In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
My beloved, today is the day of Great Thursday, also known as Covenant Thursday or Holy Thursday. And today really is a day that is filled with a tremendous amount of mystery. Today, as we look at the events that unfolded, we see Christ doing several things all on behalf of humanity. Everything He does today is for us and for our salvation, as we say in the Creed.
My beloved, today, we begin by seeing how it is that the Lord institutes that mystical supper where He gathers His disciples for the feast. And as He breaks bread with them, as He shares a meal of the Passover with them, as He is celebrating with them, He breaks the bread and He offers it to them and He says: Take, eat of it all of you: this is My body. And then He offers the cup that is filled with water and wine, and He tells them: Take, drink of it all of you: this is My blood.
He had previously told them and spoken to the public about how it is that He is the bread of life, how it is that their forefathers ate the manna that came from heaven, but they died in the wilderness. And He proclaimed then that whoever eats this bread of life, which is His body, will live eternally. He institutes this mystical supper and He offers Himself in a way that they can accept.
The same way that our forefathers, Adam and Eve, were deceived and they fell away into sin through the process of eating the fruit of the tree, the Lord chooses the same method, the process of eating, the process of union by taking it into oneself to be the very source of life that we need to restore us from the state of death that we are in. He institutes this mystical supper and this is the same day, the same moment that we all participate in in every liturgy.
Do not make the mistake of thinking, my beloved, that every time we pray a liturgy, it is a new liturgy. Don’t think that because two churches in the same city or several churches in the same city are praying at the same time, that there is multiple liturgies happening. It is always that moment that we are living in. We are mystically participating in that never-ending moment of Covenant Thursday.
It is always Him who presides. It is always Him who breaks. It is always Him who says the words. It is always Him who offers us His body and blood. We are sitting at that very table. We are sitting with Him and His disciples and we are participating in that life-giving flesh, His body and His blood that He offered to His disciples. It is the very same that is offered to us every liturgy. And He does this for the life of the world, as we say in the institution narrative of
the liturgy of St. Basil. He was determined to give Himself up to death, why? For the life of the world. This is His way of making us one with Him. This is His way of implanting life in us, placing Himself in us so that He can become the very antidote to the death that has overtaken us.
We see Him, after that supper, gird Himself and go on His knees and demand that His disciples’ feet be washed by Him. Now, Peter, in humility, approaches Him and says: Lord, how is it that you will be the one to wash my feet? And Peter, humbly, is trying to speak the words of saying: Lord, it is us who should be washing Your feet. We just saw yesterday how Mary washed Your feet, how that woman, she... she sat at your feet and she washed Your feet and dried them with her hair. It is us who should be doing this to you; it should not be the other way around. But the Lord, again, He points to something that is much greater: how it is that there's a mystical cleansing that happens when we allow Him to wash us. And the Lord tells Him: Unless I wash you, Peter, then you have no part in Me.
But Lord, we want to have a part in You. We want to be Yours. We want to learn from You. We want to be able to see how it is that You want us to be like You, that the master is the one who serves, the master is the one who humbles, the one who offers Himself entirely, who has this kenotic act of self-emptying always in all that He does. Lord, we learn from You. You show us what it means to be truly human. And so, we come to You and we say the same words as Peter: Lord, if it is about having a union with You and being able to partake of You, then Lord, not only my feet should you wash, but my hands and my head and all of me. Wash all of me, O Lord.
And truly, this was the very prayer that the Lord prayed on this eve in the garden of Gethsemane before His final arrest. And as He was speaking to the Father, He spoke the words and said: Just as We are one, let them also be one. Let them be one in Me. Let them be one in Us, that they may all be one just as We are one. This is the desire of His heart: unity, true unity, unity among men and unity, God and humanity together. This is what we were created to be, my beloved, to be partakers of the divine nature, to be one in Him, to participate in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that through Him, we might be able to get a taste of the All-Holy Trinity: life with God and life in God.
This is what we see Him do today. He offers Himself so that He may be in us, so that we may be one in Him. He cleanses us and He washes us and He tells us: Let me wash you so that you can have a part in Me. We learn from Him. We want to be like Him, truly, created in His image and His likeness. Union with God... How beautiful is that, my beloved! How beautiful is it for us to see our Lord do all that He must for us to be one in Him!
Let us come to Him today. Let us and offer our hearts to Him. And let us go to Him and say a humble prayer and declare to Him that Lord, we truly want to be one with You. We want to offer ourselves to You as You have offered Yourself to us. We come to You and ask You to
wash us and cleanse us, so that we may have a part in You. Cleanse us, O Lord. Make us like You. Make us one with You.
To God be all glory now and forever and unto the ages of all ages. Amen.