Entering Deeply Into, and Imitating, Christ’s Loving Us to the End, Holy Thursday, April 6, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan
Holy Thursday 2023
April 6, 2023
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 the homily: 

• Holy Thursday is the only occasion during the year when the Church explicitly tells priests what to preach on. The rubrics tell us that “the Priest gives a homily in which light is shed on the principal mysteries that are commemorated in this Mass: namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist and of the priestly Order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.” 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.
• 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 love into action in the gesture of washing the feet of those disciples who would be his apostles. Jesus’ entire life can be summarized by the first sentence of St. John’s account of Holy Thursday which we just heard: “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” The motivation of his life was love, and he loved us, as the Greek can perhaps better be translated, “to the extreme.” He loved us to his absolute limit, with all he had, holding nothing back. “No one has greater love,” he would tell the apostles later tonight in St. John’s Gospel, “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.
• He epitomized his saving love in the gesture of washing the apostles’ feet. Washing another’s feet was the gesture of a slave. People at most wore simple sandals and along journeys on dirt roads their feet accumulated dust on dry days, mud on wet days, and animal waste often. 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. Imagine if a billionaire on Park Avenue came down from his penthouse to clean the public bathrooms, and then wanted to go to the apartments of his janitorial staff and clean their toilets. That would only be a tiny glimpse of how great God’s humility was in taking on the service of a slave in washing the feet of his disciples. 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 Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, Simon the Pharisee criticized Jesus for not recognizing the woman was a sinner. But the Lord said that she would be forgiven much because she had loved much and had expressed that love for Jesus by washing his feet, something that Simon himself didn’t do when Jesus entered because he didn’t love Jesus at all. By his own action at the beginning of the Last Supper, Jesus was “loving much” and showing how he was willing to “waste” not just a year’s worth of work but his whole life to cleanse not just our feet but our souls of whatever had sullied them.
• We need to have faith and deep humility to allow Jesus to love us 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, in other words, in order to enter into his self-offering to God the Father for the salvation of the world, he and we have to allow Jesus to clean us. Peter, realizing this and wanting to be totally with the Lord, then gave him permission to wash not just his feet but 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 respectively. 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 Jesus does in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where Jesus is continually on his knees at our feet, literally dying 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.
• But there’s a second application 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 loving service, Jesus told his apostles and all of us why he had done it: “Do you realize what I have done to 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 also should do.” Jesus is clearly calling us to imitate his loving abasement in service of others, to be willing to do the “dirty work,” to refuse to think that we’re too good to do something that will help others, but rather 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 first-time moms and dad, how quickly many of them go from being dainty and antiseptic, to changing diapers readily and without hesitation several times of day. What to most teenagers may be disgusting work for them is no longer disgusting, because they obviously love their babies. 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.
• The second expression of extreme 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 a slave’s work to cleanse us. His extreme charity 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, to be tortured and crucified, 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.” This was the fulfillment of the ancient Passover rite that we heard described in the first reading. Just like the ancient Jews, we need to eat the unblemished Lamb. We need to immerse ourselves in the Lamb’s blood, applying it to the doorposts and lintels not of our houses but of our life. God called his chosen people through Moses to make the Passover a “perpetual pilgrimage,” to leave our homes and come out to meet the Lord. This is what we do here at Mass.
• It’s here in the celebration of Mass that Jesus loves us to the extreme. 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 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. He gives the total gift of himself to us; he says, “I love you to point of giving my life for you,” and he awaits our reply. He passionately desires to feed us with himself, because no other nourishment for our bodies and souls would satisfy his extreme love. It’s here that he says, in the present tense, as St. Paul reminded the early Christians in Corinth in today’s second reading, “This is my body that is for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The Lord gives himself to us here, not just tonight but every Sunday, not just Sundays but every day. He responds to our hunger for God by seeking to feed us with the only adequate response to that hunger. During the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival the Church in the United States is now living, we’re all called to focus on God’s ravenous hunger to nourish us as well as on stoking our appetite for this greatest of all his gifts.
• What’s our response to this extreme Eucharistic charity? 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. He wants us not just to do just “anything” we feel like; he wants us to “do this” in memory of him. The question for us is whether we receive that gift, are resistant to it or reject it. In 2011, our late Pope Benedict asked on this night, “Jesus desires us, he awaits us. But what about ourselves? Do we really desire him? Are we anxious to meet him? Do we desire to encounter him, to become one with him, to receive the gifts he offers us in the Holy Eucharist? Or are we indifferent, distracted, busy about other things?” We know that in response to Jesus’ outpouring of love, many people resist. Some don’t come at all. Some come without being cleansed. Others come without seeking a true communion of love and life with God and with others. Others reject Jesus’ gift of himself as if he couldn’t have loved us in this concrete way. Holy Thursday is a night in which we’re called to respond to God’s self-gift and grace to order our whole life, first, to receiving this gift and then to imitating it, offering our body and blood, our sweat, our tears, our heart, all we have and are, for others as Jesus has done for us and instructed us to do in his memory.
• 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 to unite us in love with him, that he did something even more mind-blowing than humbly giving himself to us under the miraculous appearances of simple human food. He instituted the priesthood, using 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. Talk about emptying oneself and becoming a slave! Jesus entrusts himself to his creatures! Tonight on Holy Thursday he instituted the priesthood, consecrating the apostles in the truth of his word to bring his healing and his real presence to the world until the end of time.
• There are many people, including Catholics, who do not approach the reality of the priesthood with eyes and hearts of faith. They look at the priesthood in general without supernatural vision, seeing the priest as basically a functionary who just fills the role of presiding, or teaching, or coordinating the things in Church, or — worse — as a businessman or manager of ecclesiastical goods. Others look at priests the way most Protestants do, as someone chosen by the community to lead them in a Bible study or try to inspire them to prayer and charitable service. But relatively few look at priests with genuinely Catholic faith, as men chosen not by the community but by God, given a vocation despite all their obvious and manifold weaknesses and sins, to carry on the work entrusted to the apostles in the Upper Room. Peter, Andrew, James, John, Matthew, Simon, Jude and the other apostles weren’t anywhere close to the most talented people, the brightest theologians, the best speakers, the best administrators, Jesus could have found. Peter’s first words were “Depart from me for I am a sinful man.” Matthew was a despised tax collector. Three others were humble, heavily-accented fishermen from an ancient backwater village. But Jesus chose them and gave them his own power to continue his saving work. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, he worked through them to bring his word, his forgiveness, his body-and blood, to the ends of the earth. And he continues to do this through their successors and through the priests those successors ordain in the Sacrament of Holy Orders. So tonight, on Holy Thursday, the Church thanks Jesus for the gift of the priesthood. We pray for the priests Jesus has chosen, that they may be more and more like him, faithful and loving until the end, washing the feet of the whole world. We pray for those whom Jesus is calling to the priesthood, including from among the young men here at Columbia, in order to give us his mercy, to share his body and blood, to baptize future generations, to prepare them for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, to join our hands in marriage, to anoint us and get us ready for eternal life with God. Jesus loved us so much that he humbled himself to entrust his saving work to simple men, who give up their freedom to imitate Christ’s obedience, families of their own to imitate Christ’s spousal chastity, and so many goods of the world to imitate Christ’s poverty. We pray for them that they, like Christ and 11 of the original 12, might prove faithful to the end and loving to the extreme.
• Christ, having loved those who were his own in the world, loved us all the way. Tonight we come to thank him for that love, shown in his becoming a slave to cleanse 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. Blessed indeed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: 

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