O Res Mirabilis: The Ways Christ Loves Us To The End, Holy Thursday, March 28, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan
Holy Thursday 2024
March 28, 2024
Ex 12:1-8.11-14, Ps 116, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Jn 13:1-15

To listen to an audio recording, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• The beginning of the Gospel for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper summarizes not only what tonight is about but also the meaning of his incarnation, the motivation for his passion and death, and the interpretive key for everything else Jesus has said and done. St. John tells us: “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.” By “end,” St. John does not mean to say merely that Jesus loved us to the finish line of his earthly life, but loved us to the extreme, to the maximal possibilities of love, with all he had, holding nothing back. “No one has greater love,” Jesus would tell the apostles later 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. To understand the importance of this night, to know Jesus, and to grasp our own deepest identity, we need to see that Jesus’ whole life was a sacrament, an efficacious external sign, of how “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).
• During the Last Supper, Jesus showed this extreme love in three powerful ways. The Church, in her instructions to bishops, priests and deacons for Holy Thursday, tells them that in their homily they are to “shed light” on the three “principal mysteries that are commemorated in this Mass: namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist, [the institution] of the priestly Order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.” Each of these are a manifestation of the boundless love of the Lord Jesus for us.
• Let’s begin with the Lord’s washing the feet of the apostles, a gesture that puts into unforgettable body language the command, “love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus would give later in the Last Supper. Washing another’s feet, 2000 years ago, was the menial work of a servant or slave. Most people walked barefoot or at most with simple sandals. Along lengthy journeys on dirt roads, their feet accumulated dust on dry days, mud on wet days, and even human and animal waste from time-to-time. The closest modern equivalent to washing feet in the ancient world would be to wash public bathrooms in parks or bus stations. That Jesus himself would take on the form of a slave to do for his creatures shows all of us that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to serve and save us.
• But the apostles needed to have the faith and humility to allow Jesus to love them in this extreme fashion. St. Peter, as we see, was deeply uncomfortable with this prospect. “You will never wash my feet,” he exclaimed. 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 our salvation, we have to allow Jesus, first, to cleanse us. Peter, eventually realizing this and wanting to be totally with the Lord, 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 today? The early saints of the Church, when they looked at Jesus’ statement that once we’ve been bathed 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 take that grime away. That’s what he does in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where Jesus is continually on his knees at our feet, dying we could say to take our sins away. We need to be humble enough to allow Jesus to clean not just the soles of our feet but the immortal souls he has infused within us and redeemed. One of the reasons why Jesus washes feet at the beginning of the Last Supper, Pope Benedict once commented, is to show us that before he gives his Body and Blood, he in fact wants to cleanse us, hence the need for us, if we’re aware of any serious sins, to go to Jesus working through priests in the Sacrament of Confession before we come to receive through the same priests his Body and Blood in the Mass.
• 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 Jesus had carried out this unforgettable gesture of extreme love, he 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 humbly to do the “dirty work” of bending 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 love them as Christ has loved us, even when they resist, object to, or oppose us and that love. During the celebration of the Last Supper, the Church has her priests imitate Jesus’ gesture of the washing of the feet of the apostles to remind them that to be ordained in the person of Christ means not just to become configured to him for the celebration of the Sacraments but also to be interiorly aligned to him in the humblest forms of service. And the example of priests doing this is meant to inspire every Catholic to exercise this extreme love in their families, neighborhoods, parishes, schools, workplaces, and beyond.
