Knowing that He was to give us His Body and Blood as a perpetual memorial of His love, Jesus first instructs the Apostles on humility. First, Jesus had humbled Himself to become a man; as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says, “For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.’”¹¹ Then on Good Friday, when He was to suffer the humiliation of the cross, He “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”¹² Now, at the Last Supper, Jesus rose, laid aside His garments, and girded Himself with a towel. Just as He had laid aside the privileges of His divinity and girded Himself with humanity at the moment of the Incarnation, in His humility He was about to lay aside even the benefits of His human nature to be present under the appearance of bread. If the humility of God becoming man reveals the vastness of God’s love for us, how much more is God’s love made manifest when He further humbles Himself to be present in the Eucharist. As a sign of that love and in anticipation of the Eucharist He was to give them, Jesus washes the feet of all of His Apostles, including Judas. This same Judas, who less than a week prior had bulked at the humble worship of the woman who had washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair,¹³ sits in silence, ambivalent to the love manifested in Christ’s humble action. Even after receiving the choice morsel from Jesus – an act by which Jesus demonstrated the special place that Judas had in His heart – Judas responds by leaving Christ’s presence; he fails to remain in Jesus’ love. Before the humble presence of Christ in the Eucharist, are we, like Judas, so caught up in our own ambitions and desires that we are oblivious to the love of God? Do we seek to remain with Jesus, or are we drawn away from Him to the darkness of the night?¹⁴

We have now reached the moment when Jesus gives us Himself in the Eucharist. “Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’”¹⁵ There is neither covenant nor the forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood. So was Jesus just speaking metaphorically or symbolically when He consecrated the bread and the wine? Of course not! Bishop Fulton Sheen said, “Since His death was the reason of His coming, He now instituted for His Apostles and posterity a Memorial Action of His Redemption, which He promised when He said that He was the Bread ofLife.”¹⁶ The blood that Christ sheds on Good Friday is the same blood that He gives us on Holy Thursday. The sacrifice that Jesus offers upon the cross physically is one and the same with the sacrifice that He offers sacramentally in the Eucharist. In both, He is the Priest offering the sacrifice as well as the Victim being sacrificed. In that first Eucharist, Christ was looking ahead and uniting that sacrifice to that of the next day; likewise, at each subsequent Eucharistic celebration we are also united to that same sacrifice. When Jesus says “Do this in remembrance of me”¹⁷ we are not merely to remember His loving sacrifice on the cross, we are to participate in it! What love! When the constraints of time would have prevented us from being present, You, O Lord, found a way for us to be there with You so that from Your cross You not only look upon Your mother and Your beloved disciple, but You gaze upon us as well. Help us, O Lord, to respond by fixing our eyes upon You, so that as our eyes meet, we, like Peter,¹⁸ will recognize the great love You have shown us.

After instituting the Eucharist, the Apostles disputed about who was to be regarded as the greatest; after having experienced the love and humility of Christ, they returned to their self-love and egotism. In our own lives, how quickly do we return to our old ways and forget what we experience in the Eucharist when we walk out the doors of the church? When Jesus tells us to remain in His love, He is talking about all eternity, not just for a short moment. Jesus reminds us of that fact when He says, “As my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my throne in my kingdom.”¹⁹ Do we realize that our participation in Mass is a foretaste of the heavenly worship, when we shall gaze upon our Beloved face-to-face for all eternity? As we join the angels and all of heaven in saying “Holy, holy, holy”²⁰, do we recognize that we are participating in the life of heaven, the beatific vision behind the veil of the Sacrament?

11 Hebrews 10:5
12 Philippians 2:7-8
13 Cf. John 12:4
14 Cf. John 13:30
15 Matthew 26:26-28
16 Bishop Fulton Sheen, The Life of Christ, 277
17 Luke 22:19
18 Cf. Luke 22:61
19 Luke 22:29-30
20 Cf. Revelations 4:8

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