With this Mass, we enter into the Sacred Triduum. These three days constitute our Christian High Holy Days. One detail that seems important to highlight is that at the end of this Mass there is no dismissal. Neither will be a dismissal tomorrow at the end of our Good Friday service. On Good Friday and the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, there are no opening rites.
Why does this matter? It matters because the for next approximately fifty hours we are in liturgy continually. These days are meant to be set apart. They are not days like other days. During the Triduum, we seek to allow ourselves to be drawn more deeply into the Paschal Mystery of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. We fast and abstain to facilitate this.
The first two days of the Triduum have the same dynamic as Passion Sunday. Like Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, tonight is a celebration. Good Friday, like is an even deeper liturgical commemoration of Christ's passion and death. The Great Easter Vigil is the axis around which the rest of the liturgical orbits.
Easter is liturgically different from Christmas in a number of ways. One way is that while the main Mass for Christmas is Mass During the Day on Christmas Day, the main Mass for Easter (and for the entire year) is the Vigil on Holy Saturday. Pulling this thread just a little more, Pentecost, which brings Easter to a close, is the most important observance of the liturgical year after Easter.
The Mass of the Lord's Supper is about the Lord's institution of the Eucharist at his so-called Last Supper. Our Gospel this evening is the institution narrative, so to speak, of Saint John's Gospel. While it features an extensive Last Supper Discourse, which is a theological tour de force, the Fourth Gospel does not have an account of Jesus breaking and blessing bread and then blessing a cup of wine, only him washing his disciples' feet and the commandment that they imitate him in so doing.
In his genre-bending book The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère brings the Fourth Gospel's instiution narrative into clearer focus. Towards the end of he book, Carrère describes a retreat he was invited to attend some years after he ceased practicing as a Christian. During this retreat, he participated in a foot-washing ritual. For the ritual, retreatants were divided into small groups. After a short liturgy of the word featuring our Gospel reading this evening and a reflection on this passage, the retreatants in the groups took turns washing each other's feet.
During the ritual, Carrère wondered why, if "all of the tweleve witnessed- and took part in -such a striking scene" is John's Gospel the only one that hands it on?1 This is a bit like what Samuel Beckett, in his existentialist play Waiting for Godot, does when he has the character Vladimir wonder why the good thief, the one who defends Jesus to the disparaging thief and then asks Jesus to remember him, only appears in the Gospel According to Saint Luke.2
Pointing to the Synoptic accounts of the Last Supper, at the center of which is Jesus blessing the bread and the wine, Carrère thought "that things could have happened differently: that the central sacrament of Christianity could be foot washing and not communion."3 He concluded by writing that this ritual, which we do once a year- even then, it is an optional part of this Mass- "could be what Christians do every day at Mass, and it wouldn't be any more absurd - less so in fact."4 So, indeed, things could've been different.
Jesus Washing Peter's Feet, Ghislane Howard, contemporary
In our reading from Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, which may well be the first book of our uniquely Christian scriptures, collectively called the New Testament, to have been written, answers the question "Why not foot washing." When it comes to the Eucharist, the apostle writes that he was merely handing on what was handed on to him, namely:
that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" 5This brings up something we are focusing on during this time of Eucharistic Revival: Christ's "real presence." As Catholics, we certainly believe that in a mysterious way Christ comes to be present in the consecrated bread and wine.
It should not be surprising to point out that this is not obvious to the casual observer. It is not even obvious to the interested observer. Miracles and bleeding hosts aside, we do not believe, in fact the Church repudiates the idea that the physical substance of the bread and wine are not changed by the words of consecration, as if some kind of magic trick is performed at each Mass.
The phrase "hocus pocus" derives from the Latin words of consecration: hoc est enim corpus meum. Just as Jesus chided the crowds who, after being miraculously fed, followed him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee hoping for more, we do not come to Mass to see a magic show.6
In an intensely empirical age, such as the one in which we live, the question about any claim like the one we make about the Lord's Eucharistic presence, is "Where is the proof?" Well, the only convincing proof that Christ is really present in the bread and wine are the lives of those who partake of it.
Jesus Christ is our Passover. As our reading from Exodus intimates, the Eucharist is the perpetual institution of the memorial feast of the Paschal Mysery of Christ.7 "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes."8 You proclaim the Lord's death by how you live, by how you empty yourself in service to others.
Do you follow the "model" of Jesus and wash the feet of your sisters and brothers? Do you live a life of humble service? Do you reach out to those in need and to those on the margins like Jesus? Are we or are we not by our communion at this altar the verum corpus Christi, the true body of Christ, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his ears, his Sacred Heart in and for the world?
There can be little doubt that Jesus' washing of his disciples' feet and Peter's emphatic request that the Lord wash not only his feet but his "hands and head as well" is a reference to baptism. In a few days' time, at the Easter Vigil, just after the baptism of the Elect, you will have the opportunity to renew your baptismal promises. Contemplating this evening's Gospel seems a good way to prepare for the renewal of your commitment to wash the feet of others.
1 Emmanuel Carrère. The Kingdom. Trans. John Lambert. 381.↩
2 Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. Act I.↩
3 Emmanuel Carrère. The Kingdom. Trans. John Lambert. 381.↩
4 Ibid.↩
5 1 Corinthians 11:23b-25.↩
6 See John 6:22-27.↩
7 Exodus 12:14.↩
8 1 Corinthians 11:26.↩
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