At the Lord's Supper

This day we popularly call Holy Thursday uniquely straddles the border between Lent and Easter. Already in the 4^th century, Pope St. Sylvester I is supposed to have said: “On this day the sacrifice of the sacred Body and Blood of the Lord was initiated as a celebration by the Lord himself. On this day the holy chrism is consecrated throughout the world; on this day too pardon is granted to penitents, those at enmity are reconciled, those who are aggrieved are pacified.”

These three themes have historically characterized this day – with different emphases at different times. In the ancient Roman titular churches, the reconciliation of those doing public penance took place at an end-of-Lent morning Mass, while the institution of the Lord’s Supper was recalled at another Mass in the late afternoon. In between, the priests from all the titular churches assembled for a single mid-day Mass at the Lateran Basilica at which the Pope consecrated the sacred chrism and blessed the other holy oils.

The elaborate ancient ritual for the Reconciliation of Public Penitents continued to be printed in the liturgical books up until the 1960s, even though it hadn’t been used in that form for over 1000 years. The blessing of the oils has continued uninterrupted to this very day, although the special Mass for that was only revived in the 1950s, at the same time that the Mass of the Lord’s Supper was moved to its present evening hour.

Yet, while all these ceremonies have evolved and been changed over time, those three basic elements so long connected with this day remain still very much at the heart of our Easter experience – this year and every year – and they all come together in the Eucharist we celebrate at this altar. For tonight, we don’t just remember the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, as some interesting thing that happened in a faraway place a long time ago. Rather we remember and celebrate the how Jesus’ special Last Supper continues now in his Church as the Lord’s Supper.

St. Paul’s letters are among the oldest New Testament writings, and so his 1^st letter to the Corinthians, from which we just heard, was the earliest written account of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples on the day before the Passover holiday. It’s safe to suggest that none of those disciples, as they sat down to supper, suspected that by the time Passover began, some 24 hours later, Jesus would be dead, and buried in a stranger’s tomb, and that they would all be in hiding. Certainly, none of them yet realized how this otherwise ordinary meal would be dramatically transformed by Jesus’ own words and actions into the Church’s central sacrament - as, offering his body and blood to his Father, Jesus would give them to his Apostles to eat and drink, and then direct them and their successors in the priesthood to offer them in turn.

The New Testament tells us how, from the very beginning, Christian communities devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and prayers [Acts 2:42]. As the Church grew in size and expanded in influence, the Church’s worship, centered on the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper as Christ’s priestly sacrifice of reconciliation, would in time transform first the Roman empire and then the ever wider world – as it must still continue to transform each and every one of us, caught up in the priestly embrace of Christ’s reconciling sacrifice.

For Christ himself is the Anointed One to whom those blessed oils point us. He is - in the words of a famous 6^th-century African Bishop [St. Fulgentius of Ruspe] - “the priest through whom we have been reconciled, the sacrifice by which we have been reconciled, the temple in which we have been reconciled, the God with whom we have been reconciled. He alone is priest, sacrifice, and temple because he is all these things as God in the form of a servant.”

So it is only fitting that we begin the first day of our Easter celebration, the day on which we commemorate Christ’s passion and death, in this supremely priestly act of reconciliation, this Eucharistic sacrifice which sums up in itself what Christ’s death and resurrection are about and everything the Church is about.

By giving his body to be eaten and his blood to be drunk, Jesus expressed the deepest truth about what he would do on the Cross. The Eucharist we celebrate tonight – and all year long - makes really present that very same body once offered on the Cross, then buried in the tomb, and now risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father. The mystery of the Eucharist, which proclaims the death and resurrection of the Lord until he comes again, is at the very heart of the Church’s life. It is, as we say, the sacrament that makes the Church.

In the vestibule of our church is a photograph taken last Fall at the celebration of our parish church’s 125^th anniversary. When I look at that picture, side-by-side with the earlier one which was taken 125 years previously, I think of all the wonderful church activity that has gone on in this beautiful building and all the wonderful church life that, like the crowd in that picture, has spilled out from this building, beginning at this altar.

