Holy Thursday

Rathkeale

20 March 2008

At the beginning of his public ministry, John the Baptist presented Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. As the Passover Feast approached during the first Holy Week, Jesus gathered with his disciples to do what Moses had laid down – a young animal, usually a lamb, was to be slaughtered and eaten. Every year that Passover meal would be a permanent reminder of God’s love for his people.

But when they were at their meal, Jesus offered himself, the Lamb of God, as a new sign of God’s love: This is my body which is for you… This is the new covenant in my blood” and he gave himself to his disciples as the meal which would always remind them of his love.

This evening, we try to enter into the reality of that Last Supper. We have heard in the Gospel that ‘Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to pass from this world to the Father’. Jesus knew that his was his parting meal. This was a moment of farewell to the apostles who had walked the roads of Palestine, listening to him, seeing his care for the sick and rejected, understanding something of the love that he had for his Father. This was a time for closeness and for sharing of what they had known together. But it was also a moment of sadness and horror: he knew that he was going to pass from this world, in agony, in cruelty, in rejection, in betrayal.

The loving farewells would surely be coloured by what was to come. Jesus knew that one of his most trusted companions, sitting at table with him, was going to betray him; he knew that Peter, the leader of his apostles was going to deny him; he knew that most of the rest of them were going to run away and abandon him in his agony.

Knowing all of that, what did Jesus do? “He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wearing”. And the Gospel is very specific: “He knew who was going to betray him”.

At the Last Supper Jesus showed an extraordinary love for his apostles, even though he knew that in the coming hours when he was going to need them most he would find betrayal and weakness and cowardice and failure.

That is the kind of love he demonstrates at the Last Supper and on Calvary – a love that goes on caring and forgiving and inviting, no matter how badly we fail – a love that never gives up looking for the sheep that is lost, a love that we can always return to.

That is why we can always have hope, however badly we have failed. But it is also a hope than challenges us. “Do you understand what I have done to you? ... I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you”.

Jesus is present to us in the Eucharist; he is present in his death and resurrection. Every time we eat his body and drink his blood, we proclaim his death, a death for sinners, a death for those who betrayed and abandoned him. When he washed the feet of his frightened disciples who would not stand with him in his suffering, he gave us an example.

Proclaiming his death means realising that this is the way that we have to follow. If we are not ready to forgive, if we are not ready to share what we have received, then we have not understood what he has done for us when he gave us his Body and Blood, and washed the feet of his disciples. We have not understood the prayer which we say in every Mass before we receive him in the Eucharist: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”.

Proclaiming his death means following the example he gave us. It means trying to have the kind of love that never gives up, the kind of love that is always willing to forgive, the kind of love that Jesus showed us and that he gives us in the gift of himself in the Eucharist.

+Donal Murray