What Do You Know by Heart? (Part 2)

A Homily for Holy Thursday 2024

What is this? I mean… what is THIS?

We are told in our reading from the Book of Exodus: This day shall be a memorial feast for you. And St. Paul recounts for us the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me!” So, what is THIS?

One of my favorite questions in all of scripture is the one Jesus poses to his freshly foot-washed followers: “Do you realize what I have done for you?”

Do we realize what he has done for us? Do we realize what THIS is?

As I mentioned on Palm Sunday, Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum is for us an exercise in memory. It is a recurring education in living out “What we know by heart.” And this educational process has 3 parts to it: Re-member (that is, know yourself, know Christ, know what the situation requires). Next is Realize (That is, make it real, don’t live in the false isolation of observation but participate fully in reality as it is revealed). And finally Rise (that is, step into the truth of who you are in Christ as he rises up in you).

So, you could say, what we know by heart then is what THIS is!

This day shall be a memorial feast for you. THIS means every day and every right now of every day.

This is my body. This is by blood. Means THIS body and THIS blood.

Realizing THIS is what it means to: “Do this in remembrance of me?”

THIS is what we know by heart. One spiritual writer describes it as “Our heart’s journey [which] is about finding freedom from any possessive interior elements in us to a greater discovery of who I am.”

THIS is an intimate particularity. There is nothing closer to you than yourself, save God. And it is THIS we are called to share.

But do we realize what Christ has done for us? Do we live lives making real the intimate particularity of this body and this blood… in remembrance of him?

Meister Eckhart describes Jesus as: “He says what he is.” Like God, who says to Moses in the wilderness: “I AM who I AM, Jesus, the Word of God, speaks himself. Eckhart writes: “What does the Lord Jesus say? He says what he is. And what is he? He is the Word of the Father. In this same Word of the Father [he] speaks himself and the whole divine nature and everything that God is, as he knows it; and he knows it as it is.”

Jesus speaks himself. He speaks as he knows it, and he knows it as it is: This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. So what are we to do in remembrance of him? Speak Ourselves. What this is all about is you and I learning to say what we are and in doing so say who God is. Because when I say what I am I create a space for the Great I AM to enter and act in the world.

But do we realize what Christ has done for us?

Remember the woman with the alabaster jar who so brazenly broke and bountifully wasted its very expensive contents… “dealing out what indoors dwells.” She knew herself. She knew Christ. And she knew she had only one thing to give, the incalculable value of her very self… that intimate particularity that is who she is in God’s eyes. She was unwelcomed, unwanted, and wonderfully unexpected but, unlike those who surrounded her, locked up safely in their cool distant and judging observations, she knew how to make real what THIS is. By her actions she said what she is. By washing dirty feet we say who we are!

What too often for us is perhaps “unwelcomed” or “unwanted” or maybe even “unknown,” is THIS intimate particularity which is me. A wonderfully unexpected THIS and the only THIS I have to give.

What you know by heart is who you are in the eyes of Christ. That’s what THIS is all about. That is what we are called to realize. So let us Re-member — Realize — and Rise to THIS moment, in THIS body, in THIS blood in remembrance of the One, the only One, who makes us REAL and is, in turn, made REAL through us.