HOLY WEEK 2000 - HIS JOURNEY AND OURS
Preacher: Father Bill Edebohls SSC
MAUNDY THURSDAY
About a month ago Pope John Paul 11 began the pilgrimage of his life. For him it was the fulfilment of a long held dream. A dream to visit the Holy Land. The land of our redemption. The land that saw, and participated in the acts of our salvation.
Sadly it was a pilgrimage to a land which, in so many ways, is anything but a holy land. A land torn apart by both religious and political strive. A land where violence, intolerance and injustice are a part of the daily fabric of life. A land were sin, as well as holiness, is etched into the landscape and forgiveness and reconciliation seem always to be one step too far away.
The Pope began his pilgrimage where Moses ended his - and this moment was captured for all in a photograph that was splashed across the newspapers of the world. You may remember it. The Pope is atop Mt. Nebo staring into the distance. Staring, as Moses did thousands of years before, across the Jordan valley and into the Promised Land.
In the photograph he looks as if he is standing on top of the world as he gazes across the vast desert to the cities in the distance. The cities of the Holy Land. It's extremely evocative and you could almost believe that the Pope is hoping and praying that on this pilgrimage he can take those cities, that land and its people, into his outstretched arms, and wash their sins away in the Jordan river, flowing before him. That he could wash them and reconcile them. That he could indeed make them a holy people - a people of the miracles, of the acts of redemption, that were born of the land in which they lived.
With that image in your mind I want you to apply it to yourself.
For tonight you begin a pilgrimage. Tonight the Church throughout the world begins the Triduum Sacrum - the great three days of our redemption. It is a pilgrimage from life, through death, to new life.
As you begin this pilgrimage, this Triduum Sacrum or three great days, close your eyes and pretend you are standing on the top of the mountain and you are looking out upon your life. What do you see in your mind?
A desert - dry, harsh, beating you down, oppressive.
A river - cool, cleansing, renewing.
A life - scarred by sins you would rather not own up to, of opportunities lost, people hurt or neglected, things left undone, alienation, hurt and pain.
Set your imagination free. See your our personal history laid out in front of you. Don't do to your history what some politicians do to Australian history. Don't whitewash it, don't sterilise it, don't even try to justify it. Just be honest and see it for what it is.
A life where both past and present sins can easily haunt the daily fabric of life. A life where sin, as well as holiness, is etched into the landscape. Or, life is just a bit skewed and our of shape - at a crossroads and you're not sure where to next.
Then, without denying or rejecting even the blackest bits, enfold it all in your arms. For you are taking it with you on your pilgrimage. Over the next three days you will take your whole life, the bad bits, the good bits, the dysfunctional bits and the holy bits, on a journey. A journey through life, death, and new life.
Tonight you sit with him at the table of the Last Supper. Not alone but with your brothers and sisters. And you come to the table, not empty handed, but with the bundle of your life that you have enfolded. Your life that you will carry into this sacred pilgrimage.
This Last Supper, the culmination and fulfilment of all those Old Testament prophecies, this dress rehearsal for the Eucharist of Easter in which the Risen Lord gives himself as the living Bread.
And in the Institution of the Eucharist the extraordinary feature of this occasion, and of the liturgy of this evening: the washing of the disciples' feet. It is an act utterly menial, degrading and humiliating, humility in violent technicolour.
Here the hands that had fashioned earth and sky and human frame now wash your feet! Christ the living Word of God, the divine Fiat through whom all things came to be. The crown and model of humanity, and its Saviour from its muddle of sin and greed and selfishness. And yet here he is, stepping in to put things right, not with the voice of command and the authority of the ruler, but rather humbly asking to be allowed to clear up the mess.
Thus it ever was: he who was to be our Master and Brother came not with the arrogance of just authority, and the panoply and splendour to which he was entitled, but with a humble "may I?" to Our Lady, and an apology to Saint Joseph for borrowing the family home, to arrive as a little child, vulnerable and at our disposal, kneeling before us and wanting to share our load. Wanting to wash the dust from our feet.
