Allowing Jesus Mercifully to Love Us To the Extreme, Holy Thursday, March 24, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Villa Guadalupe of the Sisters of Life, Stamford, CT
Holy Thursday 2016
March 24, 2016
Ex 12:1-8.11-14, Ps 116, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Jn 13:1-15

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided tonight’s homily: 

• Our celebration of the Holy Triduum this year is unique and particularly special for two reasons.
  • First we are marking these greatest mysteries in our faith during the Silver Jubilee of the Sisters of Life. This is first a cause for thanksgiving for all the graces God has given to this institute over the last 25 years. But also for all those graces he had planted within the soul of Cardinal John O’Connor over the course of his life that made him a fitting instrument to found the Sisters. We thank him for all the vocational graces he had decided to plant in you sisters from before he said “let there be light,” as part of his plan that through the Church, his Body and Bride, we might have life and have to the full. We thank him for all those whose lives have been changed because you exist, so many mothers and children and fathers and families and priests and religious and lay cooperators who have received so much over the past quarter-century. We begin with that thanks. But it’s also a time that, pondering so many graces, we need to grasp those ways in which we have not fully responded to them, having allowed their full power to take over. That’s why any major Jubilee is always a time of continual conversion to how much more God can and want to do if only we respond to his help to make our fiat more total.
  • And how we are called specifically to convert leads us to the second reason why this Holy Triduum is unique and special. It’s the first Triduum taking place within a Jubilee of Mercy in Church history. Ecclesiastical holy years are meant to influence everything the Church does during that year, and the Year of Mercy is meant to flavor how we approach this year. At the beginning of today’s Gospel, St. John tells us that Jesus, having loved his own in the world, loved them to the end, literally to the “extreme.” No one has greater love,” he would tell the apostles tonight,” than to lay down his life for his friends,” and we see the greatest manifestations of his total self-giving love in what he did during the Last Supper, how he gave himself for us on Golgotha, and how he triumphed over all that harms and kills us in his Resurrection. And Jesus’ love is always merciful. He has loved us to the paradoxically infinite limits of his mercy. And so as we enter into these mysteries, the Church beckons to do so within the prism of mercy. And so tonight, tomorrow, Holy Saturday, the great Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday, are special opportunities for thanksgiving, for conversion and for the celebration, reflection on, reception of, and passing on God’s extreme merciful love.
• As you may know, Holy Thursday is the only occasion when the Church explicitly tells priests what to preach on. The rubrics tell us that “the homily should explain the principal mysteries that are commemorated in this Mass: the institution of the Eucharist, the institution of the priesthood and Christ’s commandment of brotherly love.” The Church wants to make sure that not only do the faithful hear about each of these three “principal mysteries” but also are encouraged to enter into each of them more deeply. In these three mysteries we see revealed aspects of Jesus’ mercy that we’re called to ponder, receive and live.
• Let’s begin with the commandment Jesus gives us during the Last Supper to love one another as he has loved us, and how he puts that merciful love into action in the gesture of washing the feet of those disciples who would be his apostles. Washing another’s feet was the gesture of a slave. People at most wore simple sandals and along journeys on dirt roads they collected lots of dust on dry days, mud on wet days, and animal waste always. That Jesus himself would take on the form of a slave and do this service for his disciples shows all of us that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to serve us and save us. Most people would feel very uncomfortable at that type of service, at that type of love, but Jesus insisted on giving it. Only a few days before, when Jesus was dining in the house of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with 300 days worth of priceless aromatic nard and dried them with her hair. Judas criticized Mary for wasting a year’s worth of salary on Jesus — three times what the 30 silver pieces he would receive for betraying Jesus were worth! — but Jesus defended her, saying she was doing it for his burial and that we wouldn’t always have him. On another occasion when a woman washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, Simon the Pharisee criticized Jesus for not recognizing the woman was a sinner. But Jesus said that she would be forgiven much because she have loved much and expressed that love for Jesus by that gesture of washing his feet, something that Simon the Pharisee himself didn’t do when Jesus entered because he didn’t love Jesus at all. By his own action Jesus was “loving much” and showing how he was willing to “waste” not just a year’s work but his whole life to wash our feet.
• We need to have the faith to allow Jesus to love us with his mercy in this extreme way. St. Peter, as we see, was very uncomfortable with this prospect. “You will never wash my feet,” he exclaimed. But Jesus replied that unless he did so, Peter would have no part of him. In order to be part of Jesus, we need to allow him to clean us. Peter, realizing this and wanting to be totally for the Lord, then gave him permission to wash his hands and his head as well. Jesus’ gesture and dialogue with Peter give us a chance to examine our own receptivity to what God wants to do in us. What does it mean for us to have our feet washed? The early saints of the Church, when they looked at Jesus’ statement that once we’ve been washed only our feet need to be cleansed, said that this is meant to refer to the sacraments of Baptism and Penance. In Baptism, we’re thoroughly washed, but over the course of our journeying each day, our feet come into contact with the filth of the world and we need to allow Jesus to cleanse us. That’s what he does in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where Jesus is continually on his knees at our feet and not only carries out the service of a slave but dies to take away our sins. We need to allow Jesus to clean not only the soles of our feet but our immortal souls. One of the reasons why Jesus performs this rite at the beginning of the Last Supper is to show us that before he gives his body and blood, he wants and needs to cleanse us. As a disciple this is a challenge, because it means we have to become vulnerable, we have to allow Jesus to do something that makes us uncomfortable. By this point in life, if Jesus himself wanted to wash our feet we’d allow him, but if the means he chooses is through allowing him to love us through another sister, through one of the people we serve, through an embarrassing moment in community life, he wants us to allow him to cleanse us by that means.
