Maundy Thursday—2001     

Homily

Tonight in this liturgy we celebrate the institution of the very sacrament we are celebrating—the Eucharist. We commemorate the night when Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples. On this holy night we re-enact the washing of the feet as related to us in the Gospel of John.

Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe and the Lord of all, gets down on his knees and in an act of love bathes the feet of his disciples. It was a most extraordinary event that washing of feet but no more extraordinary than the fact that Jesus came down from heaven and too on human form and allowed himself to be sacrificed for our salvation.

At the Last Supper Jesus kneeled down no lower than he did when he entered this world as a tiny babe on the first Christmas Day. Jesus performed no act of greater love and service than when he allowed himself to be taken by rough men and died for us on the Cross.

Bathing the feet of his disciples was an act of reversal—really it should have been the disciples who bathed the feet of Jesus not him their feet. But entirely reversing the order of things is precisely what Jesus is about.

Coming down from heaven, climbing the hill of Calvary—these are even more unexpected and extraordinary events.

Tonight in imitation of Our Lord we wash the feet of our candidates for Confirmation. We chose them for this task very deliberately because they are seeking to follow Jesus. By asking to be admitted to the Sacrament of Confirmation they are asking to be disciples of Christ and full members of his Church on earth.

Jesus did not drag in people from the highways and byways to wash their feet. No, he washed the feet of his companions, his disciples, the twelve apostles. He did so to stress the special bond between them and to show them in a very concrete way how he wanted them to live.

If it was not beneath his dignity to wash their feet then it could hardly be beneath the dignity of the apostles to do the same for others.

This ministry of service to one another, symbolised in the bathing of feet, is at the heart of the Christian life. To be a Christian is to be prepared to kneel down and perform the lowliest of tasks for another. It is to be a servant for the sake of Jesus.

I was reminded of the story of the very attractive young nun working in a leper colony in the tropical heat of West Africa. A journalist was visiting the leprosarium and stood there amazed watching the young nun bathing the wounds of a victim of leprosy. ‘I wouldn’t do that for a $10,000,’ said the journalist. ‘Neither would I,’ said the nun, ‘I do it for love.’

We do not serve our brothers and sisters simply because we are told to do so by Jesus, we don’t do it because it might help us to get to heaven. We do it for love; we do it in response to the love shown to us by our Divine Saviour.

Tonight we focus our attention on the Eucharist, on this great sacrament of love. That is precisely what it is, the mass, a sacrament of love. A sacrament that cannot be contained by these four walls—just as love between two people overflows into love for their children, wider family and friends.

And we celebrate the Eucharist very frequently in our Church precisely because of Christ’s specific command: Do this in memory of me. He only said those words once, but he said them in a very special context—during the solemn meal the night before he died.

His words, Do this in memory of me, encapsulate a very great deal. They mean celebrate this holy meal; they mean wash one another’s feet; they mean love one another; they mean give your lives in the pursuit of truth; they mean be prepared to follow Jesus on the Way of the Cross.

They mean so very many things and yet they mean only one thing, to live the same kind of life that Jesus lived. That is our whole aim and purpose of our lives—we who have professed the Christian faith within the Catholic Church.

And we are overjoyed that young and not so young people each year seek to make public profession of this same faith—faith in Jesus as the only one who can save us.

Let us therefore live our lives in memory of him. Let us make every act, every thought, every word, every breath in memory of him and worthy of him the one true Lord and Saviour of us all. Amen.