Homily for Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper

Imagine for a moment if you can, what it would be like to be incapable of remembering anything – having no memory whatsoever. Our ability to recall our family relationships, our past experiences, even our own names . . . these things so much make up our very sense of self, that it’s almost impossible, even to imagine, what it would be like to not remember them.

As you all know well, that’s what makes the passing on of culture and tradition so important – and what makes watching our loved ones endure dementia and Alzheimer’s so painful and tragic.

Memory, we might say, makes us who we are.

That is exactly what our first reading, indeed our entire Liturgy this evening, is all about.

In the Book of Exodus, we hear the Lord describe to Moses how the Hebrews are to prepare for their liberation from slavery in Egypt. The night before God will free them, they are to slaughter a lamb, apply its blood to their doorposts and lintels, and eat its roasted flesh with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

But this meal that God prescribes for the Hebrews is not a one-time only event. The Lord instructs Moses and Aaron that this is: “a memorial feast . . .which every generation shall celebrate . . . as a perpetual institution.”

The Passover is the constitutive event in Israel’s history: it is the event that makes Israel the people, the nation that it is. And so, as our teens learned this past Sunday at their sedar, every year faithful Jews fulfill God’s command and celebrate the Passover.

And in remembering the Passover, the Exodus events are actually made present to the participants, and they not only remember who they are, they are themselves, in the here and now, renewed as God’s chosen people and conformed to the mystery they celebrate.

This is, for us, a crucial understanding of a particular kind of memory – because it is with this sense of memory that Jesus celebrated the Passover, and it is thus the very same sense of memory that animates our celebration of the Eucharist.

Tonight we recall the Christian Passover: the night on which the blood of the Lamb set us free from slavery to sin. We remember, as St. Paul recounted in the second reading, that on the night before He suffered and died Jesus took bread and wine, and gave them to His disciples, saying: “This is my body – this is my blood.” And in each instance our Lord commanded us: “Do this in memory of me.”


Jesus was not inviting us into some sort of nostalgic remembrance of some long ago event. And He was certainly not instructing us to perform some sort of play-acting. Rather, by commanding that we remember His Passover, the Lord desires to make the events of His Passion present to us in the here and now.

As I said on Sunday, within liturgy, time is annihilated: the past of the Upper Room, and the future of the Heavenly Banquet are wed, and they meet here, in the present, at this altar that is Calvary itself.

As in all the Sacraments, Jesus makes Himself present to us: in His holy people gathered; in His Sacred Word proclaimed; in the person of His priest; and especially in His own flesh and blood, under the guise of bread and wine.

And so at this Mass of the Lord’s Supper, and throughout these Great Three Days, we do not passively remember the events of the Christian Passover. Rather, by our remembering, the Lord re-presents the very events that make us who we are.

So, as we celebrate our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist, remember that you are once again re-formed into Christ’s body, the Church. And as we celebrate the institution of the priesthood, pray that we priests remember our Lord’s example of servant-leadership, and that our lives are conformed ever more fully to the mystery of the Lord’s Cross.

It is good, then, brothers and sisters that we remember, and that we remember well - so that we can truly know who and what we are.