• But there’s a second application, as we know, to Jesus’ washing our feet. It’s to set an example of service for all of us toward others. After he had carried out this unforgettable gesture of service, Jesus told his apostles and all of us why he had done it: “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord — and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Jesus is clearly calling us to imitate his loving abasement in service of others, to be willing to do the “dirty work,” to not think we’re too good to do something that will help others, but to bend down in order to lift others up: to be truly patient and understanding of them and their defects; to suffer for them, especially those whom the world doesn’t value; to pray for them even if they persecute us; to love them when they make us their enemies. I always admire the transition that takes place in young mothers and fathers, something so many of you have seen much more than I, how quickly they may go from being dainty and antiseptic, to readily and without hesitation changing diapers several times of day. What to most teenagers may be disgusting work for them is no longer disgusting, because they love their children. Love gives meaning to what they do. Jesus is calling us to serve others in the same way, recognizing that no service is beneath the love we’re supposed to have for others. And in order to us to be able to serve others in that way, we need first to allow Jesus to wash us, so that he can wash others through us.
• Those in the consecrated life are called by God to be icons of this type of washed washers to everyone. St. John Paul II wrote in his beautiful apostolic exhortation on the consecrated life in 1996, “In the washing of feet Jesus reveals the depth of God’s love for humanity: in Jesus, God places himself at the service of human beings! At the same time, he reveals the meaning of the Christian life and, even more, of the consecrated life, which is a life of self-giving love, of practical and generous service. In its commitment to following the Son of Man, who ‘came not to be served but to serve’ (Mt 20:28), the consecrated life, at least in the best periods of its long history, has been characterized by this ‘washing of feet,’ that is, by service directed in particular to the poorest and neediest. If, on the one hand, the consecrated life contemplates the sublime mystery of the Word in the bosom of the Father (cf. Jn 1:1), on the other hand it follows the Word who became flesh (cf. Jn 1:14), lowering himself, humbling himself in order to serve others. Even today, those who follow Christ on the path of the evangelical counsels intend to go where Christ went and to do what he did. He continually calls new disciples to himself, both men and women, to communicate to them, by an outpouring of the Spirit (cf. Rom 5:5), the divine agape, his way of loving, and to urge them thus to serve others in the humble gift of themselves, far from all self-interest. …  The consecrated life thus shows, with the eloquence of works, that divine charity is the foundation and stimulus of freely-given and active love.”
• The second expression of extreme merciful love to which we need to respond with great receptivity is the Lord’s gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus’ self-emptying out of love didn’t end with his taking the form of a slave and doing the work of a slave to cleanse us. His consecration went so much further in taking on the form of our food and becoming our very nourishment. The patron of priests, St. John Vianney, used to say about the Eucharist, that if we had had the ability to ask God anything in the whole world, we would never have dreamed of asking God for this, to become one of us, to share our life from conception to death, to take on our sufferings and sins, and then to hide himself under the appearances of bread for us to consume, so that we might become one with him. But God in his goodness gave us what we would never have dared to ask. This is his love to the extreme, which is why the Church calls the Eucharist the “sacrament of love.” It’s here in the celebration of Mas that Jesus loves us to the extreme as he gives us his body and blood for the remission of our sins. In St. Luke’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus says, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you.” He was burning with a desire to give himself to us and for us before he would give himself mercifully unto death on our behalf on the Cross. Like all love, he desires union with the one he loves, and that’s what he seeks to bring about in the Holy Eucharist, to help us to become one with his mercy. He gives the total gift of himself to us, he says, “I love you to point of giving my life for you for the forgiveness of your sins” and he awaits our reply. He eagerly desires to feed us with himself. It’s here that he says, in the present tense, “This is my body that is for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.”
• What’s our response to this gift? In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed, “How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the goods he has done for me?” God wants us to take up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. This is our thanksgiving. Then he wants us to pay it forward, offering our body and blood, our logike latreia, with him to the Father and for the sake of others. This is the source of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
• And the third action of extreme love Jesus gives us on Holy Thursday is his institution of the priesthood. So great was Jesus’ desire to continue to wash and purify us, so eager was his longing to give his body and blood for us to unite us in love with him that he did something even more amazing than humbly giving himself to us under the appearances of simple human food. He instituted the priesthood on frail men, sinful men, at times scandalous men in order to continue to be able to cleanse us and feed us until the end of time. But this was another sign of his mercy, so that we too wouldn’t think we need to be perfect in order to receive his gifts and share in his mission. He called Peter. Matthew. Paul. Augustine. John O’Connor. Roger Landry. Sinners all. So that they might be credible ambassadors of his mercy and call to reconcile the world. And in receiving his mercy this way, we’re called to become merciful and offer our priesthood of the faithful in sacrifice. And the great sacrifice God wants is mercy.
• Christ, having loved those who were his own in the world, loved them to the end. Tonight we come to thank him for that love, shown in his becoming a slave to purify us, to save us, and feed us, and to continue to sanctify us through the priesthood all the way until his second coming. Jesus has eagerly desired to eat this Passover with us tonight so that we might pass over with him into this mystery of extreme love, this sacrament of his own relationship with the Father. Tonight we thank him for all the dirty work to save us, to cleanse us, to feed us, and to continue to sanctify us through the humility of the priesthood he established. Tonight is the night in which he fulfilled his life of consecration so that we might be consecrated in him. Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: