Holy Thursday
In reviewing past homilies for Holy Thursday, I found that in almost every one I remind us all that I am specifically to preach a homily that sheds light on, “the principal mysteries that are commemorated… namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist and of the priestly order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.”
That is, I am mandated to do so, and have no discretion in the matter. And we might think that quite constraining upon the creative process, rightly so. But then, is the job here to be original? Or rather is it to be faithful – faithful to my vocation, my priestly vows, my baptismal promises, my personal conviction born of grace.
This day is best known as Holy Thursday; but in the English Church it is equally if not better known as Maunday Thursday, or “maundy Thursday”. And “maundy” is a corruption of the Latin word, mandatum, the English being, mandate or command.
This refers to Jesus’s mandate to us; the new commandment he gives: to love one another as Jesus has loved us.
The measure of that love can be found in the humility of the foot-washing of the disciples by Christ, in the heroism of Jesus’ march to Calvary. These are all part of his passion. We don’t mark its beginning in the garden at Gethsemane, but rather here, in the events we commemorate this evening. For he washes the feet of his closest disciples, and must recall the many miles they walked together; yet now he must walk apart for a time. He breaks bread with them, and lifts the cup of blessing as he had done so many times before, but on this night he gives it a new meaning, and does so in the somber knowledge that this will be a last of these suppers with them. When next he shares a meal with them, while physically present, there will be a not so subtle divide: he will be a man of the Resurrection, first-born of the dead, while his disciples will remain with us on this side with hopeful anticipation for our day of rising.
So, there is a certain melancholy in all this. His suffering for us has already begun as he begins the process of parting from the disciples in his then unredeemed flesh, even as his divinity guarantees that in the new covenant the communion he will have with them will be far more profound. This is the communion we are called to; and we hope to appreciate just how much it cost our Lord to accomplish; but also, what it calls us to give, to sacrifice, to attain it for ourselves, the glory of the resurrection, the redemption of our flesh, the sanctifying of our souls unto eternal life.
And so, we’re asked what we shall give, what passion are we prepared to enter, to endure, for the sake of Christ, but also for ourselves, for us personally, but also for others as Christ sacrificed for others?
In our meditations upon the mystery of the eucharist, the role of the priest, and the demand of charity that comes through it to us all, we should come to understand that this is not just a divine action, a work of God, but that it requires human cooperation, that God makes us his collaborators. First, of course, in the person of the priest, who is made by ordination into the instrument by which the sacrament may come into being in our presence. Second, is the need for matter, for bread and wine, most obviously, to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ; but also, our flesh, our living bodies to receive through the Blessed Sacrament, our Lord’s very soul and divinity as a sanctifying infusion into our lives.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen observed that the Eucharist does not sensually satisfy, that its satisfactions lay elsewhere. Now, Sheen spoke of the priest as someone who by his eucharistic devotion enters into the sacrificial life, comes to offer himself as a living sacrifice, consecrated to God and worthy of his acceptance – and in doing so, realizes a great joy. Yet, we are all by our baptism, as the priesthood of all believers, also called in all our various walks of life, to also make this self-offering, as disciples consecrated to becoming worthy of God as his witnesses in the world. We do this by obeying the mandate of love, and working for the good of others even as that work may be misunderstood, even resented, even mocked and rejected as was our Saviour who was perfect in his obedience to the command. So, in the coming days we can see that obedience at work as we follow the story of our Lord’s Passion, and reflect on how our own lives stories follow or depart from the sacred narrative. And then we can ask God for the grace to help us shape our lives, and more so our ends no matter how we rough-hew them.
Amen.
Good Friday
We might think of today as one for acknowledging our guilt, our complicity in the sinfulness of a world for which Christ died. Christians understand that our sins of today contributed to the burden that Jesus took to the hill of Calvary. Now, that is a metaphysical notion, that our sins of today retroactively apply at the time of his crucifixion two thousand years ago. But that’s a necessary corollary of his redemptive sacrifice applying to us now. By our faith we know that Christ’s sacrificial death was God’s answer to sin for all time, and our accepting the sacrifice is our remedy for our transgressions throughout history. But I wonder about a problem apart from sin that alienates us from God; and that is guilt.
