The Lord's Supper

“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again.” That’s the opening line of the famous World War II song that Queen Elizabeth II was referencing in her televised Speech to the Commonwealth last Sunday, when she said, “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

The challenge of separation we face today is obviously different from that of the World War II generation, but it is similarly frightening, simultaneously worldwide and very personal – as is our desire to meet and be together, as is our desire tonight to meet and be together for this Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you. So begins tonight’s famous reading from Saint Paul’s 1st letter to the Christians in Corinth. Paul’s was the earliest written account of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, a farewell meal that took the place of the Passover feast which Jesus would not live to celebrate and in the process replaced it with something completely new.

The New Testament tells us how, from the 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, would in time transform, first, the Roman Empire and, then, the ever wider world – as it still must continue to transform each one of us and the wider world we are all a part of.

The current crisis which we are experiencing has reminded us in the most painful possible way how we are all part of that one world. No oceans, no borders, no walls will protect us from the common sufferings of our world, nor excuse us from our common responsibilities to one another and to our one world. Nor must we let our temporary physical distance from one another and from this altar separate us from what we owe to one another and the new community the Lord’s Supper is intended to create among us.

The short passage we just heard, from Saint Paul was originally part of a longer passage that for most of the Church’s history was read at this Mass. Saint Paul wrote that earliest written account of what happened at that most memorable meal in all of human history not just to tell us a nice story about something that happened a long time ago. It was its present effect that Paul cared most about, and so Paul was in fact complaining, criticizing the Corinthians, telling them that they were missing the main point of the Lord’s Supper – receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood in an unworthy way, doing so to their peril. I hear that when you meet as a church there are divisions among you, Paul wrote.

What an indictment! Then as now, all was not well in the Church. The social, economic, and class distinctions, the inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions, endemic in secular society were making themselves felt within the Corinthian Church community, so much so that even the celebration of the Lord’s Supper still seemed to mirror those same social, economic, and class distinctions, inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the worst of the world with them - any more than we can. That is why what happens at this altar is so important, intended as it is to enable us to go beyond our individual self-enclosed limits and so bring something new to the world. For Jesus’ command to his disciples to do as he did is an invitation to a whole new way of life, made possible for us by what Jesus himself has already done on our behalf.

Back at the Last Supper, in the scene that follows next in John’s Gospel, Satan is said to have entered Judas, who, then, after taking a morsel of food from Jesus, left the Supper. How many times has Pope Francis warned us about the danger posed by Satan! The Devil, Pope Francis has warned, “poisons us with the venom of hatred, desolation, envy, and vice” [Gaudete et Exsultate].

So too, for us now, as for Judas that night so long ago, what happens next is what matters. What have we experienced, what has happened to us that has made us different from how we would be otherwise? What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of people do we want to become? What kind of community do we want to become? What will we take with us from this experience to help heal our conflicted and divided world?

Homily for the Mass of the Lord's Supper, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, Holy Thursday, April 9, 2020.

Photo: Holy Thursday, The Roman Missal, copywright 2011 Catholic Book Publishing Corp., NJ

Reimagining Holy Week (3) - Holy Thursday

Other than the Mass on Easter Sunday morning itself, Holy Thursday's Mass of the Lord's Supper has always been my favorite of the week. Even considering all the extra complication caused by the introduction of the Foot-Washing in 1955, it is by far the simplest Holy Week service. Essentially, it is what it commemorates the origin of - a Mass (to which some special features, most notably a eucharistic procession at the end, have been added on). The fact that the procession, like the Foot-washing, has been dispensed with this year really reminds us that the procession is an add-on, focused in fact on the following day. Were Good Friday to conclude - as it quite logically could conclude - with the Veneration of the Cross, there would be no need for any Holy Thursday procession at all. 

Personally, I have always loved and looked forward to the procession. But, given that the contemporary relocation of the Mass to the evening hour and the subsequent abolition of adoration on Good Friday have radically reduced - if not in many places de facto eliminated - the once highly popular custom of devotional visits to the Altar of Repose, rethinking the role of the procession and, hence, of Communion on Good Friday may be in order.  Having to do without both of them this year may encourage such re-imagining.

The rubrics for the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday evening call for the celebrant to preach on the principal mysteries being commemorated that night: the institution of the Eucharist and of the priesthood and the commandment of fraternal charity. In recent years, I have increasingly taken my cue from the second reading's missing verses, 1 Corinthians 11:20-22, 27-32, which for centuries were included in the epistle reading  for Holy Thursday, but which were inexplicably omitted in the Pauline lectionary.

