Holy Spirit Catholic Church
Homilies
Holy Thursday (A) 2011:
Mass of
the Lord's Supper
These
three days from Holy Thursday to Good Friday and on through Easter are
the holiest time of the church year.
These days are focused entirely on the self-giving love of God in
Jesus Christ. This is the
center of our faith: Jesus handed over to death, crucified, and raised
from the dead. Tonight in
this Mass of the Lord's Supper, that same life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus are spread before us like a banquet.
Earlier in John's Gospel, in the sixth chapter, Jesus says, "I am the
living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will
live forever; and the bread
that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world" (John 6:51).
When
our Lord wanted to show what his life, death, and resurrection meant for
the world and for our lives, He didn't give a lecture or a theory.
He gave a meal.
Tonight's Lord's Supper is the climax of all Jesus' meals where outcasts
are welcomed, where sinners are called to repentance and forgiven, and
even where the self-righteous who refuse to see their need of God's
grace are invited to a new way of life.
And
beyond themes of forgiveness and welcome in each of the gospel stories
of Jesus' meals, this Last Supper takes place at Passover.
That means all the themes of Passover are present here too: the
blood of the lamb offering protection and rescue; God delivering people
from captivity; God judging evil and defeating its power in the Red Sea.
In
these three days, we see Jesus take on the power of evil on the cross
and defeat it. "Christ our
Passover sacrificed for us," Paul declares, "therefore let us keep the
feast" (1 Cor 5:7). Jesus'
death is a banquet to which all people are invited to taste God's
saving, healing, life-giving love!
The
meaning of this meal is then embodied in the foot washing when love's
word and action come together.
For all the times that we regularly hear words about God's love,
those words can all too easily be dismissed as "empty words."
Throughout the gospels, we
hear about Jesus' love that leads Him to share life with
us. We
hear about how our
Lord blesses the poor, heals the sick, gives strength to the weary, and
raises the dead to new life.
We
hear about how God
so loved the world that He sent the Son.
But "talk is cheap," says the old cliché.
And there are times when it's
hard to trust that God's word of love comes
to us and is
for us when so much
brokenness, heartache, and sin remain
in us and
among us.
We
can and, at times, do doubt that we are the beloved children of God in
Jesus Christ. But in the
foot washing, Jesus comes in love to each in turn . . . including Judas
who will betray Him and Peter who will deny Him.
Our Lord comes as a servant and washes the disciples' feet.
It's an intimate, personal moment . . . not of judgment but of
saving, healing, and powerful love.
New
Testament scholar Tom Wright tells us that in the foot washing its' as
if Jesus is bringing together loving words and loving actions to say, "I
will clean and refresh every part of you, not just the person next to
you, but you. I will cleanse
the sad parts, the lonely parts, the messy and confused parts, your own
betrayals and denials, your own sin, the parts you wish with all your
heart could be healed."
This
is what John's Gospel means when it says that Jesus loved the disciples
"to the end." It not only
means "to the end" of His earthly life. It also means that He loves to
the fullest, beyond boundary, breaking point, or limit.
He loves us to the utmost, so much so that He took
our sin and
our brokenness upon
Himself.
In
the sacrament of Jesus' body given for the life of the world and in the
washing of feet, love's word and action come together.
Here in the Lord's Supper is the Son of God who chose the cross
as a throne. Here is the
Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep.
Here is the Son that God sent to the world in love.
Here is God who overcomes death by dying and rising with saving,
healing life for us all.
Here, in word and action, Jesus' life and love are given
to us and
for us
From
tonight on to Good Friday and then through Easter, the self-giving God
who so loved the world that He gave His Son not to condemn the world but
to save it is given
to us and
for us.
And
then our Lord extends His command that this same self-giving love be
seen
through us: "I have
given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should
also do." But with the
fullness of God's love given
to us and
for us in Jesus,
what else is there left to do but let that same love work
through us to
others in gratitude and grace?