A Cycle – Holy Thursday 26

Rom. 8:8-11

As we, begin the Triduum the church invites us to enter the “celebrate the pascal mystery of Jesus Christ. Meaning we are not observers but participants. We are here to ignore our accomplishments or our failures during Lent. Our focus is to be on what Christ accomplished by His death and resurrection.  He removed the barrier between us and God by paying the penalty for those sins.  We have gained what we lost by the sin of Adam: a relationship with God and eternal life.    

We are also reminded that Christ was the first step in God’s plan to equip us for holiness. There is a response demanded by us to become righteous in every aspect of our lives. We are reminded that we like the disciples struggle to grasp the impact of His passion and death.  Even with thousands of years of doctrine and tradition we fail to understand how we can be forgiven without some form of restitution. That is because we believe some form of penalty must be paid to atone for our sins.  We are comfortable with making amends for our wrong.  What we are not comfortable with is how God’s forgiveness demands nothing but us yielding to His embrace.  The prodigal son is a perfect example of what we expect: to be slaves instead of sons and daughters.   We find it uncomfortable to yield to the transforming power of forgiveness and allowing the Holy Spirit to pour the love of God into our hearts.

The disciples are a good example of our failure to understand forgiveness.  Annually, on the feast of atonement “all the sinful faults of all the Israelites were placed on the head of a sacrificial lamb, and it was then led away taking away all their sins (Lev.16:1). We celebrate that same sacrificial act during the liturgy of Eucharist, “behold the Lab of God who takes away our sins.”  Yet we cannot shake off the cloak of guilt that accompanies our sins. I encourage you, to visualize Jesus washing your feet and removing the guilt of your sins. Holy Thursday is all about you entering the pascal mystery by embracing what Jesus did each of us. It is personal, real, and transformative.

Our lack of trust in the promises of God to forgive and forget our sins is our greatest liability. Even as we celebrate Christ this holy night, our minds stray away from Christs victory over sin.  We get caught up on the externals of oils, incense, washing of feet, the Eucharist, and the passion of Christ and the stripping of the altar.

The events in the upper room are powerful and filled with messages for us to reflect on.  But there is something else we need to reflect on and that is Jesus in the garden.  He knew what was going to happen and the very thought of what He would have to endure was horrifying.  Jesus begs he Father to “let this cup pass.”  There must be another way which would not involve abandonment, betrayal, brutality, and pain.  If you have not seen the movie, the Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, you should watch it.  Jesus’s agony is real and the thought of what was coming was overwhelming Him.  Yet He surrenders His will to fulfill God’s plan for our salvation.   In His own words, Jesus stated these things must happen to “…fulfill what was told by the prophets.”  The temptation to find an easier way to follow God’s will is real and it plagues us as it did Jesus. 

Jesus had invited Peter, James, and John to join Him in the garden.  That invitation is one line in the scriptures and is easily overlooked. But even the unnoticeable parts of scripture are telling us something about us and God. That invitation to spend time with Jeus needs to be answered by each of us.  It is us who are invited to spend time with Jesus?  Are we oblivious to His passion and the cost of our forgiveness?  Are we sleeping, unable to hear God’s voice coming to us in the Liturgy of the Word?  Are we even aware of Jesus trying to wake us up?  Are we aware of how easily we fall back into sleep even after an encounter with Christ?      

 Are we unaware of the depth of God’s love and what it cost just so we could reconcile to the Father. We easily say our sins are forgiven and yet we fail to appropriate the grace of His sacrifice because we cannot grasp how forgiveness works.  We believe we must pay a price for our transgressions, and we mistakenly believe that discipleship demands a holiness we do not possess.  Our instincts tell us that there must be a greater cost than repentance.  We centrally fail to grasp how forgiveness works despite the image of the prodigal son being forgiven unconditionally.

Jesus has invited us to begin a journey of discipleship. We need to acknowledge that invitation, embrace. It demands we relinquish our concept of discipleship.  We must not remain sleeping and allow the Spirit to lead us to the understand heart of God. That image of the disciples sleeping shows us how easily we drift off and fail to stay connected to Christ. If they had been awake and observing Jesus, they would have responded differently when He was arrested.  They would have learned the lesson of trusting God’s goodness despite their own lack of understanding.  

The journey of salvation began with Jesus saying yes to the Father.  It ends when we also say yes to the father.