Holy Thursday
Today is Holy Thursday. This evening Lent will be over. Today begins the Triduum. Today is an important day for us and the Priests. This is where the Eucharist and the Priesthood come from. Today begins a Mass that begins and does not end until the end of Saturday’s Easter Vigil. Today there are so many things that we have been building up to since Sunday.
Holy Thursday is the night where the Eucharist and the Priesthood are initiated. Jesus breaks bread with the Apostles and tells them to take and eat and take drink for it is His body and blood. When he does this, he is preparing the final covenant for you and me. Jesus knows that his time has come, and through the Eucharistic covenant he is able to enter into the final bond with God and die for our sins. Before he broke bread with the Apostles, Jesus went to each man and washed his feet. This is the initiation of the Priesthood. Jesus humbled himself to his Apostles and taught them how to humble themselves to the people they will be serving. Typically you will see 12 members of the parish selected to have their feet wash by the Priests and Deacons. I think it is a beautiful thing that St. Austin and the UCC invite everyone up to have their feet/foot washed. It humbles yourself to the person washing your foot, and it humbles the person washing the feet.
I know we are missing both of these amazing parts of our night tonight. I know it is hard to be sitting at home watching online rather than experiencing these for yourself. I am sad too. But once again we are all in this together. We are all at home living the sorrow that Jesus knew was coming. As he washed each Apostle's foot, getting to Judas and Peter knowing that both of them would either betray him or forget who he was and yet he still stood at their feet and anointed them and broke bread with them.
Let’s sit with this for a moment. Close your eyes. Jesus is at the table (even if you want to picture the Brady Bunch zoom call Last Supper) his hands outstretched. Breaking the bread, blessing the bread. You are there. You can smell the bread. You can smell the wine. You can hear the breaths of each Apostle. You can sense the fear. No one is able to sit still in their chair or on the floor. And yet there is Jesus calm, peaceful, radiating tranquility and just being one with his Father, God. Breathe in and be still and be with God. We know the ending, there should be no need for us to be anxious. But what do you feel in this moment? What do you smell? What do you hear? Are you feeling anxious?
For me personally, I think this might be the first year I can sit with these feelings and not rush through them. I can be one with Jesus in this agony and I can feel the sorrow and yet calm that he is feeling. While it sounds so off and goes against everything, I am actually enjoying stripping the days down to the basics. While so many things are missing and it truly is sad, it is nice to just sit and reflect why I miss them, and yet I am grateful for what we have. What if we weren’t able to stream the Mass tonight? What if we didn’t have the ability to reflect on this week at home? While times are super tough, things could be a lot worse. Let’s count our blessings. Let’s put ourselves in tandem with Jesus and just be still with him.
Let’s talk about the Priesthood now. The whole Mass is really the institution of the Priesthood. Jesus is doing his final lesson with the Apostles and literally saying ‘Do this in memory of me’ which we hear at every Mass that we go to. Jesus was leading by example, as we do as humans, as parents, as teachers, as friends. Throughout the whole Bible we are hearing about the Priesthood. We hear it in the Old Testament when God is trying so hard to make different covenants with Adam, Moses, Aaron, Noah, David, and so on. He is trying to make a Priest out of many of them and it just doesn’t work, hence the importance of Jesus because he is Priest, Prophet, and King. So, really God is preparing us for the Priesthood all throughout, or to be followers of Him throughout the whole Bible.
Now you might ask was there ever any doctrine that the Catholic Church put in place to make this official? Of course there was. The Council of Trent Section 23 Chapter 1 wrote; “On the institution of the Priesthood of the New Law. Sacrifice and priesthood are, by the ordinance of God, in such wise conjoined, as that both have existed in every law. Whereas, therefore, in the New Testament, the Catholic Church has received, from the institution of Christ, the holy visible sacrifice of the Eucharist; it must needs also be confessed, that there is, in that Church, a new, visible, and external priesthood, into which the old has been translated. And the sacred Scriptures show, and the tradition of the Catholic Church has always taught, that this priesthood was instituted by the same Lord our Saviour, and that to the apostles, and their successors in the priesthood, was the power delivered of consecrating, offering, and administering His Body and Blood, as also of forgiving and of retaining sins.”
So we have the institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, but what about this thing about Mass not really ending at the end of Thursday evening? "Towards the end of the liturgy, the theme bends around again to the Eucharist. A special procession takes place of all the faithful who follow the priest as he carries the consecrated hosts to the Altar of Repose. In some parishes the procession winds up and down all the aisles of the church and even outside into the neighborhood, while songs of praise and worship to God are sung. This reverent procession challenges us to follow Jesus wherever he may lead. When the priest reenters the church, he brings the ciborium—the receptacle that holds the hosts—to the Altar of Repose and places it inside the tabernacle. The faithful are then invited to remain in prayerful adoration in front of our Eucharistic Lord. There is no dismissal (“The mass is ended. Go in peace.”) at the end of this liturgy. As the Paschal Triduum is one great liturgy, there will not be a formal dismissal until the end of Easter Vigil. We are left to worship Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. We watch and pray with the Lord as we remember what immediately happened after the last supper—going to the garden of Gethsemani with his Apostles to pray; his prayer to his Father in heaven that “Thy will be done;” his betrayal by Judas; and his arrest."
At the end of the service, the tabernacle is left opened as this is the night before Jesus dies. Typically you will have all night Adoration that reminds us of the Apostles staying vigilant for Christ to return. The candle is extinguished and the tabernacle or tomb is left empty until Easter Vigil/Easter morning.
Like I said, it is a tough one celebrating in the home. We are missing so much tonight, but let’s look at who we are celebrating with either through zoom or in our house. In your home today you can wash and anoint each other's feet, you can make a feast of unleavened bread, and then once St. Austin Adoration is done, you can flip over to Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Blessed Sacrament in Florida for 24 hour Adoration and Adore Jesus with thousands of other people.
Tomorrow is Good Friday. We will celebrate the Stations of the Cross at Noon on Facebook, and Veneration of the Cross at 3pm. Make sure that you find (or even better make!) a plain cross without the crucifix to venerate home. Don’t forget it is a day of fasting, we have two small meals and one big meal.