Holy Thursday 2024
In the film Black Robe, the main character is a young missionary part of the European expansion into Canada. He is named as Paul Laforgue, and he saw his mission as one to convert the Canadian Indians to Christianity. He was a sensitive and cultured man and at first seemed unable to appreciate the people to whom he had come to minister, people who lived in a Huron village 1500 miles from Quebec.
At some stage on a journey away from the village in which he was based, however, another tribe, the Iroquois, captured him. Eventually, he escaped. Full of doubt and despair, broken and overwhelmed with the sense of his own fragility, he arrives back at the village that in the meantime has become stricken with fever and European disease. For the first time, Laforgue sees the Indians as people, not just as a category of “souls to be saved.” He appears more vulnerable; his eyes convey compassion. His defences are down. He is powerless and poor.
The Huron chief comes up to Laforgue and asks him a question. Surrounded by the sick of the village, the warriors, and the medicine man, he asks, “Do you love us?”
In other words, “will you now enter communion with us as we are, today, in our neediness, in our disbelief, in our desperation? For this is the test as to whether you are truly with us, for us.
“Do you love us?”
This is the unspoken question behind all our deepest struggles in life, behind our compulsions and our addictions, behind so many of our hurts and the basis of our hopes.
As we begin the Easter Triduum, we celebrate that this deep question of our hearts has been given an answer. The answer is not given to us as words: it is given to us as an action, as a gesture of service.
Yet, what clothes this gesture with such extraordinary character is that the gesture is not given to us in a position of strength, but from a position of vulnerability. It is given in the midst of fear. Jesus’ love for his disciples is portrayed in full presence of that force which ordinarily would encase a person in self-defence – the force of fear. We know that on this evening Jesus is racked with fear. Yet, even in the face of this fear, he reaches out in love.
Thus, the action of service in the washing of the feet that we celebrate this evening is already a movement of Jesus from death to life, a movement from the force of fear that would render us self-protective and enclosed, inert and passive, to the experience of love that opens us out to each other creating a new possibility between us.
In a simple gesture Jesus already initiates the journey from death to life that we travel with him in the days following. This journey is entirely Eucharistic: a self-emptying become a self-giving, a self-emptying beyond the confines of fear into the open horizon of a self-giving – in the words of Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker Movement, “as simple as being on time, and as profound as sympathy . . . you see Eucharist in another’s eyes, give it another’s hand-held tight, squeeze it in an embrace. You pause Eucharist in the middle of a busy day, speak it in another’s ear, listen to it from a person who wants to talk.”
In lives lived eucharistically, lives given for the life of others, not ourselves, the radical question of our hearts is given its answer. And Life is created again.
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