God and to each other in Christ. It is not our shared opinions and practices that validate the Eucharist as some sort of ideal and abstract symbol of flexibly interpretive meaning but of little value in reality. This is why the norms and expectations for reception of the Eucharist are so clear and binding for members of the Church. It is the Eucharist that enables us to make the journey with Jesus that is the Way of the Cross — of our sufferings and of our sins carried by Him and with Him in His perfect act of sacrificial love. The washing clean of the grime on the feet of the disciples — symbolic of the residue of original sin, which is to say concupiscence — is necessary and represents the life of sacramental grace that enables each of us to serve as Christ serves and but first to love as Christ loves. Without this sacrifice of the Eucharist as confected by the offering of the priest and our participation in it, the washing of feet becomes simply self-congratulatory altruism.

As Saint John Paul II spoke at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in 2003, “During the Supper, knowing that His “hour” had now come, Jesus blesses and breaks the bread, then gives it to the Apostles saying: “This is my body”; He does the same with the cup: “This is my blood.” He commands them: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Truly this is the witness of love taken “to the end.” Jesus gives Himself as food to His disciples to become one with them. Once again the “lesson” emerges that we must learn: the first thing to do is to open our hearts to welcoming the love of Christ. It is His initiative: it is His love that enables us, in turn, to love our brethren. Therefore, the washing of the feet and the sacrament of the Eucharist: two expressions of one and the same mystery of love entrusted to the disciples, so that, Jesus says, “as I have done... so also must you do.” Christ enables us to do as He has done.

The mandatum of Jesus becomes the measure by which our lives as human beings, and not simply as compliant allegiants to abstract ideals of vaguely understood Catholic doctrine, will be measured and judged by God. Thus, the Eucharistic bond that blossoms forth in the lowly and slave-like washing of our neighbor’s feet will not give way to any other standard of how we live our lives here and now in the United States of America or anywhere else — it is a standard that trumps all other customs, laws, and philosophies of life.

Tonight’s celebration of the Eucharist — the Mass of the Lord’s Supper — is structured in such a way as to end abruptly with a procession with the Lord Jesus Himself leading us to the altar of repose — the Lord’s gift to us of a spiritual Gethsemane. It is part of one large liturgical celebration of the Triduum. Our feet are washed as His disciples so that we can make this procession willingly with Him and with confidence in His sacrificial love that enables us to love by first receiving the gift of His unconditional love which requires humility, trust, and a willingness to change on our part. Without the grace of this willingness, we risk taking the path of Judas who sneaks away into the darkness of night closed off by the self-sufficiency of his own greed and refusal to be loved and therefore to love.

Finally, as Saint John Paul II preached, “What will happen tomorrow, Good Friday? What does the cup of the New Covenant mean in the blood of Christ? It means death on the cross. It means His heart pierced by the spear. It means the hour of Christ’s passage from this world to the Father: it means the love with which He loved His own who were in the world: “He loved them to the end.” The Chalice of the New Covenant therefore means Life “because love is as strong as death.” The love that leads Christ to accept the Cross will reveal His full and definitive power in the resurrection: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’”

Homily for Holy Thursday, Mass of the Lord’s Supper

The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci

April 13, 2017
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14
Psalm 116:12-13, 15-18
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

One of the first bitter fruits of the sin of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve did not trust God, was the loss of trust on the part of human beings towards God, between man and woman in particular and among human beings in general. This introduction of suspicion in place of trust produced domination and oppression; in place of love it produced violence and possession. The first reading from Exodus speaks of the Passover. The Israelites are spared the last punishment to be visited upon Egypt. They are first to prepare a meal to be eaten as part of a sacrifice; they are to eat with their shoes on their feet as a people in flight. They begin by fleeing and seeking refuge from oppression. They begin their flight as a mob of refugees but it is the Covenant made between God and Moses on their behalf that makes them a people on pilgrimage to the Promised Land. The Lord keeps His promise.

The Israelites by God’s mercy are led dry-shod through the Sea, as we will sing in the Exultet this Saturday night at the Easter Vigil. Israel’s oppressors are drowned; their freedom is given to them by the Lord. That gift of freedom is the fruit of God’s Covenant. It is the Covenant by which God makes them a people with an identity and a sense of belonging. They move from slavery and being possessed as property to freedom and belonging to God and to each other. The Lord keeps His promise.

The Lord Jesus celebrates the Passover meal with His chosen disciples, each called by name. He washes their dry feet, made dirty by the grime of their sinful human condition. The Lord Jesus washes their feet and commissions them to do the same for others. The Lord keeps His promise.

The Last Supper is the first Passover fulfilled. The Last Supper first prefigures the lasting Passover; the Lord’s giving of His life freely on the Cross. The Lord who has power to lay down His life and to pick it up again—does so with unconditional love for us in His Cross and Resurrection.

The Passover is about trust. The trust of Moses is imperfect and incomplete so he is prevented from entering the Promised Land. The trust of Jesus is perfect and complete and He leads us each washed clean into His Kingdom. Jesus is trusting and obedient to His Father’s Will because He completely loves the Father. Jesus trusts Peter, although Peter will deny him out of fear and weakness. Yet, Jesus knows this and intentionally trusts Peter. Jesus trusts the three apostles to stay awake with Him to pray—although Jesus knows that each of them will fall asleep. Yet, Jesus knows this and intentionally trusts the three apostles. Jesus trusts Judas as His apostle, although he knows that Judas will betray Him. Jesus is not suspicious and He is not naïve in His trust of Judas or the other apostles. Jesus is intentional and conscious about His trust because it is part of His mission of redemption. The capacity to trust is part of the human condition that is in need of being redeemed. Jesus is fully aware and He trusts. The Lord keeps His promise.

Jesus trusts the disciples with His mission, to wash each other’s feet with mercy and forgiveness—part of trust. Jesus trusts the Apostles with the ministry of the priesthood to celebrate the Eucharist and to shepherd His people. The Eucharist is about trust. The trust of the Eucharist is an intimacy of agape; it is an intimacy of charity. The Eucharist makes us become the Church and not simply a congregation of like-minded individuals. The Eucharist gives us the grace to trust.

In making us to become the Church the Eucharist is also so closely identified with the other sacraments. The Eucharist as a covenant of trust between Christ and His Church is united with the sacramental covenant of marriage, the trusting and complete self-donation of a man and woman to each other with intimacy that confers holiness on husband and wife. The sacrament of Holy Orders, especially the vocation of the priesthood, is laden with trust, the trust to say "yes," the trust to persevere in obedience and celibate chastity, the trust of the Seal of the Confessional. Jesus entrusts all of this to His Church and to his priests serving within the Church. His gift of Himself on the Cross is at the heart of the gift of His Body and Blood on Holy Thursday. The gifts of the bread and wine become His gift of His Body and Blood at Mass that in turn make us His Church. In doing so, Jesus knows our sinfulness and He trusts us as He frees us to trust Him. The Lord keeps His promise.

Jesus, I trust in you!