Faith tells us that we are gathered today to celebrate the anniversary of the 1st Eucharist. Over bread and wine, Jesus says: "This is my body. This is my blood”. After they have eaten and drunk, he tells them: "Do this in memory of me." In these Eucharistic words, the Church believes that Jesus the Lord instituted the Sacrament of the Priesthood. The Eucharist and the Priesthood are solidly entwined in such a way that one cannot do without the other.But, even though it is the Anniversary of the Institution of the Eucharist, nothing in today’s Gospel deals directly with the Eucharist except that the link is made between the Eucharist and service as we heard how Jesus made it so through the washing of His disciples’ feet. So, the Eucharist is the place where our feet are washed by Christ our Lord in order that we might wash the feet of others. True Eucharistic piety must lead to service of others.
Later tonight, after all is done, the silent adoration expresses our obedience to the Lord’s invitation to stay on and to linger for awhile as we accompany Him in His distress. Jesus in his human nature is torn between what is expedient or convenient to Himself and what is necessary. It is convenient or advantageous that He should extricate or remove Himself from the situation of betrayal and danger and yet it is necessary that He remains ever faithful to His Father’s will. So, we wait with Him until such time when the shadow of the Cross is cast upon him.
Tonight, we have the Eucharist linked with the Priesthood, the Eucharist flows into Service and finally the Waiting with the Lord. What of these three themes holds our attention? If you look at today’s world, I would say that there is a disjuncture between the Eucharist and service. Thus, the Washing of Feet is directed to making the connexion between faith and justice more visible. In short, we want people to do more of the washing of the feet.
Granted that the washing of feet is very important, but, in our haste to make the connexion, in our desire to translate faith to justice, we may have missed out on something which is crucial to this translation: the priesthood.
Christ instituted the priesthood for two main reasons: First reason: the Priesthood is to ensure that the Eucharist—as Christ’s sacrifice, as expression of unity and as Real Presence—might be available till the end of time. In the Eucharist, Jesus the Lord continues to offer the same sacrifice He offered on Calvary. He died only once on the cross, but in every sacrifice of the Eucharist, made possible only through the priesthood, Jesus communicates the graces that He has won for us. The Eucharist as communion expresses the oneness of our belief, our worship and our leadership. The Eucharist is Real Presence because Jesus is present totus Christus, totally and entirely as the Church understands it. Wasn’t it that Bishop Fulton Sheen said, “the greatest love affair the world has ever known is contained in a tiny wafer of bread”. In that tiny, white host we receive reverently, we receive Christ in totality.
The second reason for the Priesthood is found in the grave responsibility that Jesus gave His disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive they are forgiven”. Thus, the priesthood in providing the sacrament of confession is a continuation of the ministry of Christ reconciling the world to the Father. Of course, the usual response is that one can go directly to God without the instrumentality of a human person—an argument which betray a lack of understanding of the working of grace. How can one accept the instrumentality of the priesthood in the consecration of the Blessed Sacrament without accepting the instrumentality of Forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession?
In conclusion, without the Eucharist, there cannot be Christianity because it is the principal channel of grace by which Jesus gives us what we need in order that we may do his will. Christ in instituting the Sacrament of the Priesthood promises us of His continued Presence and Forgiveness through the Eucharist and Confession.
But, we do have a crisis—a crisis of the lack of vocation. This crisis of vocation actually reveals a loss of faith in Christ and His Church. It does not help that we priests forget who we are and many of us seem no longer confident in our triple roles as teachers (or prophets), shepherds (kings), sanctifiers (priests) sub et cum Christo. Let me give an example. Priests sometimes try to be humble and when asked to exercise their priestly role as “shepherd, leader or king”, in short to exercise authority, they beg off because there are more competent lay people present. They don’t want to be seen as lording over lay people. Laudable as that may be, they actually reveal a failure to understand that being a priest is being a priest of Christ: sub et cum Christo. It is when a priest by exercising his roles as priest, prophet and king, reveals the power of Christ acting through human weakness. It is only when a priest acts on his own behalf that it makes sense that he should say “I mustn’t show off”. The paradox is that at the point when he refuses to exercise his authority as priest, because he does not want to draw attention to himself, he is actually drawing attention to himself.
Lack of vocation is not the result of Christ not calling people to this vocation but reflects a general loss of faith in the ministerial priest's sublime vocation of standing in Christ's place. Ultimately, crisis of vocation reveals a loss of faith in the Real Presence, in the sacrificial nature of the Mass, and in the spiritual authority of the sacerdotal office.
I have dwelt at length on the priesthood simply because it is the nexus, the link, the connexion between Faith and Justice. Without the Sacrament of the Priesthood, how can we make the connection between the Eucharist and Social Justice? Without priesthood, there is no Eucharist. Without the Eucharist there is no Church. Without the Church, what is social justice but communism? Many Catholics are really gung-ho about being able to contribute something to betterment of the world. But, the Church’s ability to do something, if it were not to be reduced to an ideological caricature, is dependent on the strength of the Eucharist. So, the survival of Christian charity depends on a strong faith in the priesthood, not this or that priest but the priesthood which is absolutely necessary for Jesus Christ to remain with us in the Eucharist, in order to feed us and to give us the strength to do His will.
Today, it is good to pray for priests, but not only for priests. I went for confession today and I was asked to pray for religious Sisters and Brothers many of whom are struggling. The form of life called Religious Life is waning not because it is no longer relevant but because somewhere in our history, priests and religious have failed to remain faithful to Christ crucified but are instead infatuated with the spirit of the world. In our desperation to be relevant, we might have just made ourselves irrelevant.
The priesthood (and by extension the Church) is enlivened or strengthened by the deep devotion of religious brothers and sisters. So, pray for priests and religious to love only Jesus crucified and pray that they dare to suffer for Christ crucified because that is what we need most in a crisis of faith and social justice.