The wages of sin is death, St. Paul tells us; but an immediate symptom of that impending spiritual demise is an affliction of the heart: that’s guilt. And guilt is a hard thing to overcome; it’s the shame that prompts us to hide from God and not trust in his mercy and forgiveness. I know that from my experience of the confessional, that even after a good confession and absolution, people have lingering guilt. I do tell them, as with any sin there is injury to the soul. When sinned against, we are hurt; and so, like a bone broken in a physical assault, the injuries of a spiritual nature also need to heal through our forgiveness of those who’ve hurt us. Sin has consequences both for those sinned against, and the sinner. The sinner in sinning is injured too, and so, he must heal. And so, residual guilt after a good confession is then the ache of a soul mending its break with God.
Today is a day of somber reflection, but I would also hope of grateful acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice for us. That today as we reverence the cross, we allow its mystery to penetrate our souls and work upon us to heal what we’ve broken within ourselves.
It’s also my prayer that we hold ourselves apart from the world’s remedies for our guilt: the abuse of pleasures, the seeking after distraction, the use of substances like alcohol or weed to deaden the feelings that prompt us to seek God all the more rather than run from him.
The great temptation today, however, is the false admission of guilt that has been so widely adopted in our culture. It’s sometimes referred to as “acknowledging our privilege” and “western” or “colonial” guilt. It is about a social guilt many are prepared to publicly own and indeed, advertise. For those doing this, it’s not about their own sins, but those of our civilization, our race, our gender in reference to wrongs against other groups, and even the world’s ecology. It’s impersonal, and it is an attempt to offload the guilt we have by the shaming of past generations, of others, and of decrying historical wrongs for which there is no personal connection. And it’s all very disingenuous as it really is an advertising of a presumed virtue, it fairly shouts out that one is morally superior, and so, fit to judge history, one’s ancestors and contemporaries and so, claim a strange solidarity with those who were sinned against; and to be exempted from responsibility to the harms done to the world. This is really just self-congratulation of those fortunate few who have the power then to advocate for caring and compassionate policies that serve to showcase innocence to charges of racism, sexism, environmental wrongs and economic exploitation.
And the penance assigned, is not to themselves, but the powerless innocent, our youth for example, who are now told that they must sacrifice disproportionately to mend the torn fabric of global history and heal the ailing planet.
It’s a nice theory, and in scripture there is the notion that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children to the third and fourth generation. But that is a recognition of the persistence of sin that one generation perversely teaches the next. We are experiencing this now with the immorality born of the liberation of the 1960s, fueled by unprecedented wealth and fantastic technology. Scripture is quite clear and says in several places that,
“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers.” (Deut. 24:16)
Each of us in responsible for his or her own sins. As Saint Pope John Paul II insisted, there is no such thing as social sin, but there can be a society of sinners. Bad collective behavior, he says is “the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins” and the product of those “who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.” (Reconciliatio et Paenitentia 16)
So, the true response to guilt in reference to a broken world where we might feel ourselves less sinned against than sinning, in a better place socially, economically, politically, and so, a little guilty about our good fortune, is not to attack others of the present or the past based on superficial notions of identity. Rather, we are to examine our consciences regularly, as good Catholics ought and inquire of ourselves not just the sins of commission, but also the sins of omission; not just the things we ought not to have done, but what about things we should be doing and fail to do? As Jesus tells us about the simple acts of charity, to give a cup of cold water to someone thirsting in the heat is to earn heaven’s reward. (Matthew 10.42)
As much as the cross is the place where Jesus made the atoning sacrifice for the sins of all humanity forever, it’s also the place where he showed us the way to eternal life in a giving of our lives for others. Today is not just about a singular act of self-sacrifice in the past, but it’s also about a stirring example for us to live out of as we journey by faith into the future. We aren’t to take the benefit of the forgiveness of our debts and merely be thankful, and then carry on as before. Rather, we are to look upon this cross, in all that it signifies, including what is most fearful for us, and nonetheless accept Christ’s invitation to take up our crosses and follow him.
Amen.
