Daily Reflection Holy Thursday

We moved from New Jersey to Lexington, Massachusetts just two days prior to the annual April 19th celebration of Patriot's Day. As our new neighbors came calling, they urged us to take advantage of the perfect timing of our arrival and to not miss the reenactment at the Lexington Green of the first skirmish in the 'Shot Heard Round the World,' the opening salvo in the American fight for independence. Following their advice, we chose our good viewing seats at dawn and watched with a bit of awe and dread the approach of the Redcoats coming from the east who went on to easily overpower the colonists. At the end of the battle, with the smoke of live musket fire still in the air, Lexington Minutemen had suffered eight casualties; the English, zero. Our then ten year old son, disgusted with the performance of his new home town, proclaimed, "If the score is going to be the same next year, I'm not coming."
 
Tonight we begin the three-day sacred, heartbreakingly poignant, and beyond-all-words journey with Christ -- Holy Thursday to Good Friday to the Easter Vigil. Our masterful liturgies will move us beyond mere reenactment of the most profound event in Salvation History, where our role might be passive observer or onlooker. No, we enter invited to make present again, through deep and active remembrance, Jesus' story and then to make that story our own. Like our Jewish brothers and sisters who celebrated Passover last night, we surrender to the transformative power of the retelling of our own Memorial Feast to mold and shape us.
 
And what are those stories we will retell this evening? We will hear in John's Gospel how, prefigured by Mary's anointing of Jesus on the eve of the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, the embodied sign of all of his teaching in its fullness. (John's portrayal is the substitute for the institution of the Eucharist shared in the other three Gospels.) Footwashing -- a sign of hospitality in Middle Eastern cultures, but a menial task, best left to servants. To the disciples this would have been an unmistakable sign of humility, what one writer called Jesus' loving act of abasement. And we will hear again, this time in Paul's telling, how Jesus gave the greatest sign of hospitality of all, a foreshadowing of the gift of his very life. "Take, eat. This is my body, given for you." How profound the linking of the two stories. "This is my body" -- a body that had just bent and knelt and washed and dried. Jesus, who took his body to so many places, he with no home of his own. A body that had welcomed children, had touched and fed and healed and consoled, a body whose eyes had seen the suffering and the dignity of others, a voice protesting against injustice, proclaiming God's mercy and love. Eucharist, food for the journey of our own transformation in using our bodies to make Christ present again. 
 
At this point each year in the rhythm our liturgical cycles, we do know that the 'score is the same.' We have never achieved enough, merited enough, to win at the game of life and its battles. All is grace as we surrender to this wondrous love -- Christ both crucified and glorified as the sacrament of God's unconditional love for a sinful world. This is the love that will change the world. Let the remembering begin.