A Fool's Feast

Maundy Thursday

I believe that none of you would need to be reminded that yesterday, the 1st of April, was April Fool’s Day. It’s a day when we traditionally pull pranks on each other, not maliciously but in jest. If a day’s pranking was not enough, sometimes it spills over to the remainder of the week. But sometimes pranks can test the limits of friendship. People can be the best of friends before this but after having suffered a prank in bad taste, even the closest of friends can from henceforth become sworn enemies.

How the world judges our actions as foolish is exactly how the world judges Christians from the early centuries of the Church until present day. Our liturgical celebrations, though it may not seem to be so, always had a certain edge to them, like those who engage in extreme sports who court death as they experience a rush of adrenaline. You may find this unbelievable. How could the Mass, which so many find boring, be a dance with death? Perhaps, the only danger we could perceive is to die of boredom.

We often forget the context of today’s celebration. Today we commemorate the Lord’s Last Supper, a Passover Feast and tomorrow, we commemorate His death. They are not two different events but a single one, for what our Lord celebrated today at His Last Supper, He will complete on the cross. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Mass of the ages is a bloodless re-enactment, re-presentation of the gruesome bloody sacrifice of our Lord at Calvary. Risk, death and danger have always been part of the DNA of the Holy Mass from the moment of its institution.

The juxtaposition of celebration and death is a constant reminder that the Church of Christ, our Church, is indeed a Church of Eucharistic fools because Christians were willing to do the craziest things in order to receive the most precious thing that could sustain them, not just in this life but for eternity. For example, there is the amazing story of the courageous martyrs of Abitene (in modern-day Tunisia). In 303, forty-nine Christians suffered torture and martyrdom because they defied the Roman Emperor’s order not to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday. Despite this cruel law and the real prospect of death, this group of Christians risked everything to gather for Mass. When asked by the magistrate why they had disobeyed the emperor and put themselves at risk, one of them defiantly said, “Sine dominico non possumus” — “Without Sunday, we cannot live.” “Without the Eucharist, we cannot live.”

In fact, for nearly 2,000 years, Christians have risked their lives to participate at Holy Mass. During the Reformation in England, priests were martyred when caught offering Holy Mass clandestinely for English Catholics. Courageous lay people who gave their homes over as places of Catholic worship, and who harboured priests, suffered torture and death. This trend continued over the centuries. In the Twentieth century, Catholics in former Communist countries like the Soviet Union or Vietnam were persecuted for practicing their faith. Today, in places such as Egypt, China, North Korea, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and countless other areas, Catholics risk their lives and travel for hours to attend Mass.

We rejoice that, unlike those in poor areas, we do not have to walk for miles, over hills or on dirt roads to attend. The vast majority of us can make a short drive to arrive at our beloved parish. In fact, we are spoilt for choices. But the ease, convenience, and accessibility of the Mass should not cause us to ever lose sight that the Mass is so precious that many of our Catholic brothers and sisters around the world are braving great inconvenience and persecution to receive what we, by God’s love, have available near us.

In his first Holy Thursday letter to priests, Pope Saint John Paul II touchingly recalled situations of the faith triumphing over persecution from his own personal experience of living under religious oppression, at a time when the priests were rounded up and there were none left to celebrate the Eucharist: “Sometimes it happens that [the lay faithful] meet in an abandoned shrine, and place on the altar a stole which they keep, and recite all the prayers of the Eucharistic liturgy: and then, at the moment that corresponds to the transubstantiation a deep silence comes down upon them, a silence sometimes broken by a sob … so ardently do they desire to hear the words that only the lips of a priest can efficaciously utter.”

I would like to close this evening with the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, at the 2005 World Youth Day in Cologne Germany:

“The Eucharist must become the centre of our lives. … This is because the Eucharist releases the joy that we need so much, and we must learn to grasp it ever more deeply, we must learn to love it. Let us pledge ourselves to do this – it is worth the effort! Let us discover the intimate riches of the Church’s liturgy and its true greatness: it is not we who are celebrating for ourselves, but it is the living God Himself who is preparing a banquet for us.”