Holy Thursday
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“When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters and say to the master of the house, ‘The teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”’ He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there.”
Luke 22:10-12
When someone says, "Holy Thursday", our first impression is that of the Last Supper. We have in our minds the image of Da Vinci's masterpiece -- the elongated table, the Lord with hands extended, offering the bread which becomes His Body, the Apostles stupefied and murmuring to one another at the occasion of the first Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The red of Our Lord's garment indicates the bloody sacrifice to come; the blue of his over-garment speaks of the water of life that will flow with blood from His side on Calvary. The azure hue also serves to remind the viewer of the Blessed Virgin's proximity to the Lord in that Paschal sacrifice. And there lurks the Betrayer, Judas, over Jesus' left shoulder, his finger gestured not at the bread and wine, but held in defiance; his gaze not on the miracle unfolding, but held steadily on his prey.
But even if the Institution of the Holy Eucharist is the summit of Holy Thursday, so many other crucially important events also take place - the kinds of events that will shape the Spiritual Life of the Catholic Church to be born into existence on Pentecost. Here's a short list:
1. The first priests are ordained (and by necessity, they are also the first bishops)
2. The disobedience of Adam in the Garden of Eden is reversed by the obedience of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
3. The great prayer of unity (catholicity) is poured forth between Jesus and the Father.
4. The spirit of Christ the Servant (diakonia) for all servants (read: clergy) of the Lord is modeled in the washing of the feet.
5. The Lord gives to the world the "New Commandment" to "love one another".
6. Jesus is betrayed by two of his newly ordained priests: Judas and Peter
7. The prophecies of Isaiah's "suffering servant" begin to unfold in earnest.
All of these events are wrapped up in Holy Thursday. Nothing may compare to the Eucharist, but we would be remiss not to recognize the overriding theme of all those events above: Humility and obedience.
Are there two words that better describe the Son in relation to the Father? Jesus made clear throughout His ministry that He came to do the will (and only the will) of His Father. We know that Jesus' human nature and human will provided the tension witnessed in the Garden of Gethsemane when He pleaded for the Father to "remove from me this cup." But we also see that He resolved this tension through those two abiding virtues - humility and obedience. Adam and Eve relinquished both of these in the Garden of Paradise by desiring to be God's equal, and by disobeying his command. In a human sense, we might say that Jesus was nurtured in these qualities by his earthly father, Joseph, and his biological mother, the Blessed Virgin. He possessed them, of course, in his divine nature, but in order to undo the human failing of our First Parents, it was His will to show all of us that the struggle is indeed "real" and it's worth every moment of it for the sake of defeating Satan in his quest for your soul and mine.
Holy Thursday is the hinge of salvation history, because it marks the beginning of the concrete remedy to Genesis. The preaching, the miracles, the calling of disciples were all employed to set the table for the act of Redemption and to propagate this miracle until the end of time. By giving us the Eucharist, the Bread of Life, God deigned to remain with us. By countering Original Sin with perfect obedience, Our Lord gave permission for His painful Sacrifice on Calvary that would restore man's friendship with God and provide a wellspring of mercy from which we can drink until He comes again.