Our life together as Christ’s Body, the Church, centered on the sacraments we celebrate here is a great inheritance – an inheritance which goes all the way back to that famous Last Supper, which we have received from the apostles, passed on to us through countless generations of people like us. Whether amid the splendor of a papal basilica or in the simplicity of a missionary outpost, whether with the Bishop in his cathedral or with friends and neighbors in a local parish church, this same Lord’s Supper has been celebrated generation after generation and treasured by every generation as its precious inheritance. As Pope Benedict has recently reminded us, however, during his visit last year to San Marino, “the best way to appreciate an inheritance is to cultivate and enrich it.”

As we do that, then who we are becoming here around this altar will overflow from this building and fill our world, as that congregation last autumn spilled out of this church and filled up that photo.

Homily for the Mass of the Lord's Supper, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 5, 2012

The Last Word

19 years ago this coming June, on what was my second day in Israel, my former novice director took me to a village in Samaria for the 1^st Mass of a newly ordained local priest. We all gathered at the village boundary around an arch of palm branches and balloons and waited there for the new priest’s entry into his hometown. As the procession began and all the villagers started shouting and waving palms in the air, my former novice director smiled and said: now you see what Palm Sunday looked like!

The Gospel [Mark 11:1-10] read before the Procession a short while ago tells us about Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem for the Passover holiday and his truly triumphal entry – minus the balloons but full of messianic symbolism – into the Holy City. The rest of the story, which we have just heard, [Mark 14, 15] reveals the next phase of that journey – to the cross and to the tomb.

The cross stands as the central symbol of Christianity because the cross is precisely where we meet God in our world, just as the tomb – the eventually empty tomb – shows where he is taking us, where we now watch and wait with Mary Magdalene and the other disciples.

Meeting Christ on the cross we somehow sense a new connection with God that we would hardly have felt if he himself had not done what we all have to do – and are all so afraid to do – die.

Jesus is God’s way of participating in our human world, God’s great act of solidarity with us in our day-to-day suffering and our final mortality.

In his Passion, Jesus confronted the power of evil in the world. Having done so, he invites us this week to accompany him to the cross and to the tomb – because, thanks to the cross of Christ, death no longer has the final word in our world.

Homily for Palm Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 1, 2012

Entering Holy Week

With Palm Sunday, the Church begins Holy Week. Officially entitled “Holy” since 1955, this week is called holy, “because of the excellence of the mysteries celebrated,” and because it is “enriched by very splendid and sacred rites.” With these words of the Decree Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria, the Holy See in 1955 introduced its famous reform of the liturgy of Hoy Week, which among other things restored Holy Thursday’s Mass of the Lord’s Supper, Good Friday’s Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion, and the Easter Vigil to something close to their ancient hours of celebration.

Prior to that reform, as those of us above a certain age can recall, all those services were celebrated (and had been celebrated for centuries) in the early morning hours of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday respectively – a situation Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria saw as ”certainly with detriment to the liturgy’s meaning and with confusion between the Gospel accounts and the liturgical representations referring to them.” Even more seriously, “schools, businesses, and public affairs of all kinds were and are conducted everywhere,” with the result that the “common and almost universal experience” was of liturgical services “performed by the clergy with the body of the church nearly deserted.” In the immediate aftermath of those 1950s reforms, churches were frequently filled to capacity for the Holy Week services, especially on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. That may be less so today, when everything is open all the time and multiple distractions abound which Pius XII’s Holy Week reformers could not have imagined - with the result that, once again the solemn ceremonies of Holy Week are increasingly playing to diminishing audiences.

Even so, however, there can be no doubt that this is the week when the Church, so to speak, “pulls out all the stops” to celebrate our collective memory of the great events of our salvation and to enable each one us to re-live those events, in order that we may experience their wondrous effects in our own lives, here and now.

In the ancient Roman Liturgy, the importance of these days was highlighted by the choice of the Lateran Basilica, the Pope’s “Cathedral,” as the “stational church” for Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and the Easter Vigil, while the neighboring Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem (built to enshrine the relics brought back by St. Helena from Jerusalem) is the “stational church” for Good Friday. While the Pope still celebrates Holy Thursday’s Mass of the Lord’s Supper at the Lateran, those other papal liturgies are all now celebrated in the much more spacious setting of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

Somewhere in the Passover Seder, it is said that in every generation each person must experience him or herself a having personally been brought out of Egypt. Whether celebrated in the splendor of a papal basilica or the simplicity of a mission outpost, whether with the Bishop in his cathedral or with fellow parishioners, friends, and neighbors in one’s own parish church, Holy Week is that unique annual opportunity offered to every one of us to experience personally what God has accomplished for us in the passion, death, and resurrection of his Son and continues to accomplish in us through his Church.

