Holy Thursday - Dom Peter
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ! We gather tonight to begin our annual observance of the Triduum: the three holy days. This period of three days has for us a mystical signification. I won’t quote you all the places in the bible where three days are mentioned, merely point out the obvious one.
Jesus has told the Pharisees and us that just as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. However, if we go strictly by the chronology of the gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday afternoon and rises during the night on Saturday, staying one full night in the grave.
I was delighted to discover that St. Gregory of Nyssa pondered this same problem. His solution is ingenious, in that quirky Patristic way that not everyone finds convincing. He makes two interesting leaps. The second is to say that, since God calls the darkness ‘night’, then the darkness that overshadows the earth as Jesus hangs on the cross introduces an extra night into the sequence of events.
Even if you take this as proven, you might be asking, ‘but wasn’t Jesus still alive at this time? And doesn’t that still make only two nights?' Your questions would be answered by Gregory’s first leap of logic: this darkness over the earth on Good Friday was only the second night during which the Son of Man was in the heart of the earth. That is because, even though Jesus’ physical death takes place on the cross, the spiritual significance of that death is illuminated, indeed, is enacted on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper. Let us understand that we are in the presence of mystery here, where time and space cease to work in their customary manner. As of Thursday night, when Jesus says, “This is my body which is for you,” He has already offered Himself and taken away our sins. The Crucifixion will demonstrate the radical price of this self-offering and of our salvation, but the Jesus’ death was inevitable, indeed was already initiated, this night.
Whether you buy Gregory’s reasoning, his underlying theological insight is of utmost significance. The meal in which we partake this night is the sacrificial banquet of the one true lamb whose blood removes our sins. We cannot share His Body and Blood if it is not broken and poured out upon the Cross. Conversely, Jesus’ death on the Cross is meaningless if it is not His self-offering in sacrifice for our sins. The Cross spreads a banqueting table for us, and the table is revealed as the altar of the Cross. Both of these realities, of course, depend further upon the Resurrection, but that is to anticipate.
Jesus sheds further meaning on His impending death and the offering He makes to the Father in the demeaning action of the washing of feet.
We often take Peter’s aversion to Christ’s offer to wash his feet as a protest on behalf of Christ’s dignity. This it may be, but I would like to close with a suggestion or two about how each of us is like Peter, that we don’t really want our feet washed, and that each of us would rather not follow Jesus’ example of service when it is presented this way. I say that we don’t really want these things, but this is an exaggeration: at the deepest level of our being, we do desire salvation and communion with God and one another, so I will tell you some of the ways we forget that this is the truth about ourselves.
Around the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Romano Guardini wrote the following about the liturgy, the high point of which we celebrate in these three days:
“[It] is a steady light, constantly burning; a gentle flame, continually warming; a force silently at work, moulding and purifying. As such it needs the peace and freedom to develop, unhampered by aims and motives.”
“Unhampered by aims and motives…” I can’t say that we approach liturgy that way so often today. Is this because we don’t approach much in life that way?
Peter and the others surely had their aims and motives, what we might today call an ‘agenda’. It included Jesus ushering in the Kingdom of God with spectacular signs and wonders, fire raining down upon the Gentiles and (not to be forgotten!) themselves sitting at His left and right. Peter is repeatedly scandalized by Jesus’ predictions of His passion, of which this sign is paramount. In a sense, Peter’s refusal is John’s version of Peter’s attempt to persuade Jesus that the Son of Man need not die.
However, Peter is who he is because he is able to sign on again when he needs to. Unlike Judas, he does not despair, but just as quickly asks for cleansing of the head as well.
But how often do we insist that God’s plans for us go according to our aims and motives, to our agenda? Do we really want to admit that we need Jesus to cleanse us and that to be cleansed we must witness His abasement? Surely there must be an easier, more antiseptic manner to the goal of redemption, and surely it need not suppress our own ideas, especially the ones that seem especially good to us. You will never wash my feet, Lord! Not if it means giving up…[fill in the blank here].
