HOLY THURSDAY 2015
The biggest mistake of the new Mass translation wasn’t something which the translators did, but something which they failed to do. They failed to clarify, in the words of consecration, the meaning of eis ten emen anamnesin.
Now you and I know, do we not, that this means “as a memorial of me” or “as my recalling to the present”. Unfortunately, the translators decided to stick with “in memory of me” which doesn’t make the meaning anything like as clear.
It wasn’t our fault, was it? I wrote to Bishop O’Donoghue before the translation was approved, and he passed my letter on to the powers-that-be. They sent me a very nice letter back, patting me on the head, and saying “There, there. That’s very nice. Now go out and play.” Dozy puddings!
“In memory of me” suggests simply an act of thought—something happened in the past, and we bring it to mind. That is not what Our Lord meant: it is not what He said and did: it is not consistent with the Jewish concept of “memorial”. When the Jews keep Passover, as they still do year after year, they are not simply calling to mind something which happened centuries and indeed millennia ago. They are making the past present. They are travelling with their ancestors from slavery into freedom. They are keeping the same feast which their ancestors kept, and with the same purpose: that the blood of the slain lamb may liberate them as it liberated the Israelites of Moses’ day through the power of God.
As with the Jewish people, so with us. Jesus was a Jew, as we cannot state often enough, thoroughly steeped in the faith of His people. When He spoke those words, recalled for us tonight by St. Paul, “Do this as a memorial of me” He knew the significance of them. He was saying to the disciples “Make this event present. Do over and over again in the present what I am doing now.”
What was He doing? He was inserting Himself into the Passover narrative. He was stating, though the disciples wouldn’t have known this at the time, that He was the true Paschal Lamb who would be slain, and whose blood would liberate believers every time they celebrated the true Passover, which is the Eucharist, or Mass, eating His Body and drinking His Blood as His memorial, as the making present of the whole sequence of Supper—Death—Resurrection.
So that is what we do, year in, year out; week in, week out; day in, day out; as the Risen Christ makes the past into the present. But tonight we do something else as well. We recall the action of loving service which the Lord attached to His sacrifice, and about which John has told us.
To wash the feet of guests, those sandalled but otherwise bare feet which would have been coated with the dust of the roads, was the duty of the slave. Jesus whilst claiming the title of Lord and Master, takes on the slave’s role and insists that we must do the same; and He does it in the context of the Supper, of the Eucharist, as a sign that our Eucharist is complete only when we too humble ourselves in loving service.
Pope Francis underlined the starkness of this demand when he took this loving service out of the Vatican into a Young Offenders’ Institution where, instead of the traditional washing of the feet of priests, he instead washed the feet of a group of prisoners, including a young Muslim woman. In doing so, he ruffled some feathers among the liturgical purists who pointed out that the rubrics speak about “men” having their feet washed, but as the Son of Man is Master of the Sabbath, I daresay the Holy Father can claim to be master of the mandatum, as we call the foot-washing, particularly as he was bringing out, perhaps more clearly than ever before, the breadth of the implications of Jesus’ actions.
So tonight, as you watch me washing (presumably) clean feet, bear in mind what it means. If we are to enter fully into the saving sacrifice of Christ, instituted on this night by His remaking of Passover, we must take with us, at the end of every Mass, the willingness of the Saviour to assume the condition, and perform in love the service, of a slave. If we are truly to proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes, we must take, eat, drink, and SERVE.
