Holy Thursday

 6-8 March 1941 (Concerning marriage and discovering one’s spouse) Out of the darkness of my life so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. … There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the tease (or foretaste of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

romance - for it is the bridegroom who pursues the bride and pledges Himself to her forever. glory - for it is the God who is so great that He can accomplish the ultimate victory by apparent defeat. honor - for no honor is greater than to be the precious spouse of the greatest king. fidelity - for in this sacrament Jesus’ promise is fulfilled that He “will be with us, even until the end of the ages.” true way of our loves upon earth - for any real human love is measured not by feeling nor by results, but by whether it matches the gift of Christ and His Cross. death - because love on earth, even God’s love revealed in Jesus, means dying.

The essence of fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by way is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.

The Eucharist makes demands on us. The Latin word MANDATUM (“Maundy” Thursday) means commandment, for by a “new commandment” the Lord Jesus demands something big from us: specifically, to foretaste death, which is what love means in this life. The new commandment is simple to say but hard to live: love one another as Jesus loved us, and in fact as He still loves us, for His cross is not simply a thing of the past for us, but breaks into our lives through the Eucharist. God who is beyond all time brought all of our lives, our past present and future, all into the present of the person of Jesus Christ. His entire life is present to all of us, always.

Thus the mandate from the Eucharist comes directly from the lips of Jesus at every Mass: love one another.

When he gives this commandment, Jesus is speaking specifically to the twelve, and thus especially to the priests whose ordination finds its source in the words “Do this in memory of me," and to His disciples. They must love each other with that profound love. But beyond that even, we do not close the circle of Christ’s love within ourselves. We follow the example of Him who loved sinners, who welcomed anyone who would “repent and believe in the Gospel” and “take up their cross and follow after Him.” Furthermore, we cannot ignore His charge to “love our enemies” and “pray for those who persecute us.” Thus we wash the feet of all, but even more so for the family of faith, just as the early Christians were known to others by the way they loved one another.

Perhaps the two most important ways of living the Christian life are found in these two questions: Do I give my entire self to Jesus in the Eucharist, laying down my life for Him? and Do I give my entire self to Jesus in the poor and broken, the “least of these” that He identifies Himself with? If I lose one of these, then I lose the power of the Gospel, which only transforms the world by the deep relationship of love that we have with Jesus in the Sacraments, represented by these holy oils and above all in the Eucharist.

This is why the washing of feet so important to us: Because it is the best symbol of “the greatest thing to love upon earth: the Blessed Sacrament.” The Eucharist, being the true presence of Our Lord, makes present to us His entire Paschal Mystery that we begin to embark upon with this evening when He is betrayed and arrested. In the Eucharist we have Jesus dying for us as the sacrificial lamb, and at the same time we meet Jesus arisen, revealing the wounds in his hands, his feet, and his side that have conquered death and open eternal life to us. This is why we give our entire lives to the gift of gifts, God Himself truly present.

The washing of feet helps us to remember what Jesus did for us: that one so great would stoop to do something so lowly, to enter into our mess and purify it, to make clean the filth that covers us from our sins. May every Christian cherish the memory of this ritual that helps us to see the full beauty of our greatest love. May all of us, priests and faithful, who have all been configured to Christ by baptism, live from our true identity seen in this Mass, and fulfill the new commandment that Jesus reveals in His Paschal Mystery.