• The second expression of Jesus’ extreme love to which we need to respond with maximal receptivity is the Lord’s incredible gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus’ self-emptying didn’t stop with his taking the form of a slave and doing a slave’s work to cleanse us. His boundless charity went so much further when he took on the form of our food to become our very nourishment. This is why Jesus himself in his revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque as well as the Church herself in her Eucharistic documents, have called the Eucharist the “sacrament of love.” We could call it the “sacrament of extreme love.” It wasn’t enough for the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity to humble himself to assume our human nature and be born in a borrowed cave. It wasn’t enough as an infant to be hunted down by assassins and become a refugee. It wasn’t enough to live and work in relative obscurity in a place from which some wondered whether any good could come. It wasn’t enough to preach, teach, exorcise, heal, and travel almost non-stop through Judah, Galilee, Samaria and the pagan territories, often enduring derision and rejection. It wasn’t enough to be betrayed by those closest to him, sadistically tortured, and ignominiously crucified. It wasn’t even enough to rise on the third day victorious and ascend gloriously to the Father’s right hand. Jesus loved us so much that, to remain with us always until the end of time, he most humbly of all conceals himself — his Body, his Blood, his Soul and even his majestic divinity — under the simple appearances of human food, of bread and wine.
• What Jesus did on Holy Thursday, and which the Church does each day in memory of him, is the fulfillment of the ancient Passover rite that we heard described in the first reading. Just like the ancient Jews needed to do in Egypt with the Passover lamb, so we Christians have to eat the unblemished Lamb of God. Just like they needed to wipe the lamb’s blood on our doorposts and lintels, so he wants us to paint our insides by drinking his blood, as we will have the privilege to do tonight. God called his chosen people through Moses to make the Passover a “perpetual pilgrimage,” to leave their homes and come to meet the Lord. This is what we Christians do at Mass, not just on Holy Thursday, but each Lord’s Day, and indeed have the awesome privilege to do even each day during the week.
• Thomas Aquinas, the 750^th anniversary of whose death the Church celebrated three weeks ago, the second greatest teacher in the history of the Church only to Jesus himself, the patron saint of university students and teachers, whose learning was exceeded only by his Eucharistic love, wrote about this mystery of Jesus’ extreme love in his hymn Sacris Solemnis. The fifth verse of that him is known by its first words, Panis Angelicus. In it, St. Thomas exclaimed, “O res mirabilis! manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis!” “O what a mind-blowing reality! A poor and humble servant eats the Lord!” It’s in the Eucharist that Jesus says in the present tense — as St. Paul reminded the 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 eagerly desires to give himself to us in this way. He considers himself the only nourishment worthy of our soul. As he told us in the Capernaum synagogue, he wants us to eat his flesh and drink his blood and draw our very life from him.
• What’s our response to the Lord’s extreme Eucharistic charity? The Responsorial Psalm tonight takes up this question and answers it. 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 Lord’s name. The Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving, is indeed the way we express gratitude for the greatest expression of all of Jesus’ incomprehensible and immeasurable love. In response to his love, Jesus tells us to “do this” in memory of him. That means to celebrate the Mass, to make it the source, summit, root and center of our whole life. We are now in the midst of a three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States. It’s a response to a crisis of Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, gratitude, love and life. We see that crisis in terms of Mass attendance, where only one of six Catholics in our country comes to Mass on the Lord’s Day, and far fewer, for example, tonight, come to thank Jesus for his extreme Eucharistic love. We see the crisis in the fact that seven of ten Catholics think the Eucharist is a “thing,” not Jesus himself, the same Jesus under a different sacramental appearance who gestated in Mary’s womb, was held in her arms, and gave his body and blood on Calvary. We see it in the crisis of how few Catholics take advantage of the incredible opportunity to be with Jesus in prayerful Eucharistic adoration. I mentioned earlier how Jesus, in his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, referred to his Eucharistic self-gift as the “Sacrament of Love.” A little later, he told her, that in response to his extreme love in the Eucharist, “most” treat him with indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn. Jesus, like anyone who loves another, wants his love to be received and requited. Instead of indifference, he wants us to make him in the Eucharist, the biggest difference in our life. In response to irreverence, he wants us to treat him in the Eucharist with great piety and devotion. Rather than coldness, he longs to see passion, enthusiasm, excitement. In place of sacrilege, he wants us to receive him in a holy way, with our souls cleansed by him by means of the same priests through whom he gives us his Body and Blood. And rather than scorn and contempt, he wants us to treat him with praise and gratitude. The Eucharistic Revival is a grace-filled opportunity for us to celebrate the incredible treasure we have, Jesus himself in the Holy Eucharist, so that we might allow Jesus to transform us through his extreme Eucharistic love and, in transforming us, transform the world.
