Holy Thursday
17 April 2025
With the beginning of this evening Mass, the season of Lent has now officially ended. We have now begun the most intense and the shortest of the Church’s liturgical seasons. This brief season is three days long, comprising Holy Thursday evening through Easter Sunday evening. The three days is the origin of the name of this time: The Sacred Triduum, from the Latin meaning the Sacred Three Days. This short “season” has us observe our most high holy days, celebrating tonight that our Lord established two sacraments at the Last Supper, the institution of the Holy Eucharist and of the holy priesthood; observing tomorrow (Good Friday) the saving sacrifice of the Cross; and, observing on Holy Saturday the reality of the tomb, a placed turned into hope by our Lord’s resurrection to new life, which we begin to anticipate and watch for in vigil on Holy Saturday night leading into Easter Sunday.
These intense, climactic days are the fulfillment of what God chose to do to restore His creation and the communion of life He desires us to have by His promise of salvation. It is good to briefly consider all that hangs in the air in these brief three days. Such recollection should help us appreciate aspects of the saving mysteries we celebrate here liturgically.
From the accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis, we recall that God provided all good things, the garden of blessing, every seed-bearing plant and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it, every animal, every bird of the air, and every creature that crawls on the ground. God gave all these things for man to steward and care for. And He gave them also as food for man to have every blessing in that garden of communion with God.
The Fall brought disorder into God’s creation. It changed natural life such that after the Fall it tends to weaken and fall apart. It brought about death. The Fall results in man’s being cast out of the Garden, subject to death, and an eternal consequence of being at odds with God, which is the condemnation of Hell. But Genesis reports that first announcement of the kernel of the Gospel (Gn. 3:15), that God has a plan to destroy the effects of the serpent’s cunning and to deal a mortal blow to death itself.
As that plan of salvation unfolded, and as man’s fall was related to grasping at and eating food, God called for the Jewish people to observe their salvation from slavery over the course of the Passover meal. It was a meal that recounted God’s goodness and saving action. Far from mere memory alone of the past event of the Exodus, the Jewish mind and faith is that the Passover makes God’s saving action present now to His people. The meal had to be eaten. The Passover lamb became the sign of what God does in the midst of His people. The identification of God Himself – Jesus Christ – with the lamb, carries with it the message that, in Jesus, God is saving His people in the fulfillment of all that the Exodus accomplished, a journey no longer from slavery in a country of the earth, but a journey to freedom from slavery to sin by the passage to redeemed life, and finally a journey to the Promised Land of Heaven. In the course of the last Passover meal with his apostles, the one we call the Last Supper, the Lord took the familiar Passover ritual and did something new and unexpected with it. It took time for the disciples, the first Christians to grasp all the implications of the Lord’s action, but in the first generation of the Church, Christians already understood that the Passover meal had become a New Covenant by which God’s saving action was made present to His people now, and the lamb that had to be consumed was Jesus, the Lamb of God, very God Himself. That faith has been handed on ever since and we still maintain it today as Catholics. In fact, we would not be Catholic, we would not be the Lord’s Church, were we to fail to hold this faith about the reality of what took place at the Last Supper, and which now takes place in the Holy Mass. The second reading from St. Paul to the Corinthians shows us how this faith was passed down from the first generation of Catholic disciples. St. Paul is able to write, as we heard, “I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ … In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’.”
What I want to tie together for us is how the Lord’s ultimate gift and sacrifice of himself for our salvation mirrors in some degree the act by which man was disobedient to God in the Garden and ushered in the fall. In other words, God’s plan of salvation takes up some of the imagery and the action by which man created the need for salvation in the first place. At the Last Supper, Jesus presented himself to his apostles in a way that echoed his strange sounding words from John 6 that he, that his very flesh, is the bread come down from Heaven. At the Last Supper, Jesus presented himself to his apostles as food. And though it would take at least a little time for their minds to grasp this, along with the action of the Holy Spirit to guide them in truth to this part of Catholic faith, the next day the Lord would show how this saving food – his very life – is likewise food from a tree, for the apostles learned that the Lamb of God, who was given as food, is placed upon the wood of the Cross, food dangling from a tree.
In the Garden of Eden food dangling from a tree was taken in disobedience, bringing to man a knowledge of good and evil that God did not intend for man and which distorted man’s nature. God’s plan of salvation finds its culmination in that saving food of the lamb dangling from a tree on Calvary. In obedience, we are to look upon it – upon God Himself – hanging in death, yet showing the immense depths of God’s love, that He places Himself where our disobedience brought ruin. Now in obedience, and provided we observe communion of life with the Lord, we are called to receive food from the tree of the Cross. But, this food saves!
This night we commemorate that at the Last Supper, as the Lord was bringing to fulfillment the long plan of salvation, he brought about salvation in a way that makes his saving power present in every time and place. The power of the Cross and its food, made present in every Holy Mass, is not just a past recollection or a memory of a past event. Like the ritual of the Passover meal for the Jews, this ritual of the Holy Mass makes present to us here the saving power of the exodus of the cross, death, and resurrection of Jesus: who is God, Lamb, and Savior. At one and the same time in giving this saving gift, by establishing also the holy priesthood exercised in his Catholic Church, the Lord has provided the means by which his gift of self in the Holy Eucharist can be made present to his Church, to disciples in every time and place. For all this, we marvel at the promise God made in that kernel of the Gospel first proclaimed over the wreckage man had made in the Garden of Eden. God promised there a saving plan that the offspring of the woman would strike a mortal blow to the offspring of the serpent. Our undoing is mirrored in the ways God has acted to save us. Man first looked upon the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and found it enticing and good to look upon. Now, man is called to look upon what does not seem enticing or good, in fact, rather grotesque, the agony of that tree of the Cross. Man was first disobedient by taking from the tree in the Garden. Now, man is called upon to be obedient in finding upon the tree of the Cross food for eternal life. Where man’s sin brought death in the flesh, now man is called upon to express faith that death is destroyed because the seed-bearing fruit of the life of God Himself is planted within the greedy jaws of death. As that limitless life of God germinates in the darkness of death and tomb it is destroyed from the inside out! God’s generous love is what we celebrate this evening, a love that finds its promised culmination in the Holy Eucharist, the Real Presence of God, food for the journey, and the sign that we are not abandoned or left as orphans. Intimately bound up with this sacred gift (the Holy Eucharist), is the means by which that gift comes to us: the priesthood of Jesus Christ. This day is a day for the priesthood in a unique way. And so, I ask you to pray for me and to pray for Fr. Bali, and for all priests. We are weak earthen vessels – yet the power of God in sacred ordination results in His saving plan continuing to come in your midst through the sacramental life of the Church. At the same time, I ask you to pray and to watch – even within your own families and among your sons – for signs that the Lord desires to continue the plan of salvation such that one day your son just might be called “Father”. In the charity and the humble service that the Lord models for us, we seek to promote priestly vocations for the good of the present and future mission of the Church and we seek to observe faithfully that the Lord is present to us in these sacred mysteries of his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.