Understanding our faith

The Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper – Holy Thursday

We are now past the midway point of Lent.  And we are moving towards the great feast of our year – the three holy days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday.

We are already aware, I am sure, that these three days are not separate feasts but make up the one feast over three days.  For this reason, the word Triduum is used to describe them.  It is a Latin word which means the three days are one!  The three days are calculated from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday.

The three days celebrate Jesus giving over of himself to his death and through that death into the hands of the Father who raises him from the dead.  At the Last Supper, Jesus expresses the meaning of his death in his very words ‘This is my body given for you’, ‘This is the cup of my blood shed for you’.  Those words express the gift of himself to us even unto death.  So, they are intimately linked with what happens the next day on the cross where that actual death takes place.  Those words at the Supper link the Last Supper to his death on the cross.  And in our celebration of the Eucharist, those same words link our Eucharist to the gift of himself for us.  So, the celebration of Holy Thursday is incomplete without the celebration of Good Friday – the two fit together.  This is the ultimate reason why we do not have the celebration of the Eucharist on Good Friday but rather we have communion by means of bread consecrated at the Evening Mass of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday.

On Holy Thursday, the second reading from St Paul is about the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23-26), but the gospel is about Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.  It is again an action in which he is giving himself to them in an action that they did not at first appreciate as is evidenced in Peter’s reply to Jesus (John 13:6-9).  But they, and we, are being shown the newness of God as shown to us in Christ.

After Mass, the consecrated Eucharist is taken to what is called the Altar of Repose, in a quiet part of the Church where people can spend time in quiet prayer.  This is also part of the celebration of these three days.  It is the time when we commemorate the suffering of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.  He asks his first disciples to wait and keep awake with him (Matthew 26:28, 40; Mark 14:36).  And so, we his present disciples are offered this time to wait and watch with him in prayer.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin