Homilies for the Sacred Triduum

Holy Thursday Homily 2011

Today we give thanks for how Jesus wonderfully makes our salvation available to us day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out. Not only does he bring us freedom from our sins, and access to the eternal happiness we all long for and fail to find here below, but the act by which he gave his life for our salvation is not just something he did two thousand years ago, but something he makes present for us every time we attend mass. And we are invited not just to look on, but to enter into the mystery of love by which he saved us. We remember, but our remembering is not just a calling to mind but a transforming of our hearts and our lives. The full power of his act is still with us. Jesus has totally given himself for us, and he wants us to totally give ourselves in service to our brothers and sisters, those close by and those who inhabit the far reaches of our globe, all of them members of his body.

How does he make present the death by which he saved us? He chose to make it present under the appearances of bread and wine. This is what he did in a final meal with his disciples before his passion, death, and resurrection, and he told them, and us, to repeat his action in memory of him.

What precisely did he do? Let us hear the story as told in the second Eucharistic Prayer:

Before he was given up to death, a death he freely accepted, he took bread and gave you thanks, He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said:

Take this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body which will be given up for you.

When the supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said:

Take this, all of you, and drink from it; this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

What are the significant actions in this story?

He started by taking a loaf of bread, in the words of Paul’ account, setting it aside for a special purpose. He blessed this bread, giving God thanks and praise. His setting aside and blessing is reflected in the prayer that we say at the offertory: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, through your goodness we have this bread to offer, fruit of the earth and work of human hands. It will become the bread of life.” The first part is the blessing, and the second tells us the special purpose for which this bread is set aside. That blessing is derived from the Jewish passover liturgical meal. Indeed that whole meal was structured as prayerful commemoration and blessing. The Eucharistic prayer is a longer version of this blessing prayer, and it is within it we find the story of what Jesus did with the bread and the wine.

When we hear this blessing prayer, like the disciples of Jesus we are drawn into an intimate relationship with God whose presence in his gifts we recognize.

But then the bread he has just blessed he breaks and distributes to his disciples. The bread is there to be broken, distributed, eaten, not just to be contemplated. Thanksgiving and contemplation are wonderful, but God expects us, like Jesus, to break and distribute bread to be eaten by others. Even more, we are to be the bread to be broken and distributed to others. Our gift of ourselves is to be without limits. Thanksgiving without service is empty. What we have received we must share with others. In receiving the Eucharist, we receive each other, because we are all members of Jesus’ body.

The relationship with God Jesus models in the blessing is usually seen as a relationship upward, like the beam of the cross which is planted in the ground and reaches heavenward. The relationship with our fellow humans Jesus models in the breaking and distributing is seen as a relationship which embraces all on the horizon, like the beam of the cross on which Jesus’s hands were nailed. In this blessing and breaking Jesus was pointing to the Cross which was waiting for him, the Cross which is the instrument of our salvation. On the cross he both surrenders to His Father without limit and he totally gives himself for all members of the human family.

In faith we affirm the real presence in the consecrated bread and wine. But this presence is dynamic not static.

We don’t just contemplate the bread of life, but we receive it as broken, given to us for our nourishment. Jesus’ bones may not have been broken on the cross, but his body was tortured and dislocated. That is the body we receive in the consecrated bread.

We don’t just contemplate the cup of salvation, but we receive it as poured out from the cup. Jesus may not have shed every drop of his blood on the cross, but water and blood flowed from his side, and in death he was spent, he was emptied out. This is what we receive in the consecrated wine.

So not only does Jesus totally empty himself out in the death he suffers out of love for us, but he has created a ritual which allows that love to penetrate and transform us whenever we come together to obey his command “do this in in memory of me” and to receive communion.

Receiving communion is not a banal gesture we perform without much thought each Sunday. It is the act by we are plugged in to the most important event that ever happened within the human family, the act of Jesus’ surrender to God which our sin had made impossible. Each one of us must surrender to God as Jesus did, and live out that surrender in many acts of service by which we express our gratitude to God in imitation of Jesus who came to serve us, to wash our feet.

Let us be grateful to Jesus for what he had done for us by receiving communion not only into our hands and our mouths, but also into our hearts, in a way that will renew us as a community of faith, hope, and love.

HOMILY FOR GOOD FRIDAY 2011

“For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate’s response to these words of Jesus was “What is truth?” He responded with a question, and that question has echoed down through the centuries. Indeed, what is truth? Through all the joys and sorrows, the great accomplishments and the miserable failures, the acts of heroic love intermingled with the senseless violence which has always been part of our human world, down through the centuries we have sought the truth.