Easter
Easter puts to us this quandary: is it really true? The Church with exuberance proclaims, he is risen! And so, challenges the world to answer that claim, but what can we say of a world that does not listen? Or rather, pretends to not hear; that affects indifference even as our leaders show enthusiasm for many other religions.
King Charles, the Defender of the Faith, in his Easter Message didn’t actually talk about Easter. Rather his reflection was on Holy Thursday, when Christ washed the feet of the disciples, and broke bread with them at the Last Supper. He felt compelled then to incorporate observations about the supposed shared ethos of hospitality and service had with Judaism and Islam. And so, no mention of the Resurrection, but saying something that argued not so subtly that all religions are really just the same. Politicians, especially in this election season, are keen to be photographed at temples and mosques, etc. To be frank, there is no spiritual interest here, just retail politics, pressing the flesh and giving an appearance of concern as once was done with Irish Catholics and German Lutherans.
What is noted is how apparently indifferent they are to the Christian community now – Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, etc. No one seems eager to speak of Lent, or Easter. No one wants to bring up Christianity, I fear, because to do so is bring up Jesus and so, beg the question, who is he? Is his story true? And as to the most notable things about him, that separates him as an historical figure from all others – did he rise from the dead?
That is an important question. Western civilization was built upon the answer. It’s crumbling as we’ve come to avoid the question. Because if “yes” – what are we doing to ourselves in this decade and more of self-destruction? If no, well, then let us embrace the demolition of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated. Let’s get on with that job.
But no, rather there is sheepish avoidance; and encouraged indifference, and the raising of successive generations to remain incurious, disinterested. We’re being led out, as the poet Matthew Arnold put it in his poem, Dover Beach, onto a “a darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
where ignorant armies clash by night.”
The great journalist and writer of the last century, Hannah Arendt, whose works document and comment upon the horrors of the 20th century, wrote that “not caring whether something is true or false is an essential characteristic of individuals in a totalitarian state.” (“Lies in Politics” essay, 1971)
A totalitarian state needn’t resemble Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. To live in a society in which there is totalizing control of thought and action, that can happen wherever the mass of people can be motivated, or manipulated by the powerful. In such situations, people lose concern for the truth. I think we can say that the many captured by technocratic modernity, the world we live in, don’t prioritize truth so much as they value such things as efficiency and certainty, among a host of recently invented virtues and values. Get me the things I want and crave, and be quick about it! I want my paradise yesterday; but if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for a new iPhone and an Uber Eats gift card; but be quick about it!
I happened upon a very brief essay that argued that the true priority of our society is efficiency – getting it done, whatever it is. Truth, being either unknowable or non-existent, the aim of a society is to achieve its goals as efficiently as possible, whatever they may be. And as it was pointed out, that means motivating people to accept extreme measures such as, going to war, or surrendering, suspension of civil rights, the mad proliferation of rights to all sorts of things that hitherto hadn’t been understood remotely as a matter of rights; austerity, massive spending, expropriation of private property and possessions, encouragement to excessive consumption, compulsory service, mandated activities, universal prohibitions , but also popular indulgence in vices of all kinds as a reward, or a compensation, or just a sop to the idea of freedom that is no freedom at all – (short pause) and a society no longer concerned with truth is not attracted to virtue.
I think the more accurate and honest characterization of where we are is really in the choice between truth and fear: fear of change and so, fear of loss; fear of sacrifice, and so, fear of suffering; fear of death, and so, fear of oblivion. And so, it is by these fears we are manipulated into believing we can avoid change, and so the risk of loss; we can forgo sacrifice, and escape suffering. We’ll do whatever we’re asked by the powers that be; but then when they inevitably fail, how angry we are apt to get; and its an anger born of fear and disappointment.
Facing the truth can be a fearful thing. As Christians we see profound truth in that horrible cross; but it’s also seen in an empty tomb; both places of death and decay. Yet in facing them, the fear is defeated, and we come to live by a truth that cannot die, that cannot be shut away. It bursts out with resurrected life again and again.
For each of the faithful it began with the question, “is it true?” and in our sincere seeking after the answer. For those of us who’ve come to say, “Yes! It is true.” we now put the question to the world, and dare it to answer.
Amen.