Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday
14 April 2022

 As we have begun this evening Mass, the season of Lent has now officially ended and we have entered the most sacred days of the Church’s briefest liturgical “season”.  The Sacred Triduum, or the Sacred Three Days, carries us from Holy Thursday evening to Easter Sunday evening.  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 priesthood; observing tomorrow the saving sacrifice of the Cross; and, observing on Holy Saturday night and Easter Sunday our Lord’s resurrection to new life.

 The oddity of the last couple of years has impacted it seems almost every aspect of life, including adaptations to our typical practices at Church.  This has resulted in some good opportunities, I think, to give a renewed focus to some of the most essential aspects of our Catholic faith.  Though we are more back to normal than not, I found in a conversation with several brother priests a few months back that we rather appreciated that the omission of the optional foot washing last year provided an opportunity to focus more strictly on the institution of the Holy Eucharist.  Several of us wanted to maintain that focus and so I am again opting to omit the foot washing, which is always optional anyway.  I rather appreciate the foot washing, so I will certainly opt to do it in the future, but for this year at least I wanted to let the Holy Eucharist be the exclusive focus.

I decided I wanted to provide this focus so that we do not obscure that the Cross is really the focus of these days and that even the action of our Lord taking off his outer garments and washing feet is actually supposed to speak to us more than just foot washing, but the continuation of what the Son of God began at the Incarnation.  In other words, at the Incarnation the Son of God lowered Himself to strip off His proper glory as God in order to be veiled by His union with human flesh.  The action of removing his outer garments and washing feet, once again, renews this self-emptying, this lowering of God to us.  In other words, the foot washing is more than just a servant’s action, but is a prophetic act, drawing attention to the completion of the Lord’s self-emptying on the Cross.  Everything about the Last Supper and what we observe this evening speaks of the action and the gift of the Cross where our Lord submitted to sacrificing himself for our salvation.  That’s what I hope our focus can be this year.

 As your Pastor, I want to place our focus on the sacrifice of the Cross and the Holy Eucharist because I think one of the most disfiguring tendencies or ideas afloat with regard to the Holy Mass is the idea that it is a re-enactment of the Last Supper.  That idea in summary is that at the Last Supper Jesus had a meal with his followers, gave us two sacraments, and told us to do this again in memory of him.  And so, at Mass we gather as the present-day community of the Lord’s disciples and we share a meal.  But this degenerates rather quickly into notions of theatrics whereby the priest plays the part of Jesus and the people play the part of the apostles, and thereby obscures the actual theology of our faith about the Holy Mass, and the Holy Eucharist, and both the ordained priesthood and the baptismal priesthood.  Over the past many decades with the rise in the popularity of this idea, we have suffered a weakening, an impoverishing, of our theology of the Holy Eucharist and what it means to participate in it.  While one can hold an appropriate appreciation of the meal aspect of the Holy Eucharist, it must be said clearly that that is not the primary focus of the Holy Eucharist.  Rather, a Catholic understanding of the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Mass is first and foremost the making present in each time and place where the Mass happens of the very same sacrifice of the Cross, though in an unbloody manner, by which we are placed into relationship with the sacrifice of the Lord for our salvation.  And for this reason, and because of this authentically catholic understanding, St. Paul could write (as we heard in the second reading), “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.”  At Holy Mass, just as was present at the Last Supper, the mystery of the Lord’s Cross is in the air.  St. Paul and we today acknowledge that our gathering in fulfilment of the Lord’s command proclaims not a meal or a re-enactment of the Last Supper, but rather, we proclaim his death.  And since the Lord’s Cross is intimately connected to his Resurrection, our gathering here moves from proclaiming his death to receiving not dead flesh, but the living resurrected flesh of the Lord, presented to us in a manner we can receive in Holy Communion.  Therefore, a Catholic’s ability to receive Holy Communion is not simply the idea that might be expressed in this way, “I come to a meal and so I eat”; but rather, should be expressed as, “I come to the sacrifice of the Lord and if I am seeking to drive out sin from my life, I am then worthy to receive Holy Communion, to receive the Lord’s sacrifice for sin.”  I, too, must move from death to life by repenting of sin in confession, and by changing my sinful ways to live a deeper communion with the Lord.

Just as the foot washing is not just about a servant’s act, so the Last Supper and the Holy Mass are not primarily about a meal.  It is a meal, yes, but one whose focus is not just or simply about a meal, but rather moves us to consider the Cross, the sacrifice accomplished there, and the same sacrifice made present to us by our faithful gathering here.  And more than just “considering” these things as if they existed only in reflection of the mind or in memory, the Holy Mass puts us in contact with the very same reality of the Lord’s sacrifice for our salvation.  It makes the one and same sacrifice of the Cross present to us here and now through the agency of the ordained priesthood by which the Lord receives a man’s being and his life and so conforms the man to himself that the Lord chooses to act through him.  Through the gift of self in the ordained priesthood it is Christ the Great High Priest who acts.  In this way we might understand a deeper reality of the many vestments a priest wears for this most solemn act.  The ordained priest vests not to dress himself up, but rather, quite the opposite, he vests to cover himself in order that a priest beyond himself might be seen, namely the High Priest, Jesus Christ, whose one eternal Priesthood operates in our midst such that when we gather for Holy Mass we do not gather for a mere re-enactment.  No, we gather such that the sacrifice of the Lord on the Cross is actually made present to us and offered to us in Holy Communion.

 The Church knows in her deepest faith and her highest theology that everything about this evening is about the Cross, it is about sacrifice.  No surprise then that the first reading from Exodus is chosen, speaking to us about the memorial feast of the Passover that is not simply a meal but a perpetual institution that calls for the sacrificial slaughter of a lamb.  This is the foundation for the New Testament understanding of the Holy Mass.  As the Gospel passage this evening showed Peter with several misunderstandings about the Lord’s action of washing feet, may we purify our focus on the Cross in these days and carry that focus into a more proper understanding of the Holy Eucharist and the ordained priesthood.  May that opportunity this night result in a deeper faith in the Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist.  May it result in renewed participation at Holy Mass and regular confession of sin.  May it result in our commitment to spend time with the Lord in the prayer of adoration in our chapel.  May it result in greater awe in our families to generously promote a priestly vocation from within the family.  May it result in a new harvest of future priests from among the boys and young men here in our midst.