Holy Thursday 2018 – By Abbot Peter McCarthy

Homily by Abbot Peter McCarthy 3-29-2018

Every time I’ve found myself reflecting on these Holy Thursday readings this week, a particular poem kept surfacing in my mind until it apparently wore a hole in my thoughts!  I realized this morning that one line especially kept haunting my reflections.  It is not a contemporary poem, written over 100 years ago now by a very young, and at the time unknown German poet, Rainer Rilke:

 

Only in our doing can we grasp you.  

Only with our hands can we illumine you.  

The minds is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world.  

 

Each mind fabricates itself.  

We sense one’s life’s limits, for we have made them.  

And just when we when we would flee them, you come 

and make of yourself an offering.  

 

I don’t want to think a place for you.  

Speak to me from everywhere.  

Your Gospel can be comprehended 

without looking for its source.  

When I go toward you 

it is with my whole life.

 

I am challenged and even confronted by the very charged atmosphere of this Holy Thursday evening: The ‘feel’ of it!  The readings are filled with swirling – violent – themes of light – darkness – slavery – liberation – friendship – betrayal … this evening is dense … hard packed tension with layer upon layer of political intrigue and violent, even tortured, men: Judas – Pilot – Caiaphas – Herod.  It is this very night – Paul reminds us in our second reading from 1 Corinthians when the sinless one was betrayed – ‘was handed over’ – wrenched from his beloved disciples, who themselves abandoned him.

And yet … this is the night resonant with ancient, cultic hymns of glorious divine intervention and liberating revelation!  Listen to our first reading from the book of Exodus, Israel’s Passover:

 

This day shall be a memorial Feast for you, 

which all your generations shall celebrate – as a perpetual institution.

 

And in our second reading, we have one of the earliest eucharistic hymns of the ancient Christian community:

 

On the same night that he was betrayed,

the Lord Jesus took some bread

and thanked God for it and broke it, and he said,

‘This is my body, which is for you;

Do this in memory of me.’

 

There is also a gentleness to this dark and violent night – an almost transforming tenderness that one would never expect; like the experience of Divine Mercy!  Like gentle and courageous Jesus allowing himself to be ‘handed over’ this night – bound and lowered into the dark, fearful dungeon of the condemned in the basement of the house of Caiaphas.  A deep and transforming tenderness that radiates from this sinless one!

 

Each mind fabricates itself, writes the poet.  

We sense our life’s limits, for we have made them.  

You come and make of yourself an offering.

 

Tonight’s Gospel from St. John begins right at the end of his Book of Signs.  We should still find echoing in our hearts Jesus’ final words:

 

I, the Light, have come into the world 

so that whoever believes in me need not stay in the dark anymore …

 

I say these words of Jesus should be echoing in our hearts because in our hearts we too carry the darkness, the violence, the fear, and the betrayal of this night!  It is in our world today just as much as it filled the Kidron Valley of Jerusalem on that first Holy Thursday.  It seeps into our hearts as it once polluted and eroded the trust of his earliest disciples.

Jesus asks us in our Gospel tonight: “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  Do we understand what Jesus is doing to us this Holy Week?  And why do we begin tonight in such darkness?  Because John writes:

 

Jesus had always loved those who were his own in the world.  

But now he showed how perfect – how total his love was.

 

My brothers and sisters, God’s glory – God’s love in Jesus – is revealed most fully in our dark places!  Tonight, Jesus lowers himself down into the center of the swirling, violent, fearful darkness that imprisons our world … “And he makes himself and offering.”

 

He removed his outer garment, John writes, and taking a towel wrapped it round his waist:

He then poured water into a basin and began …

to wash away our blind and toxic fear of love that pushes us into self-centered and violent lives – like Caiaphas – like Judas – like Pilot, where we can’t make room for love anymore, even though love itself is standing in front of us!

 

We sense our life’s limits, for we have made them.  

And just when we would flee them, you come 

and make of yourself an offering.

 

My brothers and sisters let us pray, especially during our liturgy of the washing of the feet that follows now, that He who this night lowered himself into the center of our dark world, wash us in the cleansing power and healing mercy of His love this Holy Week.

+ Abbot Peter McCarthy