It gets worse when Jesus commands us to go and do the same, to wash one another’s feet. Simply serving others is a task many of us will sign on for. But Jesus is asking something more profound. If Gregory of Nyssa is right to say that this night represents Jesus’ passion and death, and that His version of ‘service’ means suffering for the forgiveness of others, we might balk. If so, this exposes in us an unwillingness to recognize Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, as well as an inability to recognize in ourselves a desire for control, which service can often mean. This is another reason that we refuse others’ service of us: we don’t want their help. I can do it just fine, thank you. And as far as serving others: I will accept as long as it doesn’t hurt too much, that I get good feelings out of helping someone. If it means suffering at their hands, well…
If you recognize a part of yourself in this, as I do in myself, we must ask, what can we do? Here is where the liturgy returns to help us out, as does Fr. Guardini’s analysis of the liturgy. Let me offer a similar quote from a wildly different context as a possibility. In a poem called “En sourdine” Paul Verlaine writes:
“de ton Coeur endormi
Chasse à jamais tout dessein,
Laissons-nous persuader
From your weary heart, drive away forever every plan. Let us rather surrender.
Prescinding from the irony in Verlaine’s poetry, let us recognize that this is a love poem. Love, at least ‘falling in love’ tends to distort time, to dismantle our reserve, to reorient our preferences and relativize our concerns. Can we separate ourselves from our mundane concerns, our individuating preferences, our defense mechanisms and our drive for accomplishment for three short days and allow ourselves to be courted by God? If we can, think of how our faith and our very lives will be different.
Let us then surrender to Christ in the liturgy once again this year, and allow ourselves to be swept up in the embrace of one who loved us enough to suffer ultimately to win our eternal friendship in heaven, let us mourn with tears the death of one so just and so good; let us rejoice with abandon at the astounding triumph of the Lamb of God and His unhoped for offer of a share in God’s own life. “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well!” May you be praised, Lord Jesus Christ our Savior!
Jesus has told the Pharisees and us that just as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. However, if we go strictly by the chronology of the gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday afternoon and rises during the night on Saturday, staying one full night in the grave.
I was delighted to discover that St. Gregory of Nyssa pondered this same problem. His solution is ingenious, in that quirky Patristic way that not everyone finds convincing. He makes two interesting leaps. The second is to say that, since God calls the darkness ‘night’, then the darkness that overshadows the earth as Jesus hangs on the cross introduces an extra night into the sequence of events.
Even if you take this as proven, you might be asking, ‘but wasn’t Jesus still alive at this time? And doesn’t that still make only two nights?' Your questions would be answered by Gregory’s first leap of logic: this darkness over the earth on Good Friday was only the second night during which the Son of Man was in the heart of the earth. That is because, even though Jesus’ physical death takes place on the cross, the spiritual significance of that death is illuminated, indeed, is enacted on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper. Let us understand that we are in the presence of mystery here, where time and space cease to work in their customary manner. As of Thursday night, when Jesus says, “This is my body which is for you,” He has already offered Himself and taken away our sins. The Crucifixion will demonstrate the radical price of this self-offering and of our salvation, but the Jesus’ death was inevitable, indeed was already initiated, this night.
Whether you buy Gregory’s reasoning, his underlying theological insight is of utmost significance. The meal in which we partake this night is the sacrificial banquet of the one true lamb whose blood removes our sins. We cannot share His Body and Blood if it is not broken and poured out upon the Cross. Conversely, Jesus’ death on the Cross is meaningless if it is not His self-offering in sacrifice for our sins. The Cross spreads a banqueting table for us, and the table is revealed as the altar of the Cross. Both of these realities, of course, depend further upon the Resurrection, but that is to anticipate.
Jesus sheds further meaning on His impending death and the offering He makes to the Father in the demeaning action of the washing of feet.
