Thursday, April 1, 2021

 Holy Thursday – Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper

(Exodus 12:1-8.11-14; I Corinthians 15:23-26; John 13:1-15)

An American rabbi writes of a Passover his father, a Polish emigrant, had many years ago.  He says that his father had gone to Lithuania to study in a Hebrew school.  However, he was captured by the Soviets and sent to a workcamp in Siberia.  There he and his friends prepared for Passover while harvesting summer wheat.  They saved a few kernels each day and hid them until the following spring to make matzoh.  They fashioned a rolling pin from the gears of an old clock and a piece of wood.  The pin was used to perforate the matzoh dough so that it would bake quickly and thoroughly.  Then in the middle of a Spring night, the boys baked the matzoh in a hut with an oven.  On Passover night they came together to fulfill the biblical mandate that was reiterated in today’s first reading.  They thanked God, the Creator, for His great kindness.

The apostle Paul tells us in the second reading how Jesus transformed the Passover supper.  He took the unleavened bread, blessed it, and said that it was his body.  When he blessed the wine and called it his blood, he spoke of a new covenant between him and his disciples.  The new covenant would supplant the old, not entirely replacing it but adding substantially to it.

Tonight’s gospel reveals the difference.  At the anticipated Passover feast in John’s gospel Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.  The gesture is meant to be symbolic.  Jesus tells his disciples that they are to serve one another as he just served them. In the long discourse that the foot washing initiates, Jesus further explains himself.  His disciples are not only to thank God for His kindness but are to love one another as radically as he loves them.  That is, they must be ready to die for one another. 

Most of us have difficulty acknowledging much good in others.  Some, however, like that police officer killed in Boulder, Co., last week, have the courage to love radically like Jesus.  Tonight we want to pray for him and for the many loving people we have known in our lives.  Perhaps some of these died in the pandemic this past year.  We also should pray for one another and ourselves that we will emerge from this Easter weekend triumphant with the Lord.  We hope to have Jesus’ Spirit of love more deeply embedded with us.