In Paul's account, it is clear that he was quite critical of the Corinthians. It seems that the values of secular Roman society, with its social and class distinctions and inequalities, were making themselves felt even within the Church community, to the point that even the celebration of the Lord’s Supper seemed to mirror those distinctions and inequalities. [Imagine such a thing!] Some have suggested that perhaps the rich got better food than others did at the community meal that in those days accompanied the Lord’s Supper, or that perhaps, since the rich had the leisure to arrive earlier, they ate first and left little or nothing for the others. Whatever exactly was going on, Paul’s point was that they were missing the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and the opportunity it offered for them to be transformed by it.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them to Mass - any more than we can. It is always temptingly easy to miss the point and focus on the wrong food, as Pope Francis reminded us on Corpus Christi several years ago, when he said: “If we look around, we realize that there are so many offers of food which do not come from the Lord and which appear to be more satisfying. Some nourish themselves with money, others with success and vanity, others with power and pride. But the food that truly nourishes and satiates us is only that which the Lord gives us! The food the Lord offers us is different from other food, and perhaps it doesn’t seem as flavorful to us as certain other dishes the world offers us. So we dream of other dishes, like the Hebrews in the desert, who longed for the meat and onions they ate in Egypt, but forgot that they had eaten those meals at the table of slavery.”

The unprecedented crisis in which we now find ourselves, in which the food of the Eucharist is itself unavailable to most of us, is one which very directly challenges all of us to re-examine the things we have hitherto valued, and to recognize where and how we may have misplaced our priorities. This year, even more than normally, Saint Paul's Holy Thursday message - in its entirety - speaks loudly in our empty churches and cities to the emptiness of our hollowed out society, inviting us to undertake the urgent task of rebuilding by beginning with our own fuller transformation into the Body of Christ.

Photo: The Altar of Repose, 2019.

Pearl Harbor?

On Sunday, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams (who also edifyingly acknowledged that he missed  Palm Sunday Mass) said that this Holy Week "is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.” He then went on to make an analogy obviously intended to highlight the catastrophic character of this moment. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that,” he said.

I applaud Adams for trying to alert Americans - some of whom still seem insufficiently frightened - to what is happening. New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo, at present perhaps the leading exemplar of political leadership in the country, has been doing that, as have others; and every voice counts in this crisis.

The "Pearl Harbor" analogy is obviously meant well, meant to get people's attention and force them to focus. So I don't fault Adams for using it. Still, I do wonder about his analogy. Pearl Harbor was, famously, a "sneak attack." So was 9/11. Covid-19 is not. The US had several weeks (at least) to get up to speed and prepare for the virus' arrival in this country, but did not do so - due to an amazing failure on the part of the Administration in Washington. That is the most immediately obvious flaw in the Pearl Harbor analogy.

But there is another even more unfortunate flaw in the analogy. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt did not leave it to Hawaiians to address the problem on their own or in competition with other states and US territories. Rather, he took the lead in confronting the crisis and called upon the entire country to join in a common united effort - the exact opposite of what our current, consistently divisive President has done. 

Commenting recently on the awkward phrase "social distancing," Ezra Klein recently said on his podcast: "What we need is physical distancing and social solidarity."

Social Solidarity seems to be a concept completely alien to our current President and to his political party. If anything, this current crisis is revealing just how badly damaged our social fabric has been over the past several decades. 

On that same Palm Sunday, Queen Elizabeth II spoke to the people of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth - a significant percentage of the world's population. She addressed her people in the inclusive language of social solidarity, something our President has never done and likely never will.

Of course, she occupies a uniquely unifying role in her society, which - combined with her almost flawless fulfillment of that role through most of our lifetimes - gives her a moral standing on the world stage few others can claim. Indeed, I think that at present, in this crisis, when unifying moral voices are so needed but so few, there are perhaps only two on the world stage - Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis - who have so far been able to do so.

As a politician, the President of the United States is necessarily in a different category from either the Queen or the Pope. Yet, one can recall times in the 20th century when the President of the United States could make a comparable contribution on the world stage. But no longer. It is not just that the occupant of the office has changed. So, sadly, has the United States.

