Homily for Holy Thursday

Homily for Holy Thursday

April 12, 2001
Collect
Salesians Sisters, Mary Help of Christians Academy, North Haledon, N.J.

Without a liturgical assignment this year (2025) except to participate in the community’s celebration of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper at Salesian HS, I post an old homily for the day.

(from the Sistine Chapel)

“We pray that in this Eucharist we may find the fullness of love and life” (Collect).

That was our prayer a few minutes ago.  In this Mass of the Lord’s Supper we commemorate 3 foundations of our faith; we celebrate 3 essentials of our salvation.  These are the institution of the Holy Eucharist, of the Christian priesthood, and of the command to love one another.

At the same time, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper must be seen in context.  We have begun the Easter triduum, our 3-day celebration of the paschal mystery.  In these liturgical days—Thursday evening to Sunday evening—we take part in, we share in, we become part of the passion, death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Our opening prayer told us, in the form of our address to God:  “We are gathered here to share in the supper which your only Son left to his Church to reveal his love.  He gave it to us when he was about to die and commanded us to celebrate it as the new and eternal sacrifice.”  So the Holy Eucharist, this sacred supper, is linked to the Lord’s death.  It is the perpetual presentation—making present to us, making effective in us—of his sacrifice of the cross.  It is both supper and sacrifice, both nurture and atonement, the personification of Christ’s love and the means by which we absorb his love and the strength for us to offer his love to our sisters and brothers.

The 2d Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy calls the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life.” (#47).  That is, all our liturgical actions, all our public worship, take their energy and their life from the Eucharist, from Christ’s sacramental presence in the Church.  And all our liturgical actions, all our public worship, aims at the Eucharist, at our complete communion with our Savior.

Thus the holy priesthood whose anniversary we mark tonite exists for the Eucharist and from the Eucharist.  For the Eucharist, because Christian priests’ main purpose is to celebrate the sacred mysteries of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection in the Eucharist and to nourish all believers with this sacred food, the bread of life.  We baptize so that the number of believers may increase and may participate in these holy rites.  We preach so that those who have not heard the Good News may come to know it and to believe it, and those who have believed it may be strengthened in it and keep coming to their Savior.  “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26).  Christ established the ordained priesthood so that his sacrifice could be perpetually present to his people.

The priesthood is rooted in the Eucharist.  1st of all, there is only one Christian priest.  Jesus has offered the one and only sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the whole world:  “This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”  Marked by his blood, as the doorposts of the Hebrews in Egypt were signed by the blood of the paschal lambs (Ex 12:1-8,12-14), we are saved from eternal death.  The apostles and every other priest of the Christian Church share in the one priesthood of Christ, exercise his priesthood in offering his eucharistic sacrifice, make his one and only sacrifice present for believers in every age and in every place.

2d, by his celebration of the Eucharist, the priest communes with Christ.  Without the Eucharist, he can’t be a priest.  His communion with Christ his master and model strengthens him for his apostolic mission of evangelizing, comforting, absolving, guiding, and everything else he does as priest, as alter Christus.

(by Rubens)

The 3d aspect of our liturgy this evening is the command to love one another.  Jesus gave us a 2-fold example.  The 1st we heard in the gospel:  his humble service with the command to do the same.  The 2d part of his example of love comes from his discourse at the Last Supper:  “Greater love than this no one has, to lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  This is my commandment:  love one another as I love you” (Jn 15:13-14,12).  He loved us to the point of death.  Or, as John said in the 1st verse of this evening’s gospel, “He loved his own in the world, and he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1), which can mean either “to the end” of his earthly sojourn, or “to the utmost, to the limits of human possibility.”  John loves those little sacred double entendres.

How important is the theme of the command to love in our liturgical commemoration?  So important that it gave the old name to the day, Maundy Thursday.  Maundy is a Middle English word rooted in the Latin mandatum, “command.”

Jesus has left us the Eucharist as a sign of his love, a means to empower us to love as he did, a reminder that we must love one another sincerely, as that ancient Maundy Thursday hymn tells us:  “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.  Amemus Deum vivum.  Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero” [Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found.  Let us fear and love the living God, and love each other from the depths of our hearts.]  Our only reason for proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes is to proclaim his redeeming love and to let his love work thru us until it has touched every man and woman.