Here tonight we celebrate the Solemn Mass of
the Lord’s Supper. All masses are commemorations of the Last Supper, but this
mass this evening is a special commemoration, a true anniversary—we focus in a
particular way on Jesus in the Upper Room and on all that he did there on that
most holy night before he died.
The Last Supper ought more properly to be
called the First Eucharist because it was the institution of the Eucharist—the
Mass—whose celebration is the hallmark of all true believers in Christ.
On that night Jesus took the bread, blessed
it and said: This is my body which will be given up for you, do this in memory
of me. By this action we believe that the bread changed in a mysterious way
into the Body of Christ. And we further believe that every time we repeat this
action in the celebration of the mass, then the bread and wine are too
transformed into the body and blood of Our Lord.
This is a very high theology of the
Eucharist—and it is not accepted by all Christians. But we Catholics remain
firm in our faith that this bread and this wine through the action of Christ
and his Church do really become for us the Body and Blood of Jesus.
This food for our bodies becomes food for
our souls—this tiny host and this mere sip of wine could never satisfy our
physical hunger but they bring our souls more nourishment than we can possibly
imagine.
We are not literalists or naïve
fundamentalists and we do not see and taste flesh and blood. But we firmly
believe that what has the outward form of bread and wine is transformed by God
into the most intimate union with Christ his Son—it is in its very essence his
true body and blood.
The Eucharist is the deepest communion that
we could possibly experience with the Son of God. And yet we celebrate it here
in church day-in-day-out and it never grows stale, we are never bored—in fact
what grows in us is an ever-greater yearning for complete union with God.
The other significant action of Jesus at the
Last Supper was the washing of the feet of his disciples before the meal proper
took place. In this magnificent gesture we see Jesus showing us how to live out
our daily lives as Christians. We see him kneel before his disciples and bathe
them, performing the work of the lowliest servant and yet making it the
greatest of honours.
This wonderful symbolic act is
all-of-a-piece with Christ’s sharing of his body and blood later in the meal
and his total and complete submission to the will of his Father in the passion
and death on the cross the following day.
And after the meal we go to the garden. We
keep vigil with our suffering Saviour. Or, as is most often the case, like the
disciples we don’t. But, whatever we do, he keeps vigil on the night before his
death and in his humanity suffers deeply from the realisation of what was to
undergo the next day. The hardest, the most awful and yet the most glorious day
of his life and indeed of all our lives.
We rejoice on this Holy Night. We celebrate
the Last Supper of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we glory in the
marvellous wonders he has wrought, we feast in his name, our bounty overflows
and we spontaneously share with the poor, and we unite ourselves with the
powerful mysteries we celebrate. We know that we cannot fully grasp the depth
of these mysteries but their profundity amazes us and inspires us with faith in
the wonderful way that God has chosen to demonstrate his love for the world.
And our prayer is that Christ will soon
bring to full realisation in our lives all that he has promised and that
through our celebration of this Eucharist we will become totally at one with
him. His mandate that we should love one another will become then not an act of
will on our part but our spontaneous reaction to everyone we encounter.
And the Kingdom will be no more a vision and
a hope but it will have become an ever present reality.