Judicial Dictatorship

Whatever the outcome of this week's Affordable Care Act marathon before the Supreme Court, one thing seems uminstakably clear. As a society we have all collaborted in replacing democratic decision-making by popularly elected officials with a system of judicial dictatorship. It is, I suppose, fittingly ironic that conservative populists, who ostensibly aspire to maximize individual freedom, have empowered the most anti-democratic branch of the federal government to overturn an act of Congress, the branch of government which, by constitutional design, was intended to be the most democratically based branch. Meanwhile, on the other side, liberals, who tend toward a more elitist style of governance (e.g., HHS Mandates), and have over the years done more than their fair share to legitimize judicial power over the elcted branches, may well see their signature accomplishment overturned by the monster they have fed. As usual, it is the American people who will lose. They may lose substantively in possibly losing the much needed benefit of health insurance reform. They will certainly lose procedurally in further diminishing the "political" (i.e. democratic) branches of government.

Of course, the Supreme Court could uphold the Affordable Care Act. In that case, the promise of health insurance reform will be saved. But our politics will continue to be impoverished by the systemic flaw of judicial review, which not only puts too much power in 9 "Philosopher Kings" (would that they really were at least philosopher kings, rather than merely lawyer kings!), but also, by diminishing the the ultimate responsibility and accountability of the elected branches, thus reinforces those branches' contemporary patterns of irresponsiblity and unaccountabilty.

SCOTUS and the Affordable Care Act

Finally, after endless partisan polemics, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 will be argued this week before the US Supreme Court. As most of my friends know, I am philosophically no fan of judicial review. I consider it to be a true blight on our system this peculiar modern American proclivity to permit the most unrepresentative, elitist, and intrinsically anti-democratic element in our government such wide-ranging freedom to overturn laws that have been democratically passed by popularly elected legislators. That said, that’s the way we do things and the system we have to work within!

While I may not be as cynical about our Judiciary as the columnist who recently wrote in The Washington Post that that the outcome of such fundamental decisions depends essentially on which side of the bed Justice Kennedy got up on that day, it is in fact almost impossible to predict (at least prior to hearing how the Justices behaved during oral arguments) how this case will actually go. In part, that is because of the ambiguity of the legal issues themselves.

The first is whether the 1867 Federal Anti-Injunction Act applies. That law stipulates that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person.” That’s a very sensible law - and not just because it restricts the judiciary’s jurisdiction. Invoking it (as the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did last year), would allow the Court to kick the can down the road, so to speak, and avoid this election year hot potato. But, of course, this Court has a history of intruding itself into the political process. And, in any case, both sides really would prefer a substantive decision. Hence, neither side is advocating this outcome. Even so, the Court could rule that, since the provisions in question have not yet come into force, no one has been penalized and hence there is as yet no basis for an action. In terms of the current political circus we call an election, I think that might not be such a bad short-term outcome.

Assuming that the Court does not go that route, however, then the remaining oral arguments on Tuesday on the constitution’s commerce clause and the “individual mandate” and on Wednesday on the “individual mandate” and “severability” and on Congress’s authority to expand Medicaid will really matter. At minimum, the legal arguments involved will raise important issues about whether or not we have a legal system which is capable of addressing contemporary problems.

The Justices, of course, cannot be unaware that the “individual mandate” was conceived and promoted as a conservative idea to preserve private insurance as the preferred method for paying for health care in the US. If the “individual mandate” is declared unconstitutional, then (regardless of what is decided on the technical question of “severability”), the Affordable Care Act (particularly its requirement that insurance companies cover people with “pre-existing conditions”) will become in effect unaffordable. As insurance rates rise, sooner or later there will be a popular outcry to fix the problem. (After all, almost everything in the Act except the “individual mandate” is popular with voters, but all those things will become hopelessly expensive without the “individual mandate”). The only option left then will be a totally public system – something like Medicare for everyone, which President Nixon was willing to support way back in the 1970s). Perhaps Nixon had the right idea.

As the saying goes: “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”