Or have we really sought the truth? So often like Pilate we have sensed what the truth might be and have refused to be fully aware of it. The truth has consequences, some of them painful and challenging, and we are not ready to face them. We fill our minds with numbing distractions, we concern ourselves with everything but what is essential. This is true of each of us, to the extent that we allow ourselves to be possessed by the fashion of the day, glittering for a moment, but rapidly discarded. This is true of the world in which we live. Often those who wish to lead us vie as to who would make the most promises, promises they know they cannot all keep, and they run away as fast as possible from those topics which are crucial to our welfare but which have a difficult and painful edge. And, of course, they are able to do this because so often we are in connivance with them, and they know that doing this will enhance their short-term prospects of success.

Pilate was a leader, but he was also a coward. When Jesus told him that he came to testify to the truth, there must have been some spark of recognition in him that he was dealing with someone different from anyone else he had met, a king in a very true and authentic sense, supported not by military power and the violence it is able to perpetrate, but by the power of truth. There was a tinge of cynicism to his question “what is truth”, but there was also in him a longing for something that he deeply sought, but which he repressed from his consciousness.

Initially he recognized that there was no case against Jesus, no warrant for his crucifixion, and proclaimed this to the crowd. But he felt insecure in his ability to control the explosive potential of the region of which he was the power, and he felt that the situation could get out of hand and he would be blamed by the Roman authorities. He thought that the assembled crowd would choose to release Jesus rather than Barabbas, a noted bandit. (Ironically his full name was Jesus Barabbas, and Barabbas translates as Son of the Father. The name might have been similar, but they were totally different as persons.)

Those assembled in the crowd chose Barabbas. Instead of upholding the truth that there was no case against Jesus, Pilate flinches in the face of their determination and tries to compromise. He says to himself:, “ I will have him flogged and bring him back to the crowd bloodied and bruised. Surely that will satisfy their bloodlust.” His compromise was a brutal one: having Jesus savagely punished when he knew he had committed no crime. This leads us to think of our own compromises and how often they have led us down a dark path we did not anticipate.

He tries to convince the crowd, but they prey on his weakness. “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be king — as Jesus does – sets himself against the emperor.” In the end, convinced though he was that Jesus was without guilt, he releases him to be crucified. Whatever glimpse of the truth he might have had in his dialogue with Jesus was wiped away, forgotten. He was filled with fear. What about his successful tenure as governor of Judea and his reputation in Rome? And the truth was blotted out from his mind.

But in the end the truth is never blotted out. Jesus was witness to the truth all the way to his death on the cross, and truth prevailed. To what truth did he witness? The truth that absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God, who is willing to go to any lengths to bring us back to himself. Also the truth that there is a power of evil lurking in the world, so strong that it managed to put to death the author of life, the source of the love and compassion and tenderness which makes our life here below bearable. So the crucifixion, which was the most heinous and oppressive deed that could be committed against an innocent person, is also the deepest act of self-surrender, of obedience, of love, of compassion. Love came out the victor. Truth was vindicated. The tyranny of the persecutor is the patience of the martyr.

The question “what is truth” continues to haunt our world as it did Pilate. It haunts us as well. How often, like Pilate, do we flee from the truth, look the other way when we are caught in our own compromises, or when we catch a glimpse of the dark motivations that often mar the good that we do, be we moved by pride, or fear, or anxiety, or avoidance of conflict or pain. And what is the status of truth within our world? We often ask ourselves if there is anyone out there willing to speak the unvarnished truth as he or she sees it. So often messages are doctored, massaged, spun around in order to bypass that part of ourselves where we are able to genuinely discern our path in the Spirit. And then as we look at the multi-billion dollar communication enterprises of our world, mass-media or advertising or whatever, how haunting indeed is the question “What is truth?”

We are grateful to Jesus because he was a faithful witness to the truth and in him the truth prevailed. May this gratitude transform our lives. Let us allow Jesus’s truth to invade us, especially the darker parts of ourselves we wish to ignore. The light of his truth is compassionate and merciful, and it will bring healing. Let us together work together for a world in which genuine truth, the truth to which Jesus was a witness, prevails. In the Greek of the New Testament, the word for witness and the word for martyr is the same. We may not be called upon to give up our lives, but we will be called upon to risk our lives, our welfare, our reputation, our image. But we know that the truth to which Jesus was faithful is the truth that will set us free.