Holy Thursday - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2012

It was Passover. Even in Jesus' day, Passover was an ancient observance – the night when the Hebrew People celebrated freedom. They had long memories: Twelve hundred years beforehand, they had been an enslaved people – until, on the first Passover Night, God set them free from their oppressors. God was [sort of] proud of that achievement. The first of the commandments has God saying: I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the House of slavery. God rejoices in being a liberating God.

It was to free us, the whole of humanity, that God sent his Son to us. Jesus' mission was a liberating mission. He came to set us free from our addictions and compulsions, and the radical insecurity from which they stem. He came to set us free from the hostilities and violence that cripple us and constantly spoil our happiness. True to form, acting out of our endemic violence, we murdered Jesus. But not before he had time to become [for those who would take notice] the way, the truth, and the life.

On that last night of his life, on our Feast of Passover-par-excellence, he told us how he wanted us to remember him – not for his sake, but for ours. He would love us to relate to what he came for – to become free, free within ourselves, and free, too, eventually, from the all-too-common actions of others that inhibit our freedoms. He would love us to prioritise our search for freedom. So he suggested two things to keep us focussed – two things that he did himself. 

Firstly, as we heard in tonight's Gospel, he suggested that we wash each other's feet – metaphorically. The way to freedom is to wash each other's feet! That means to let go of our own puffed-up sense of over-importance. None of us is the centre of the world. We don't need to be – God already loves us. That's enough. Look at  all the energy we would save, all the hurt we would avoid, if we no longer needed to be the centre of the world. Washing each other's feet is to choose to take care of others, to respect them, to meet their needs. Perhaps, it means to die to self, surprisingly to find our self.  The way to freedom – learn to love.

He also suggested, as we heard in tonight's Second Reading, that we remember him by having a meal together. And, in that meal,  to take a loaf of bread, to break it, and together to eat that broken bread, and then to wash it down with a drink of wine. Wonderfully, in this meal, the bread broken is his body broken for us, his body freely given for us; and the cup of wine is the wine of the New Covenant between God and us, where the wine is his blood poured out for us on the cross. Following his lead, he wants us to be ready to allow loving to break us, sometimes.

The way to freedom – surrender to love, whatever the cost. The message is amazingly simple. It is clear. But it's a struggle. Perhaps, first, we have to let him wash our feet. It seems to be the condition for our having any part/share with him. We have first  to let him be broken for us, to pour out his blood for us. Until we first let him love us that much, we lack the wherewithal to follow his way. 

Tonight … let him love you.