Mass of the Lord's Supper - Holy Thursday
In every Sacramental celebration touch or physical nearness is essential, it is part of the ritual. We don’t do these rituals from afar, because at the heart they are always about the person, always for the lifting up of a person.
In Baptism parents hold their child and the celebrant places the water over the head. It is an intimate ritual. Just as bathing is.
In Confirmation and Ordinations, Bishops touch the person with oil on the foreheads or the hands to confer the sacrament. He looks them in the eye.
Reconciliation and Anointing of sick need that closeness as well.
Marriages are sealed with a kiss; not by the priest or deacon, but the new wife and husband.
Touching and proximity remind us that real people are involved. Life and salvation involves people. Not in an abstract way, nor can it be a high minded theological expression: this is people to people. Faith needs intimacy.
Jesus touched people.
To heal, to welcome, to forgive, Jesus literally touched others. Even those whom society do not touch, like the lepers, he disregarded. Jesus wanted closeness. Jesus made people belong.
Jesus’ mission was and still is to bring forth the Kingdom of Heaven. The salvation of God was and is so that we can work with Jesus, for the Father, to bring forth heaven here on earth.
The salvation of God is that all people belong and come to believe in the way of God. This mission continues in us. We are to build up a world of compassion, kindness, mercy, generosity, love. Our mission directs itself to people, to connections. We create belonging.
Not in some idealized manner, not with talk, but in real concrete personal ways.
Reflect back to the wisdom of the Gospel for tonight. Jesus continues this mission and makes it explicit by washing the feet of his disciples. He gets intimate with them. The implication is that if he does it, they must do it as well.
Peter recoils from this initially. He represents that aloofness, that distance, that superiority complex...the “I am too good for this” attitude. We could call this clericalism in our day. Please note that clericalism does not only apply to priests, it is an attitude that any person can take on. Note Jesus’ words...how can Peter have a part in the Kingdom of Heaven if he will not allow himself to belong, to be connected to others. If he will want others to belong.
We cannot just make our Faith an Ideal, a mental practice. Faith is more than a theory. The practice of our faith is not about “me” coming to church and getting communion, and thinking that is sufficient. It is not.
Mahatma Gandhi was purported to have said Christian was great, too bad there were too few practicing it.
Communion celebrates connection with the living person. Our faith needs flesh and bone; it needs to be made real in the people we live with and experience, and serve. Communion inspires us to reach out to others, as Christ has reached out to us.
The circumstances now, with this isolation, this quarantine, do not place this on hold. Social distancing cannot stop us from our mission. What this situation has done is challenged us to our approach to faith differently.
Maybe we are understanding in a deeper way, this is not just about me and God, or me and Jesus, or me getting communion...there is so much more to our Catholic Christian faith.
Maybe we are being challenged to examine our own lives and how we live it out.
Priests too, although I won’t speak for all of us, are challenged. Has my practice of the faith, my service to the community been too afar, to mechanical? Relying solely on ritual and forgetting the people?
A few weeks ago, Pope Francis made that extraordinary prayer. Alone in St Peter’s square, which is physically huge. Yet Alone, but he reached out to the entire world and made a connection.
We call communion “communion” for a specific reason. It is about being with others, it is about celebrating together and about serving one another and all others. It is about people building up people.
This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about. And it is here for us. Look around. Look around your homes, your contact list? Your social media. Our hearts?
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