Our People

Homily for Holy Thursday 2007

Our Lady Star of the Sea, Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
5/4/2007

Sacramentum caritatis: this is the name given to the Eucharist by Pope Benedict in his most recent letter. This sacrament of charity, the Holy Father wrote, is the revelation of God’s infinite love for every man and woman, a love so total that tonight and tomorrow You will lay down your life for us. St John introduces tonight’s events by saying that this was how Jesus showed how perfect his love was, how he loved them “to the end”, to the uppermost. Jesus is God loving to the max.

Tonight we see a play more real than any ordinary life. In the third and final act, we will go out into garden with Jesus and keep watch with him in his Agony. We will see him in terror on his knees, sweating drops of blood, pleading for release yet surrendering in trust. He will be betrayed with a kiss and delivered into the hands of sinful men. He will stop the fighting and give himself up to the police because, at his Supper and in his prayer in the Garden, he has already stopped fighting – with God, fate, history. He has already handed himself over to the future, confident it is safe in the hand of the only One worthy of all trust. So will begin his interrogation, torture and execution. By 3 pm tomorrow he will be dead.

It would be impossible to make sense of the Agony that begins later tonight had we not first witnessed two previous scenes. Act 2 is the Institution of the Eucharist, that most familiar scene for us Catholics because we see it not just annually but every Sunday. Jesus takes bread and wine and the usual Passover blessing and turns them all into the permanent memorial of his Passion and Death, when his Sacred Body will be broken and his Precious Blood spilt. Here we begin to see where it is all going: Jesus’ impending death is now sealed in blood; he is the Paschal Lamb; he replaces all the ancient rites with his own. The defeat of Good Friday and the victory of Easter Sunday are foretold and made present and memorialised through this Eucharistic sacrifice of love.

Sacramentum Caritatis, O Sacrament of Charity, O Blessed Sacrament: in You Christ gives all that he is in his Divinity, that we might sup with God, commune with the saints, receive the Holy Spirit into our souls. In You Christ gives all that he is in his Humanity, so we receive the very substance of Jesus into our bodies. The gift is total and it is only through it that we can begin to make sense of the events which follow: the friends he takes with him (that’s you and me) and the friends who fail him (that’s you and me); the tormented prayer, resignation, then quiet confidence; the hand-over to darkness and the trust in light; the nakedness and humiliation, the suffering and death of the man-God; the hope that there might yet be victory over death: all have been enacted and explained and perpetuated through the Institution of the Eucharist. For here Christ “draws all men to himself”, draws every suffering, lonely, abandoned or thirsting soul into himself. Indeed, Pope Benedict suggests, Jesus here introduces a kind of ‘nuclear fission’ to the heart of all being, setting off a process to transform all reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire universe, to the point where God will be all in all.

But before all this comes Act One and it is the key to the Eucharist and the Agony and the Ecstasy beyond. First, Jesus removes his chasuble and ties a towel around himself and washes his disciples’ feet. What amazement the Apostles must have felt as they heard him talk of service and betrayal. Even more amazing words were to come later that night and in the days ahead. Frightening, portentous words, as he consecrates the elements and the men and the darkness with desperate prayers. Exciting and exalting words, as he renews history and the cosmos and every human life. Accompanying those words are equally astonishing deeds: half-stripping tonight as a premonition of the stripping that will occur to him tomorrow; grovelling on the ground tonight as a forewarning of the falls on the Way of the Cross tomorrow; his interrogation by Peter tonight, as if prepping Jesus for his trial by Pilate tomorrow; and after all this standing up tonight to give the mandatum to serve as he has done, just as he will be raised up on cross tomorrow to give the mandate to love as he has done, to the end, to the limit. Jesus is God loving to the max.

“I have given you an example,” he says, “so that you may copy what I have done to you.” “Do this, in memory of me.” Serve, sacrifice, surrender your will: all the meaning of this night is told in its First Act and then unpacked. No Eucharistic act is authentic if it does not involve bringing to God the needs of the world with the gifts brought to the altar and the prayers raised like incense. No Eucharistic act is authentic if it does not involve taking Christ out to the world, as we will go out into darkness with the Blessed Sacrament tonight. There is no genuine worship in this place outside time and space without commitment to living the Gospel in time and space, bringing liberation and justice, peace and security, life and love to those around us.

We must make of our own lives, then, a Eucharistic mystery: a total gift of the self in the service of God and neighbour. We must make a vertical act of love, in worship of God, and a horizontal act of love, in charity towards our neighbour in need. We must offer our own bodies and life-blood with that of Christ. We must make of ourselves, or let God make of us, a place where others might encounter Christ. So we must be willing, literally and metaphorically, to go down on our knees in the service of those others.

Sacramentum caritatis, O Sacrament of Charity, O Blessed Sacrament. Go now, He says, I have given you an example: now do likewise yourselves.