Holy Thursday 2024

It is one thing to have the audacity to take bread and say, “This is my body” and then take the cup filled with wine and say, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But it is quite another to wash the feet of a sister or brother. Yet we cannot have one without the other. To preside at the eucharist is a great privilege and an enormous responsibility. It is our hands that take the bread and the cup. You share in my priesthood in the deepest way possible for the food we share is that which we are continually becoming – the body and blood of Christ. I cannot exercise my sacred ministry without you. For it is in this meal we enter into communion, through the body and blood of Christ, with one another. This is an extraordinary union. And the implication is that we are each called to bend down and wash one another’s feet. I remember having to wander some distance to a house up in the hills of Ba, Fiji, to anoint a lady who was dying. It was raining and I had to walk through mud to get there. Before I entered, I took off my shoes as is the custom, and there was a young woman by the door waiting to wash my feet. I recall she did it with remarkable care as if she wanted to ensure that she could remove all stain of mud from my feet. It was a eucharistic moment and she was the priest. She prepared me to enter the sacred space where her aunty was soon to make her final journey into the loving embrace of God. May we always be prepared to live out our eucharistic responsibility and privilege through simple acts of kindness and love.

 

Photograph: Pope Francis washes the feet of prisoners, taken 5 years ago.