Homily for Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday  

April 2020

We are now beginning the longest liturgy of the year under extraordinary circumstances, indeed under circumstances that are unprecedented in our lifetimes and, one hopes, never to recur.  Mass began in the usual way with the sign of the cross.  That sign of our salvation will not be made in a liturgical setting again until the conclusion of the Easter Vigil Mass some fifty hours from now, a vigil that will also be celebrated under constrained circumstances. However, despite the ability of most of us to attend Mass and the other liturgies in person, the next three days will comprise one uninterrupted liturgy of prayer and contemplation even as we go about our usual daily tasks in quarantine.   

The first reading described the Passover meal that marked the beginning of the Exodus.  Last evening, April 8, Jews throughout the world began their recollection and reenactment of this event at their seder tables.  Part of the seder ritual includes the plaintive question, "Why is this night different from all other nights?"  We can ask the same question.  "Why is this night different from all other nights?" 

Tonight is different from all other nights because we commemorate the institution of the great gift of the Eucharist, the True Body and Blood of Christ, present to us in the sacrament of the altar, present to us who choose and wish to partake. 

Tonight is different from all other nights because it is a night of confused wonder that began with the joy of the Gloria but will end in silence as the altar is stripped.  This three-day liturgy that recalls our redemption from sin and death calls us to prayer and to contemplation of the great truths that mark our faith.  Over the next fifty hours we will hear the proclamation of the Passion on Good Friday and the detailed recounting of our history as a people and as Church in the readings of the vigil Mass.  More critically, however, and indeed, something that we can do in quarantine or out, over the next hours we are called to listen to the silence and to enter into that silence. 

On this night, a night unlike any other in history, not the history of the transient world on which we live but the universe created by God, consider the words of Robert Cardinal Sarah from his book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise.

We "encounter God in truth only in silence and solitude" a silence and solitude that is  both interior and exterior.  That silence and solitude is found in the monastic cell or in our own rooms, it is the silence and solitude of the grandparent contemplating a sleeping grandchild or the recently widowed visiting the grave.  It is the silence of Eucharistic adoration and the silence of sitting in a chair looking out the window.  It is a silence that is less dependent on place and setting than it is on our internal dispositions.  

Cardinal Sarah elaborates, "Silence is not an absence.  On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences."

Remain with and in that presence over these next three days.

______________________________________________________

Will post homilies for each day from Thursday to Easter Sunday. The photo is from Mass in a monastery where I was asked to photograph the liturgy.

+Fr Jack, SJ, MD