We often take Peter’s aversion to Christ’s offer to wash his feet as a protest on behalf of Christ’s dignity. This it may be, but I would like to close with a suggestion or two about how each of us is like Peter, that we don’t really want our feet washed, and that each of us would rather not follow Jesus’ example of service when it is presented this way. I say that we don’t really want these things, but this is an exaggeration: at the deepest level of our being, we do desire salvation and communion with God and one another, so I will tell you some of the ways we forget that this is the truth about ourselves.
Around the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Romano Guardini wrote the following about the liturgy, the high point of which we celebrate in these three days:
“[It] is a steady light, constantly burning; a gentle flame, continually warming; a force silently at work, moulding and purifying. As such it needs the peace and freedom to develop, unhampered by aims and motives.”
“Unhampered by aims and motives…” I can’t say that we approach liturgy that way so often today. Is this because we don’t approach much in life that way?
Peter and the others surely had their aims and motives, what we might today call an ‘agenda’. It included Jesus ushering in the Kingdom of God with spectacular signs and wonders, fire raining down upon the Gentiles and (not to be forgotten!) themselves sitting at His left and right. Peter is repeatedly scandalized by Jesus’ predictions of His passion, of which this sign is paramount. In a sense, Peter’s refusal is John’s version of Peter’s attempt to persuade Jesus that the Son of Man need not die.
However, Peter is who he is because he is able to sign on again when he needs to. Unlike Judas, he does not despair, but just as quickly asks for cleansing of the head as well.
But how often do we insist that God’s plans for us go according to our aims and motives, to our agenda? Do we really want to admit that we need Jesus to cleanse us and that to be cleansed we must witness His abasement? Surely there must be an easier, more antiseptic manner to the goal of redemption, and surely it need not suppress our own ideas, especially the ones that seem especially good to us. You will never wash my feet, Lord! Not if it means giving up…[fill in the blank here].
It gets worse when Jesus commands us to go and do the same, to wash one another’s feet. Simply serving others is a task many of us will sign on for. But Jesus is asking something more profound. If Gregory of Nyssa is right to say that this night represents Jesus’ passion and death, and that His version of ‘service’ means suffering for the forgiveness of others, we might balk. If so, this exposes in us an unwillingness to recognize Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, as well as an inability to recognize in ourselves a desire for control, which service can often mean. This is another reason that we refuse others’ service of us: we don’t want their help. I can do it just fine, thank you. And as far as serving others: I will accept as long as it doesn’t hurt too much, that I get good feelings out of helping someone. If it means suffering at their hands, well…
If you recognize a part of yourself in this, as I do in myself, we must ask, what can we do? Here is where the liturgy returns to help us out, as does Fr. Guardini’s analysis of the liturgy. Let me offer a similar quote from a wildly different context as a possibility. In a poem called “En sourdine” Paul Verlaine writes:
“de ton Coeur endormi
Chasse à jamais tout dessein,
Laissons-nous persuader
From your weary heart, drive away forever every plan. Let us rather surrender.
Prescinding from the irony in Verlaine’s poetry, let us recognize that this is a love poem. Love, at least ‘falling in love’ tends to distort time, to dismantle our reserve, to reorient our preferences and relativize our concerns. Can we separate ourselves from our mundane concerns, our individuating preferences, our defense mechanisms and our drive for accomplishment for three short days and allow ourselves to be courted by God? If we can, think of how our faith and our very lives will be different.
Let us then surrender to Christ in the liturgy once again this year, and allow ourselves to be swept up in the embrace of one who loved us enough to suffer ultimately to win our eternal friendship in heaven, let us mourn with tears the death of one so just and so good; let us rejoice with abandon at the astounding triumph of the Lamb of God and His unhoped for offer of a share in God’s own life. “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well!” May you be praised, Lord Jesus Christ our Savior!
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 11:24 PM
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