Homily for Holy Thursday 2009
The exodus is the central religious experience
that forms and shapes the religious imagination of Israel.
There are other important elements,
such as the Temple and the deportation and return from Babylon.
But all of these are extensions
of the great saving event of exodus.
Passover, the night the Lord passed over Israel
and destroyed the first-born of all Egypt;
the night the Lord led Israel out of Egypt,
that place of bondage and slavery;
this event is retold, recounted, remembered
each year without fail,
in the celebration of Passover.
More than that, the exodus serves as the interpretive lens
for countless other saving events in Israel's history.
On this night of Passover,
Jewish people tell the story of God's saving work.
There is a role for the young in the telling of the story.
The oldest son asks this question:
"Why is this night different from every other night?
What does all this mean?"
When this question is asked,
the response given is this:
"With a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt,
that place of slavery."
Bondage and liberation –-
These are powerful, universal themes in human living.
Nations and peoples have been enslaved and liberated.
I think of apartheid in South Africa
or the struggle of black people in this country
to be treated as full citizens.
I think of the ongoing struggle of the millions of poor people
who cannot live fully because of the bondage of poverty.
Each one of us has our own Exodus.
Each one of us has an experience of bondage,
of being stuck, blocked.
This bondage may be an addiction of some kind;
a way of understanding ourselves that is false;
an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame
for the wrong we have done along the way.
We can discover a grace-filled path to freedom.
Our God is a God of freedom.
As Christians we have received this wonderful story
and used it as the foundation
for our own story of liberation in Jesus Christ.
Tonight we tell the story of Exodus
but we follow it with Saint Paul's account
of Jesus gift of Eucharist to the Church
and then with the story of Jesus
washing the feet of his disciples.
Jesus' action after supper is a culmination of everything
the disciples had witnessed while being with him.
All Jesus' life and being is summed up in the words
"as I have done for you, you should also do."
Jesus is our Passover Lamb.
On this night his "passing over"
strikingly presents saving events.
He passes over from being free to being arrested.
He passes over from being master to slave.
He passes over from life to death, to resurrected life.
In washing the feet of his disciples,
Jesus anticipates his giving of self for his disciples,
for the world, in his death on the cross.
Jesus' death is a sacrifice.
In the Bible, sacrifice is most commonly associated
with a gift and a meal.
The giving of a gift and the sharing of a meal
are the classic ways of reconciling a rupture,
of healing a wound,
whether with a human person or with God.
The giving of a gift to God makes it holy,
which is the root meaning of the word "sacrifice."
Jesus' death was a sacrifice -- it is holy for us.
As the liturgy puts it,
"Christ our Passover has been sacrificed" --
therefore, let us keep the feast.
The Passover Lamb is food for the journey.
Christ our Passover has been made sacred for us --
let us share the meal of his Body and Blood.
You see how the Eucharist Jesus gives to us
compresses the memory of his Last Supper with his disciples
together with his passion on the cross on Good Friday.
In Eucharist, we remember, we hold in our being
the dying and rising of Jesus.
We break holy bread and share a blessed cup of wine,
God's holy gifts for God's holy people.
We celebrate all the ways in which these mysteries
have been liberating for us,
have freed us from bondage
as streams in dry land.
We eat and drink the resurrected life
that Christ gives to each one of us.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
April 9, 2009
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