(Photo: President Franklin D. Roosevelt asks Congress to declare war after Pearl Harbor, December 8 1941)

Wasting Time

Counting forward from today, it is six days until Easter. Presumably that accounts for the choice of today’s Gospel (John 12:1-11) which begins: Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany. Today's Gospel for this Monday of Holy Week does more than establish a chronology, however. It also sets a certain mood for this week. Famously, it describes how Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, anointed Jesus with expensive perfume. When her extravagance was criticized, Jesus defended her action by referring it to his upcoming burial. 

Ritual, by its nature, is inherently somewhat extravagant. So, typically on this day, I have preached about this as an introduction to what we do during Holy Week. Like Mary, the Church this week traditionally holds nothing back, employing all the rich symbols of the liturgy to invite and enable us to enter as fully as humanly possible into the drama of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, so that we may more fully participate in its benefits. 

Things are obviously different this year, however, when the opportunity to participate in these extravagant sacred rites, that are normally so filled with ritual power and symbolic meaning, is necessarily confined to passive participation via visual media, and when the rites themselves are being celebrated in a simpler, somewhat stripped down form that is appropriate for these extraordinary circumstances

So this year there is perhaps a different lesson we should take from today's Gospel. Because of circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to engage in the ritual extravagance liturgy in general and this week in particular calls for. We are, however, increasingly being called to the ritual of wasting not perfume but time.

Americans are activists, historically the practitioner's of Max Weber's "Protestant ethic" in its most vulgarized form. This is as true, sorry to say, of American Catholics as of American Protestants. Combined with a perverse desire to maintain as much a facade of "business as usual" as possible, the result is a widespread temptation to keep being "productive" during this enforced period of slowdown. 

Now being "productive" is not a bad thing, and there is always some work to be done, work that ought to be done. Even so, is this slowdown not also an opportunity to rediscover other, less "productive" ways of spending one's time, other things to care about, new things to appreciate?

Bereft of the company of friends, is this instead a good time to celebrate friendship in more tranquil ways - in extended, unhurried, unbusinesslike phone conversations, for example, and perhaps even recovering the almost lost art of letter-writing?

Bereft of the constant stimulation of activity, is this instead a good time to rediscover other, more inward sources of stimulation, such as, for example, the increasingly lost art of reading real books?

Bereft of full participation in the Church's liturgy, is this instead a good time to relearn other more reflective, more meditative forms of prayer, more consciously cultivating one's appreciation of and relationship to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within each one of us?

Hosanna!

Years ago when I was studying in Israel, my former novice director took me to a village in Samaria (on the so-called West Bank) for the First Mass of a newly ordained local Arab priest. We found everyone gathered at the village boundary, around an arch of palm branches and balloons, waiting there for the new priest to enter his hometown. As the procession began and all the villagers started shouting and waving palms in the air, my guide said to me, "now you see what Palm Sunday looked like!"

For centuries, pilgrims have eagerly sought that sense of direct connection with the holy places and the great events that happened there. The presence of Stations of the Cross in every Latin Catholic church testifies to this desire to bring that connection home. And, not unlike the Way of the Cross, historically Holy Week evolved in part as a stretching out of the Easter story over time to experience - through celebrating at special times - what pilgrims in Israel experience through being present at special places. And so it is that two millennia later we still re-enact Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

But not this year – or, at least, not in the way we are used to. Thankfully, we still sang some of that wonderful 9th-century hymn which Theodulph, the Bishop of Orleans, composed for this very occasion around the year 810. But no procession this year – and, for most of us, no palms.

Even so, we still have the story, and that story still speaks, if anything that much louder for having to speak alone to a world that has gone unnaturally silent.

The Gospel read at the beginning of this Sunday’s Mass recalls Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem for the Passover holiday and his triumphal entry into the Holy City. 

But then the rest of the story, which we have just heard, reveals the next phase of that journey – to the cross and to the tomb.

Recently, we have seen those powerful images of Pope Francis venerating Rome’s famous “Plague Crucifix,” first at its regular home in the Church of San Marcello al Corso and later more publicly in Saint Peter’s Square.

Christ’s 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 will 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 otherwise.

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

In his Passion, Jesus confronted, once and for all, 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, suffering and death will no longer have the final word in our world.

Homily for Palm Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, April 5, 2020.

Photo: Palm Sunday, The Roman Missal, copywright 2011 Catholic Book Publishing Corp., NJ.