Benedict XVI’s Sermon for Holy
Thursday Evening
Lord’s Supper Mass
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Holy Thursday is not only the day of the institution of the Most Holy
Eucharist, whose splendour
bathes all else and in some ways draws it to itself.
To Holy Thursday also belongs
the
dark
night of the Mount of Olives, to which Jesus goes with his
disciples; the solitude and abandonment of Jesus, who in prayer goes forth to
encounter the darkness of death; the betrayal of Judas, Jesus’ arrest and his
denial by Peter; his indictment before the Sanhedrin and his being handed over
to the Gentiles, to Pilate.
Let us try at this hour to understand more deeply something of these
events, for in them the mystery of our redemption takes place.
Jesus goes forth into the night.
Night signifies lack of communication,
a situation where
people do not see one another. It is a symbol of
incomprehension,
of the
obscuring
of truth.
It
is the place where evil, which has to
hide before the light, can grow.
Jesus himself is light and truth, communication, purity and goodness. He enters
into the night. Night is ultimately a symbol of death, the definitive loss of
fellowship and life. Jesus enters into the night in order to overcome it and to
inaugurate the new Day of God in the history of humanity.
On the way,
he sang with his disciples Israel’s
psalms of liberation and redemption, which evoked the first Passover in Egypt,
the night of liberation. Now he goes, as was his custom, to pray in solitude
and, as Son, to speak with the Father. But, unusually, he wants to have close
to him three disciples:
Peter, James and John. These are the three who had
experienced his
Transfiguration – when the light of God’s glory shone
through his human figure – and had seen him standing between the Law and the
Prophets, between Moses and Elijah. They had heard him speaking to both of them
about his
“exodus”
to Jerusalem.
Jesus’
exodus
to Jerusalem
–
how
mysterious are these words! Israel’s
exodus
from
Egypt
had been the event of escape and liberation for God’s People. What would be the
form taken by the
exodus of Jesus, in whom the meaning of that historic
drama was to be definitively fulfilled? The disciples were now witnessing the
first stage of that exodus
– the utter abasement which was nonetheless the essential step
of the going forth to the freedom and new life which was the goal of the
exodus. The disciples, whom Jesus wanted to have close to him as an element of
human support in that hour of extreme distress, quickly fell asleep. Yet they
heard some fragments of the words of Jesus’ prayer and they witnessed his way
of acting. Both were deeply impressed on their hearts and they transmitted them
to Christians for all time. Jesus called God “
Abba“. The word means – as
they add – “Father”. Yet it is not the usual form of the word “father”, but
rather a children’s word – an affectionate name which one would not have dared
to use in speaking to God. It is the language of the one who is truly a
“child”, the Son of the Father, the one who is conscious of being in communion
with God, in deepest union with him.
If we ask
ourselves what is most characteristic of the figure of Jesus in the Gospels, we
have to say that it is his relationship with God. He is
constantly in communion with God. Being with the Father is the core of his
personality. Through Christ we know God truly. “No one has ever seen God”, says
Saint John. The
one “who is close to the Father’s heart … has made him known” (1:18).
Now we know God as he truly
is. He is Father, and this in an absolute goodness to which we can entrust
ourselves. The evangelist Mark, who has preserved the memories of Saint Peter,
relates that Jesus, after calling God “Abba”, went on to say: “Everything is
possible for you. You can do all things” (cf. 14:36). The one who is Goodness
is at the same time Power; he is all-powerful.
Power is goodness and goodness is power.
We can learn this trust from Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of
Olives.
Before reflecting on the content of Jesus’ petition, we must still consider
what the evangelists tell us about
Jesus’ posture during his prayer.
Matthew and Mark tell us that he “
threw himself on the ground” (
Mt
26:39; cf.
Mk 14:35), thus
assuming a posture of complete submission,
as is
preserved
in the Roman liturgy of Good Friday.
Luke, on the other hand,
tells us that Jesus prayed on his knees. In the
Acts of the
Apostles, he speaks of the
saints praying on their knees:
Stephen during his stoning, Peter at the raising of someone who had died, Paul
on his way to martyrdom. In this way
Luke has sketched a brief history of prayer on one’s
knees in the early Church.
Christians, in kneeling, enter into Jesus’
prayer on the Mount of Olives.
When menaced by the power of
evil,
as
they kneel, they are upright before the world, while
as sons and daughters, they
kneel before the Father.
Before God’s glory we Christians kneel and
acknowledge his divinity; by that posture we also express our
confidence that he will prevail.
Jesus struggles with the Father. He struggles with himself. And he struggles
for us. He experiences anguish before the power of death.
First and foremost this is
simply the dread natural to every living creature in the face of death.
In Jesus, however, something
more is at work.
His gaze peers deeper, into the nights of evil. He sees
the
filthy
flood of all the lies and all the disgrace which he will
encounter in that chalice from which he must drink.
His is the dread of one who
is completely pure and holy as he sees the entire
flood of
this world’s evil bursting upon him.
He
also
sees
me, and he prays for me. This moment of
Jesus’ mortal anguish is
thus an essential part of the process of redemption.
Consequently, the
Letter to the Hebrews describes the struggle of
Jesus on the Mount of Olives as a
priestly event.
In this prayer of Jesus, pervaded by mortal anguish, the
Lord performs the office
of a priest: he takes upon himself the sins of humanity, of us
all, and he brings us before the Father.
Lastly, we must also pay attention to the content of Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives. Jesus says: “Father, for you all things
are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want”
(
Mk 14:36). The natural will of the man Jesus recoils in fear before
the enormity of the matter. He asks to be spared. Yet as the Son, he places
this human will into the Father’s will:
not I, but you. In this way he
transformed the stance of
Adam, the primordial human sin, and thus
heals humanity.
The stance of Adam was: not what you, O God, have desired; rather, I myself
want to be a god. This
pride is the real essence of sin. We think we are free
and truly ourselves only if we follow our own will. God appears as the opposite
of our freedom. We need to be free of him – so we think – and only then will we
be free.
This
is the fundamental rebellion present throughout history and the fundamental lie
which perverts life.
[Again, I cannot help but think of his Chrism Mass
sermon.] When human beings set themselves against God, they set
themselves against the truth of their own being and consequently do not become
free, but alienated from themselves.
We are free only if we stand in the truth of our
being, if we are united to God. Then we become truly “like God”
– not by resisting God, eliminating him, or denying him.
In his anguished prayer on the Mount of Olives,
Jesus resolved the
false opposition between obedience and freedom, and
opened the path to freedom. Let us ask the Lord to draw us into this “yes” to
God’s will, and in this way to make us truly free.
Amen.
