April 17, 2025
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Eucharist, Family, Guest Celebrants, Lent, Trust
Holy Thursday – Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper
April 17, 2025 — Year C
Readings: Ex 12:1-8, 11-14 / Ps 116 / 1 Cor 11:23-26 / Jn 13:1-15
by Rev. Jay Biber, Guest Celebrant
In your own families I’m sure you have a calendar of your own, just for your family. It’s not a big calendar of New Year’s Day or Memorial Day, or the Fourth of July, like the great national calendar. It’s the calendar of your family: the calendar of the birthdays, the wedding days, or maybe the time you first met and where you first met. It’s the calendar of those big dates and maybe some sad dates, too: a car accident, or a death in the family, and those things that mark the calendars down through the years.
I love to think of this Holy Week as our calendar. It’s not a particularly special day for the country or the world, but it’s our calendar. It is here that we count our time, and obviously, a lot of the people you know don’t recognize this timing. Why, in the middle of all this on a Thursday, all of a sudden, you’re counting time, you’re marking time, differently? Maybe that’s where we got that expression, “She marches to a different drummer.”
We have a rhythm. Our whole creation has a rhythm to it the way we understand it. It’s not just building material that we can rearrange the way we like. It comes with a pattern; it comes with a shape to it. Even in science, for example, there is a pattern. The Vatican astronomer spoke up in Lexington this year. He said, “Science is meant to lead to worship.” We see the patterns of God, and we want to begin to know who is the One behind these patterns? Who is the One behind these forms? And so, we measure things a little bit differently.
With this Holy Thursday feast today, especially this year, I was struck because it coincides exactly with the Jewish Passover feast. It coincides this year, but not every year, because of the course of history. We’ve asked, “How are we going to measure?” Maybe by the first day of spring, because that’s the way the sun works. Or is it the lunar cycles, the cycles of the moon? There are different ways to measure, and that’s why you have an Orthodox Easter and a Catholic Easter. The Eastern and Western Churches calculated differently, but what they had in common, together with the Jewish people, is that all this creation of God and all this history is all connected. It’s somehow all connected.
When we say, “in those years since the time of Christ,” we say “AD.” If you know your Latin, that means anno Domini, in the year of the Lord. That way, we’re counting time with Christ at the center point of history, with the incarnation of Christ at the very center point of the cosmos and of all human history. He’s at the center. That’s how we count.
Sometimes when people don’t understand what’s going on at the Mass, I’ll say, “Well, you know, it’s okay.” The Mass is not something that started in America, nor is it something that came over from Europe. It comes from the Middle East. What we do always comes from the Middle East. Those are the origins of our faith, the patterns.
This year, the whole Passover Week is exactly the same as Holy Week. It began as did our Holy Week, as is the Jewish custom. A lot of our roots are taken from our great Jewish ancestors. There are a lot of the roots of this faith. And so, the pattern for this Holy Week begins when? Sunset, Saturday night, last Saturday night. Because in the Jewish reckoning, the day always begins at sunset the night before. That’s when you start counting it. So, what we call the Vigil Mass is really a Sunday Mass, but it’s done in vigil, the night before. That’s when Passover begins.
Holy Week finishes on Easter Sunday at sunset. That means that the week is right smack on top of the feast of Passover. It suggests to us, especially in the celebration of Holy Thursday, the many gifts that accompany these celebrations. Think of the great gifts of today: the first First Holy Communion. Some have said the first Mass – I suppose you could, but it was definitely the first First Holy Communion for all the Apostles. This was the beginning of the Eucharist that is to accompany us, the manna from heaven, built on the Jewish patterns. And now, we have not the manna that came down during the night, nor the quail that they were able to kill to eat, but the Body and Blood of Christ.
So tonight, we commemorate the gift of the Eucharist, the institution of the Eucharist. We commemorate the institution of the New Testament priesthood, not the Aaronic priesthood of offering sacrifices, but the New Testament priesthood. When did that happen? Well, you’re going to hear it at Mass tonight, when He says, “Do this in memory of Me.” It’s that simple. It wasn’t like a Super Bowl half-time show. In all simplicity, the greatest gift to the Apostles around was: “Do this (what we do tonight) in memory of Me.”
So, think about what went before you. I think, especially when I’m among Catholics, that every single one of you came from immigrant stock. There wasn’t one of us who didn’t, if you check back in your family. Maybe you remember the stories. I’m old enough. I guess I got the fresh stories of the trip over: steerage in the boat, the anti-Catholic prejudice. I got all the stories. Maybe you got some of them. But that’s part of your depth, because those people came with a faith. When you think of all those in our own families who came over, they didn’t know what they were getting into.
Like a lot of life, if you really knew what you were getting into, you’d beg off. We’d say, “I don’t think so. I’m afraid.” But we got into it and flourished. We follow the Jewish pattern. So, what happened that first Passover? First of all, we hear the command. Egypt is the slave-owner. The people of Israel are in Egypt. They were in Egypt and were enslaved, and they were just pushed harder and harder. They’re pushed to their breaking point. It’s Moses whom God chooses to lead them out. And he gives them their order for Passover.
First of all, Passover is meant to be commemorated in the family or in the local community. By Jesus’ time, when they were celebrating Passover, there was a rule: you couldn’t leave Jerusalem. The whole family had to come to Jerusalem. The whole family had to get together. This is a family feast. The whole family had to get together because that’s where you get your strength. And there you heard the orders: to sacrifice the lamb, to eat the meal, a convivial meal. The rule was that you couldn’t leave Jerusalem, because they said, on this one night, everybody’s got to be there, because it’s so important to keep that tradition. Otherwise, we risk just falling apart, if we don’t remember.
Of course, then, the eating of the Passover lamb is a foreshadowing of Christ who will become the lamb of the Passover. The understanding is that what was begun in the Passover is continued in the pattern. First of all, the Church is still a pilgrim people. Israel had a promised land to look forward to. We have a different promised land, for which we depend on the manna from heaven, and we still know that we are nomadic. We’re nomadic people in the sense still that there is no lasting city, that we can’t count on making this earth perfect. Pope Benedict said, “If we try to think this world is supposed to be perfected, we’ll make Hell out of it.” Our lives are carried out in moments of great beauty and in moments of great darkness and sadness, where each generation, and the Church in each generation, has its own challenges on the way, always on the way, looking forward to the final resolution.
And so, we get to take nourishment from, not the manna that came down from heaven, but the Body and Blood of Christ. On the journey, we always need to be grateful, as God taught Israel to be, for the beautiful things given it. We must also keep faith through the sad times as well, keeping faith through tough times because Israel’s been through them, and the Church has been through them. There’s no generation that hasn’t, and that’s a way, I think, to interpret our own lives.
In our lives, there come times of great fullness, when you can’t imagine it being any other way and equal times of emptiness, when you can’t imagine it being any other way. Yet somehow, in every generation, we turn ourselves over finally to God. We surrender to this manna from heaven. So, every generation is able to give its own witness that God did provide.
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