Contrast that with our attitudes and values. Simon Peter says it all for us: "Lord, you washing my feet? Never! I won't have it!" What can be more humiliating than love washing our feet? How obstinately we cling to our self-respect; we set such store by the service we render to God, by the favours that we think we do him, and we really think that we are quite nice, decent people, hardly pensioners on divine grace and sinners entirely undeserving of his patient and pardoning love. It is plain enough what Jesus means: "He who has bathed", he says, "does not need to bathe again - only his feet need to be washed." Those who have bathed are those who have been baptised, and those who need to wash their feet are those of us who need Absolution to restore that pristine cleanness given us in our baptism.
It is only when we realise what devious, self-centred, proud, insincere, untrustworthy disciples we are, ready to run away when the going gets rough, to clear off when we disagree with Our Lord, that we allow him to serve us in washing, in cleansing our motives, our ambitions and our actions. To put it simply, we need to recognise that we are sinners before God can do anything with us or through us.
Here he takes the waters of the Jordan, flowing through the desert, and gently washes away the dust and the dirt and brings to right the alienation of all those things that make up the lives that we have brought to this table.
Coming to this table we become one with each other and one with Christ. We are fellow pilgrims, we share in his suffering, in his dying, and in his rising.
The climax of Holy Week is in the celebration of Easter within us and among us - no not a celebration out there - no not a celebration of a past event of long ago - but a celebration of Easter within us and among us.
A celebration that began within us in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation. For those of us who are already sacramentally one with the Lord, it includes the renewal, the re-appropriation, of our Baptism and Confirmation, by Penitence and Absolution so that we may grow ever closer to Jesus.
One with him in forgiving and being forgiven, one with him in his spirit of love, in his ministry of healing, in his perpetual prayer, in his self-offering and in his sufferings. And one with him in his victory and in his glory.
Jesus, come, my feet are dirty. You have become a servant for my sake, so fill the basin with water; come wash my feet.
Then having washed me he feeds me. Gives me strength to continue my pilgrimage anew.
Tonight at supper with his friends Our Lord anticipates the events of tomorrow. The Last Supper is also an anticipation of the Cross. Before he is passively handed over to his violent death, Jesus actively hands himself over as food to his disciples. He pre-empts the shedding of his blood, controlling circumstances to the end, his flesh is 'given' and his blood is 'shed' while still at table with those he loves. He disposes of himself, in advance of being disposed-of on Calvary.
Here, tonight, at supper is disclosed the divine and eternal giving and readiness to be given. For the One who, as man, "immortal food supplying, gives himself with his own hand" is the Incarnate Son given, out of love for the world, by God the Father.
Our supper is not a mere symbol, a kind of acted parable to show the spirit in which Jesus is to suffer. It is an act by which the interior attitude, revealed in the washing of feet, comes to its logical conclusion in self sacrifice, in self giving, in giving and shedding, in passion and death.
Our Lord hands over his sacrifice at tonight's supper to his disciples, to us, in order that we may perform it in imitation and as memorial. "Copy what I have done" he says after he washes our feet. "Do this in memory of me" he says, after he gives his flesh and sheds his blood. Both commandments are one and the same. Ultimately the preparedness to wash feet means a preparedness to die. "No greater love has a man than to lay down his life for his friend".
The washing of the feet had an unsuspected depth of meaning. When inspired by love, the least service rendered to one's neighbour takes on an extraordinary dimension; it foreshadows that total sacrifice for which everyone should be prepared; that full communion towards which we should all be moving. But we can only do this by accepting the Servant Christ and following him - even to Calvary. And, with our eyes finally opened to the needs of those around us, shall we be moved to become like Jesus, people who see and act. People who wash feet, give flesh, and shed blood.
Not our sacrifice but his and yet it is ours, for those who love each other become one - as we live in him and he in us. So much 'one' that our hands become his hands and our heart becomes his heart. To the extent that the memorial is no mere remembering but a present reality, and Christ is made truly present in both the washing of feet, the act of charity and love, and in bread and wine.
He gives his sacrifice to us so that we may have something to offer to God. Yes, the Mass is a Sacrifice: it is Christ's sacrifice which he places into the hands of the Church, into our hands, so that we in turn have something to offer the Father: the only thing of value, the sacrifice of Christ.
