From our 2nd Reading tonight : “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death” 1 Cor 11:26
Have you ever wondered, whenever you’ve heard these familiar words from our 2nd Reading, why St Paul wants us to “proclaim” the death of Jesus? You can hear and see me give this Homily on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIRUTp9rcKM
We don’t use that word “proclaim” very often in ordinary speech do we? But when we do, it is usually something that we want to say out loud and in public, or something that is printed out as a proclamation for everyone to read. But we don’t usually think of Mass like that. For us, the Mass is much more of a private thing, something we do with our fellow Catholics so that together we can be drawn into union with Jesus, to enter into his sacrifice, and receive him deep within us. And if we ever think of proclaiming Jesus to the outside world, we would more likely want to proclaim his love, his glory or his presence in the world, rather than his death.
Holy Week therefore seems an unlikely time to think about proclamation. It seems more a time for meditation, a time for joy that the Lord loves us so much, but also of sadness that the only way his love could be fully expressed was by his death on the cross.
But although the death of Jesus is an immensely sad thing, we must not forget that it’s also an immensely glorious thing. This is because it is not just the tragic death of a good man, but also the dramatic action of God himself entering into the darkest places in our world, into evil and death itself, to defeat them both and bring us eternal life. Thus we believe that all that Jesus did, and all that he suffered, was a great victory, a great sign to us that although the evil in our world seems so enormous, God’s power is even greater, or as I will sing in the dark on Saturday night, “Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed… O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”
But, at first glance, our Gospel (John 13:1-15), and the washing of the feet ceremony that will follow in a moment, seem to be on a completely different subject. What has the quiet humility and love of Jesus, that we heard in the Gospel, and that we imitate in our ceremony, got to do with God’s victory over death and sin? The answer is, of course, that this quiet humble love, is in the end far more powerful than all that the power of evil can throw at us; the answer is that this quiet humble love at the feet of the disciples is part of the process of love and redemption that ends on the cross. The disciples, you notice, do not understand the significance of this amazing act of love; and Jesus has to say to them, “At the moment you do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
Our impulsive Peter still doesn’t understand, and has to be told by Jesus, “If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me.” In other words, if we want to realise the full saving power of God coming to us in and through Jesus, if we want to be drawn into full communion with God, then we must allow God to do this his way. We might want flashes of lightning from the sky, or a Dr Who figure zooming into our life and putting everything right, and Jesus knows that. Remember what we heard him say in the Gospel last Sunday? “Do you not think that I cannot appeal to my Father who would promptly send more than twelve legions of angels to my defence?.. But this is the way it must be.” So God tells us, nay proclaims to us, on this night, that the greatest power of all is not a power that appears big and strong, but the quiet inner power that is love and service and sacrifice ; that is God himself.
So we do not therefore watch and pray with Jesus simply to feel sorry for him, or even to feel sorry about ourselves because our sin made it necessary for him to suffer. No, we also watch and pray with Jesus, because in doing so we are watching God defeating evil and are playing our small part in that great battle. All his actions are part of this amazing process, this battle against sin and death. The washing of the feet, the agony in the Garden, the arrest, the trial, the suffering and finally the death, are of course, a tragic story that may well make us weep, but they are also a glorious story of ultimate triumph; a story that must be proclaimed to the world. Proclaimed, not so much by shouting about it, but by us sharing it gently as Jesus did, and living it out day by day, so that we become the proclamation; we become Christ to the world.
St Paul put it this way when he told the Christians in Rome to imitate these actions (Romans 12:20-21) “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good..... Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer... Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. ... Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position.... If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
This then is the way God’s power works in us and in the world. This is how the battle is won ; the battle in which evil is defeated by love.
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