It is such a blessing to be with you all tonight. Truly, this is a night to celebrate God’s abundant love. As we heard in that beautiful reading from St. John’s Gospel, Jesus “loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” Tonight I am happy to gather with you as we encounter Jesus’ love and celebrate the two great gifts He gave the whole Church through His abundant love: the Eucharist and the priesthood.
Whenever I see true and deep love, it moves my heart. Recently, I found a news story about a young father named Jory who had been deployed with the Army in Syria since September. He left behind his wife and three young daughters during that time. When he returned, Jory decided to surprise his oldest daughter, Payton, in her classroom at school. Payton’s teacher had the class playing ‘Head’s Up, Seven Up,’ and while all the kids had their heads down, Jory sneaked into the classroom. He went over and tapped Payton’s hand, letting her know that she was one of the seven to put their heads up. When she looked up a moment later, there was her dad.
Even remembering the embrace of Jory and Payton gets me all choked up. They just hugged and hugged, so glad to be reunited. There is something about the love between parent and child that touches us deeply. This is what we are made for as human beings in God’s image and likeness – we are made for love! Our hearts yearn to be held in that embrace of love–by a parent, a spouse, and above all by God. We were made by Love for love, and as St. Augustine put so well, our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
Tonight is a night to remember the gifts that Jesus gave us out of His love for us: the Eucharist and the priesthood. Both of these gifts involve His enduring presence with the Church, and both of them allow us to experience that embrace of love by which we are made whole and where we find our rest.
The first reading reminds us of the way that God prepared for Jesus’ gift of Himself in the Eucharist long before God the Son took flesh and joined our human family. Tonight in the book of Exodus, we heard the account of God’s instructions for how to eat the Passover meal. He instructed each family or group of families to procure an unblemished lamb, have it slaughtered and then share in the lamb at their meal. While they were gathered intimately together for this sacrificial meal, they were to leave some of the lamb’s blood smeared on the doorposts. This blood was a sign of their faithfulness to God’s covenant, saving their firstborn from the judgment of the angel against those false gods of Egypt. We see here that God drew the people of Israel close to Himself through a lamb, rescuing them from the deadly consequences of idolatry.
Now we find ourselves gathered for a sacrificial banquet once again, but this time in an even deeper way because of what Jesus has done for us. All around us in our sin-sick world, we see the disastrous consequences of sin, of the rejection of God and His laws for us. In the midst of this darkness, Jesus stands not just as a symbolic lamb as during the passover, but as THE Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. At the Last Supper, He was transforming that meal that the Jews had celebrated together for centuries. By His divine proclamation, on the night before He died, Jesus proclaimed that the unleavened bread was His body and that the cup of wine was the cup of His blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant. In that moment Jesus instituted a new way for humanity to draw close to God: through literally consuming Him under the appearances of bread and wine. Jesus gave the greatest gift to the Church that He possibly could! The gift of Himself in the Eucharist forever links us to His perfect self offering that He would make on the Cross the following day. So, in the midst of the temptations and trials that face us in life, we can be confident that we do not stand alone.
When we approach this altar to receive what appears as bread and wine, we approach God Himself. By Jesus’ own authority as God, He has chosen to remain present to us, to stand with us and gather us to Himself, to hold us closer than we could have possibly asked or imagined. When we think about the embrace of love between Jory and Payton, it surpasses that. Greater than the embrace between parent and child, between dear friends, between spouses, that is the embrace of love that awaits us in the Eucharist! We call it Communion for a reason. In this Blessed Sacrament, we are joined to the Lord as His Body. The embrace is so complete, the Love so perfect, that we are united with the One we receive. Jesus makes us ever more perfectly part of His Body, that mystical body which spans the centuries and all the world, that unites all of us who are joined in the universal Church. This gift of Jesus’ Presence both with us and inside us provides all we need to live out the holiness He challenges us to. So let us rest easy tonight knowing that Jesus is here. He is here to comfort us in our grief, to share our joy, to encourage us in our uncertainties, to show us the way when we feel lost, to hold us and never let us go. What a great gift the Eucharist is! I am so blessed and humbled by the opportunity to celebrate this Sacrament day by day and Sunday by Sunday with you.
Another gift I humbly praise God for is the gift of Jesus’ priesthood. On this night two thousand years ago, Jesus commanded the Apostles to continue this memorial of His loving self-giving, to continue making Him present through the Eucharist. From the earliest days of the Church, this banquet has been celebrated, giving us the opportunity to know the loving embrace of the Lord Jesus. The Eucharist and all of the Sacraments where we encounter Jesus are possible because Jesus set aside certain men to continue to be His unique vessels for the Church. St. Paul says “I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” and then describes the Eucharist. He had a knowledge that He was chosen to pass on those great gifts of the Lord, to allow Jesus to work through Him to heal, encourage, teach and lead.
This gift of the priesthood is another way Jesus continues to make Himself present to us and embrace us. At our best, all of us who are called to this unique vocation take on the task that Jesus undertook at the Last Supper when He humbly bowed Himself low and washed the disciple’s feet. He charged these Apostles, who would pass on their priesthood to others, to be servants: “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”
This is my honor and privilege, to have the opportunity to bow low and serve your needs, to wash your feet and serve you. During the time of Jesus, the washing of feet would have been the duty of the servants of the house. So it is with the priests of Jesus Christ, our charge is to be the servants of the House of God which is His Body, the Church, to give up our lives in order to make Jesus present to all of you: to make Him present at every Eucharist with the authority He has given us, to bring you His mercy in Confession, to give You His healing and comfort in the Anointing of the Sick, to help you encounter His grace in the Sacrament of Marriage as you are joined together, to give and strengthen His life in you through Baptism and Confirmation. What a great gift this is, what a life! I am blessed and humbled to do my best to answer Jesus’ call to loving service every day. I know that in our brokenness, we as priests do not always do a good job of allowing Jesus to work through us. For this I sincerely apologize. Please pray for me and for all priests, that we would be those vessels to help people encounter the loving embrace of Jesus, to help draw more and more people to His life-changing grace. I pray that tonight all of us experience the embrace of Jesus in a deeper way and lift up our hearts in thanksgiving for His great gifts!
+ Heavenly Father, we praise and thank you for the great love of Jesus and for His presence with us through the Eucharist and through His priests. Jesus, help each of us to experience Your embrace more deeply in the Eucharist. Please give all priests the humility to be the servants of their people, the humility to allow You to work powerfully through them. Holy Spirit, inspire our hearts to deeper love through the love we encounter in the Eucharist tonight and at every Mass. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +