Word to the Wise
Thursday, April 18, 2019 - Holy Thursday: Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper - ABC
[Exod 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Cor 11:23-26; John 13:1-15]This day shall be a memorial feast for you, which all your generations shall celebrate with pilgrimage to the Lord as a perpetual institution. [Exodus] For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. [1 Corinthians] So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, "Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me 'teacher' and 'master,' and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do." [John]
When a Jewish family gathers to celebrate the "seder meal" at Passover, the youngest child who is capable of it is supposed to ask, "Why are we doing this?" That is a good question for us Catholics who gather on Holy Thursday, but it is a good one to ask any time we celebrate the Eucharist. Holy Thursday is a celebration of the fullest meaning of the Eucharist, which means that what we read from Exodus and St. Paul this evening must be placed alongside what Jesus does for the disciples in the Gospel According to John in washing their feet.
The Passover context of Jesus' actions is important because it is a celebration of deliverance from oppression and the establishment of a new covenant between God and God's People. Jesus asks, as does Moses, that we celebrate this feast as a memorial of his deliverance of us from our sins, as St. Paul reminds us in the second scripture for the evening. But before Jesus shares his body and blood in the form of bread and wine, he shares his body and blood in service to his disciples and tells them to do the same. The fullest meaning of the Eucharist is found not only in consumption but in "communion" with one another in service to one another. We not only "receive" communion, we give communion! The "real presence" of the Lord takes place wherever "two or three are gathered in my name." If we share in the body and blood of Christ, we do so not simply as individuals but as a community of love and service.
Our communion with the Lord is found in our communion with one another and we celebrate this ritually in the Eucharist, an act of thanksgiving, which finds its fulfillment in what we do in everyday life to "the least of my brothers and sisters." [Matt. 25:31-45] Holy Thursday, with its celebration of the washing of the feet, is placed alongside Good Friday and Holy Saturday to remind us that everything that follows the Last Supper is celebrated whenever we gather to remember that Last Supper and in how we live it out every day! AMEN