The First Passover, The New and Eternal Passover, and This Passover, Holy Thursday, April 9, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Holy Thursday 2020
April 9, 2020
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 Mass, please click below:

The following text guided tonight’s homily: 

• As we begin this most unusual celebration of the Holy Triduum, the first reading from tonight’s Mass not only helps us to grasp that the Biblical precedents of our present situation but also puts into relief just how important what Jesus did during these days, and our participation in it, really is.
• The Book of Exodus describes for us how God had the enslaved Israelites in Egypt prepare for the Passover. The first nine plagues — the Nile turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, the suffering of livestock, boils, hail, locusts and darkness — had failed to convert the heart of Pharaoh to set his people free to worship him. And so we came to the tenth pestilence: the death of the firstborn of man and beast alike. One of the characteristics of Jewish spirituality, and part of the virtue of religion in general seen elsewhere, is gratitude to God for his gifts, expressed in a special way through the consecration of the first fruits to him: not only the first agricultural produce of a season but also first-born children, vicariously offered to God, as we see later famously in the presentation of Jesus. If Pharoah was not open to allowing the children of Abraham to worship him at all, if he was not going to permit them to express their gratitude for his blessings even in slavery, if he was not going to believe in God’s presence and power through the first nine signs, then God would teach them the source of all life and every blessing by helping them to appreciate the Giver and his gifts through the loss of what they held most precious.
• And so the tenth plague came and every first born in the land died. But God had given the Israelites in advance the vaccine for the plague in the procuring of an unblemished lamb, whom they were to keep for four days, prepare and sacrifice, wipe its blood on the lintels and doorposts of their homes, and finally consume. This Lamb would be offered to God in place of all of their first born and lead to the “Passover,” when God, seeing the blood, would pass over their homes. And that’s precisely what happened and ultimately freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. That’s what the Jews have been memorializing on the 14th of the month of Nisan ever since. That’s the context of the Last Supper in which Jesus, celebrating this rite with unleavened bread, wine, bitter herbs and a slaughtered lamb, revealed its ultimate meaning and fulfillment.
• As the whole world now lives through the Covid-19 pestilence, which is striking down men and women no matter where they fit in ordinal rank, and when we hear a “great cry throughout all the land” for those who have died, for the families who mourn them, for the suffering of those presently in ICUs or home in pain, and as we pray for all those enduring the consequences, what we are doing tonight matters.
• Jesus, in completing the Passover rites on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, has provided us an antidote for Covid-19 and every other plague far more valuable than hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Those drugs might be able to heal us from the coronavirus, but they will just delay the inevitable. Jesus has given us the remedy for death, no matter what cause will be inscribed on our death certificate. This year, in the midst of all of the suffering, we give thanks that this worldwide plague has brought everyone to confront the fact and reality of death, which, as we’re learning in great numbers, will come for some much sooner than many anticipated. The coronavirus is cross-crossing the globe like a thief in the night burglarizing many of health, oxygen and even earthly life.
• But Jesus’ words not to be afraid have no expiration date; the Church’s faith that it is our duty and salvation, always and everywhere — including now, in New York — to give God thanks and praise admit of no exception. That’s because Jesus has given us the remedy. In dying, he has destroyed our death; in rising, he has triumphed over every plague and its consequences, including the pestilence of sin. One of the goods that God is bringing out of this present crisis is the grace for us to grasp how much we need that remedy and enter into it, by celebrating the new and eternal Passover from death to life, by consuming the Lamb who has been slain, by wiping his blood not on the lintels of our homes but all over our interior temples, by passing over with him from spiritual worldliness and death to newness of life in communion with him risen from the dead.
• 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. This year, because of the coronavirus and the long Lent of 2020, we can appreciate each of them in new light.
  • With regard to the Eucharist, most Catholics have been prevented from coming to the celebration the Mass, our entrance in time into the Passover of Jesus, and the opportunity to receive the Lamb that many have said that they will never be able to take Eucharist for granted again.
  • With respect to the priesthood, faithful and priests both have been forced to look at the priesthood in perhaps a different light, not so much as a “worship leader” understood in a horizontal sense, but far more in line with the Letter to the Hebrews, as someone in the person of Christ who, even celebrating Mass alone, nevertheless brings to God all of the prayers of his people and the Church throughout the world, as someone who has the capacity to cleanse souls at a distance in parking lots or anoint us for the Passover from death to life dressed from head to toe in personal protective equipment and anointing us via cotton balls.
  • And the whole Church has had a lesson in Christ’s command of brotherly love, in watching medical personnel courageously risk their life to care for those who are ill, washing not just feet, but hands and heads and faces, in making us all far more aware of how we’re called to inconvenience ourselves when necessary to care for others in precarious situation, and in slowing us down and giving us the privilege, day after day, of trying caring for those God has made our closest neighbors, those we live with and now need to spend most of the day with, those literally next door whom we might routinely ignore in the hustle and bustle of modern life.
• God’s ways are not our ways, as he himself taught us through the Prophet Isaiah taught us (Is 55:8). We may have preferred to grow in appreciation of the ineffable gifts of the Holy Eucharist, of the priesthood, and of the command to grow in the divine image by loving others as he has loved us, by other means than a pandemic, but one of the benefits that God wants to bring out of this ontological evil is renewed and much deeper appreciation for the means by which God continues to try to set us free from slavery, slavery to sin, slavery to fear, slavery to death.
• At the beginning of tonight’s Gospel, St. John summarizes not only Jesus’ whole life but his continued approach to us. “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. Having loved his own in the world, he loved them to the end.” Jesus’ love is everlasting. He loves us “to the extreme,” to the point of being the “first born of all creation” struck down so that all of us might not perish but have eternal life. During the last Supper, he reminded us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” Tonight Jesus reiterates those words. He loves us each personally and desires to give himself to us as our nourishment, to lead us from within on the Passover for sin and death to love and life. He then tells us, “Remain in my love”: to dwell in it, believe in it, to rejoice in it, not to run away from it, to let him wash us regularly and thoroughly with his mercy from whatever dust or filth we may pick up from the world and its idolatries. And then he tells us how to remain in it: “You will remain in my love if you keep my Father’s commandments, just as I have kept his commandments and remained in his love.” Those commandments are all explicitations of how to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as Jesus does, imitating his example of love “to the extreme.” The command, “Do this in memory of me,” brings us not only to unite ourselves with him as body and Head, as bride and Bridegroom, to offer ourselves as living worship to the Father (Rom 12:1), but also to give of our own body and blood, our hearts and heads, callouses and caresses to others.
• Through the Eucharist, the Priesthood, and the call to an authentically Christian moral life, all of which we celebrate tonight, Jesus seeks to love us, help us to remain in his love and grow in it. That’s why, as we lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Lord’s saving name, we proclaim, with words that mean more to us this year than perhaps ever, “Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!”

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: