Holy Thursday Is Not Just About Remembering Jesus and Feet

Where is the rest of Holy Thursday hiding?

The stark Francis style of Holy Week papal observance is all about deletion and de-emphasis in the name of corporal works of mercy.  Holy Thursday and the Catholic Rites of Our Lord’s Last Supper are mainly about the Blessed Sacrament, the priesthood, and the Mass itself.  But for Pope Francis it’s about service, service, service.

In other words it’s all about the feet.

Go to a jail, not a church, and smell like sheep!  That’s wonderful true, but it’s not Holy Thursday is it?  That’s because it leaves a lot of important Catholic things out, priceless heavenly things that Our Lord gave us.

It’s troubling to find the Catholic media falling in line too.

When I was growing up, like a lot of families, mine had one of those small, cheap Kodak Instamatic cameras. You used those flash bulbs that looked like ice cubes…and got these little square pictures back from the drug store when you had them developed. My dad must have taken hundreds, if not thousands of pictures with that camera. I never appreciated them until years later, after I was grown, and my parents had died, and we were going through their things and we found all these pictures. Boxes of them, curled and faded. But there they were – life, captured by Kodak. Memories you can put in a shoebox.

We need that. We want something of the person we love to outlast them, and stay with us.

We want to remember them.

So photos help us to remember the ones we love.

And remembrance is at the very heart of what we celebrate this evening. But Jesus didn’t leave us photographs in a shoebox. He left us something better.

He left us Himself.

Paul’s letter to the people of Corinth is the earliest account ever written of the Last Supper. It pre-dates, even, the gospels. It is so close to the original event, that its words are part of our Eucharistic prayer, spoken at every mass, at every altar, around the world. The words that created the Eucharist are the beating heart of our Catholic Christian belief.

And through it all, one word leaps out at us.

Remembrance.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Jesus is saying: This is how I want to be remembered.

So, instead of photos, Jesus left us Himself in the Eucharist and he wants us to remember him by the Blessed Sacrament?  Or Perhaps, since Our Lord’s real presence is much more than just a memory, Deacon Kandra is saying that Jesus wanted priests to remember to confect the Holy Eucharist in that way.  The memory is the Mass, not the Sacrament itself.  Either way, there is much more to the Blessed Sacrament and the Holy Mass than remembering Jesus.

Next Deacon Kandra uses the Gospel of John to sort of change the Last Supper into mainly a message of service.

In the gospel, John doesn’t even mention the meal, or the institution of the Eucharist. But he finds something else for us to remember: Christ, the servant.

This of course is no reason to see Holy Thursday primarily in this way.

Deacons feel a special affection for this passage, because it is here that the diaconate, really, is born — in Christ’s extraordinary act of service, the washing of his disciples’ feet. Often, you will see emblems for the diaconate that include the image of a basin and a towel. It refers to this specific passage. And it is a reminder that we are called to serve – to wash one another’s feet, in humility and in love, just as Jesus did.

But is the meaning in Jesus’ act the same for lay people? Isn’t there something in it about bishops, priests, and deacons–something uniquely apostolic?

But it is not just the ordained who are called to this. It is all of Christ’s disciples. All who sit at His table and share in His body and blood.

All of us.

“You ought to wash one another’s feet,” Jesus says. “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

In other words: remember what I have done. And do this, too, in remembrance of me.

So we go from family photos, to the Mass, to the Eucharist, to the Priesthood, down to lay people helping each other; then to cap it off we hear the words of consecration used in a way that could apply to any single act of Christian mercy.

Doesn’t something strike you as odd about that? It reminds me of what Pope Francis warned yesterday, when he claimed:

“If we approach Holy Communion without being sincerely willing to wash one another’s feet, we do not recognize the Body of the Lord?”

Do the Blessed Sacrament, or Mass, or the priesthood have no power or value intrinsic to themselves, or do these things only matter if we wash enough feet?

Is is just all the same this Holy Thursday?