Holy Thursday - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

Consistently throughout his gospel John reminds us that the purpose of his writing is, as he explicitly spelt out at the end of his gospel, so that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this, we might have life through his name. But John faced a problem with Jesus’ passion and death.   How on earth does his death help us to see Jesus as Son of God?

John adopted two solutions: irstly: in the way he fashioned his account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion, he creatively and very deliberately showed us a Jesus in control – as an old latin hymn Vexilla Regis put it, Regnavit a ligno Deus: God reigned from the cross. 

John’s second approach was to insist that Jesus was not a helpless victim, even if willingly accepting his death as the will of the Father. Rather he insisted that Jesus freely chose death himself, out of integrity and love. He set out to illustrate this, symbolically, by his account of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

What was normally a menial task more appropriately done by a slave - washing people’s feet - for Jesus was a free act of loving service. Jesus saw it as symbolic of his fast-approaching death that would likewise, and pre-eminently, be a free act of loving service. It was because it symbolised his death that Jesus said to Peter that Peter could have no part with him if he refused to be washed clean. If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me; and why he could then add: No one who has taken a bath needs washing, he is clean all over. It would be by his death in fact that Peter, and the whole group of disciples, indeed the whole of humanity, would be really washed clean lovingly.

Jesus holds out to us the possibility of the same behaviour: to be carried out in the ordinary course of our day – to choose loving service of others freely, not as victims,  even when, if we are true to our deepest self, we may sometimes have little alternative. He holds out the possibility to do so without resentment or a feeling of being trapped, whether by God or by our own sense of decency.

That same message the other gospels conveyed through their story of the Eucharist: this bread is my body given up for you: this broken bread is my body broken for love of you; this  bread is my body broken so that you can share it together. Jesus went on to add: Do this in memory of me. To remember me, do precisely this: carry out the ritual so that you won’t forget, but more importantly, move beyond ritual to give your bodies, your energies, in loving service, broken perhaps in love, not as trapped victims of circumstances, resentfully, but in freedom.

And do it together, not as isolated individuals at some kind of ecclesiastical McDonald’s, but in the friendship symbolised by the sacred meal shared in common.