• The third action of extreme love Jesus gives us on Holy Thursday is the 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 perhaps 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. On Holy Thursday he instituted the priesthood, consecrating the apostles in the truth of his word to celebrate the Mass in his memory and to bring his healing and real presence to the world until the end of time. He did this knowing that, within the first hours after their ordination, all of the apostles would have their faith in Jesus shaken and would abandon him. But 11 of the 12 would return and faithfully serve him and the Church he founded on them until they would share definitively and fully in his resurrection.
• Holy Thursday is a night on which we thank the Lord for the gift of the priesthood. Describing what Christ did during the Last Supper, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Sacris Solemnis, “Sic sacrificium istud instituit, cuius officium committi voluit solis presbyteris, quibus sic congruit, ut sumant, et dent ceteris,” meaning, “Christ thus instituted the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, whose ministry he willed to be entrusted only to priests, whom he thus made fit to receive the sacrifice and give it to others.” Priests are first those who are supposed to “receive” the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist, to be truly Eucharistic men, whose lives are centered around the sacrifice of the altar, who zealously spend time in daily conversation with the Lord present for us in the tabernacle. Then they are those whom Christ has chosen to “give” to others —at Mass, in hospitals, even on death beds — the most precious treasure in the whole world, Jesus’ own Eucharistic self-gift. The priests are called, in other words, to be Eucharistic disciples and Eucharistic apostles, going to Jesus in the Eucharist with faith and giving Jesus in the Eucharist with fire.
• Tonight we thank Jesus for the priests he has chosen, called, ordained and sent to serve us in this Eucharistic way, both now and over the course of our Christian life. We thank him for the priests who have baptized us, heard our confessions, prepared us for Confirmation, given us Jesus’ body and blood, anointed us and our loved ones when we were in danger of death, joined our hands in marriage, vested us at ordination and been the “servants of Christ and stewards of his mysteries” as we have sought to discern and follow faithfully our vocations. Tonight we give thanks to God for having called Father Peter Heasley, Father Michael Holleran, Father Emmanuel Okpalauwaekwe, Father Jean-Sebastien Laurent, Father Jean-David Carossio, Father Osiris Salcedo, and Father James Plantania and we thank them for their steady yeses, each day, in response to that call. In this year in which I will celebrate in three months the 25^thanniversary of my priestly ordination, I give the Lord particular thanks for the gift and mystery of the priesthood and for all those whom he has sent me to serve, through whom he has sought to sculpt me into a priest after his image. On Holy Thursday, the Church prays for all 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 and from Corpus Christi Notre Dame Parish, that they may cooperate with the grace of God to recognize their vocation and give a wholehearted consent to that summons. Jesus indeed loved us so much that he humbly entrusted his saving work to simple, limited men, who out of love for him and others have been willing freely to give up their freedom to join themselves to Christ’s obedience until death, to forgo the blessing of marriage and families of their own to imitate Christ’s own chaste, spousal love, and to forsake so many worldly goods and possibilities to emulate Christ’s rich poverty in spirit. We pray for all 407,000 ordained priests across the world to whom Jesus has given the priestly vocation, and for all those who Christ is beckoning to build on their labors, so that they might “receive and give to others” the gift of Christ’s Eucharistic sacrifice and, like Christ and the 11 saintly apostles, prove faithful to the end and loving of God and us 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. As we prepare to actualize his command of brotherly love in the washing of feet, we ask him to help every priest and Christian to learn how to love others with the same humility and generosity with which Christ loves us. As we prepare to celebrate the Eucharist, to “do this in memory of” of him, we ask Jesus to help us all live truly Eucharistic lives, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, all we are and have out of love for him and others. And as we pray for our priests, present and future, we ask the Eucharistic Lord to help them all, like the 11 faithful apostles, to become saints so that through them he might sanctify us and help us become for the world examples and missionaries of his extreme love, his saving love, to the end. This is what we celebrate tonight. This is what Christ this evening eagerly hungers to do in and through us. Blessed indeed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: 

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