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April 6, 2023Abu Dhabi.
Bishop Paolo Martinelli presided over the celebrations of the Mass of the Lord's Supper at St. Joseph's Cathedral Abu Dhabi at 7pm today. He washed the feet of 12 parishioners commemorating Jesus's washing the feet of the disciples before the Last Supper.
Below is the full text of the homily delivered during the occasion.
Dear Sisters and Brothers, with this Eucharistic celebration, the Mass of the Lord's Supper, we solemnly enter the sacred triduum that leads us to the Holy Easter, the resurrection of the Lord. The Paschal Mystery is the center of our faith. It is the center of the liturgical year that shapes the life of the Church, our communities, and our Christian life.
Who Jesus really is for us, we rediscover in these holy days. Jesus is the son of God who came into the world to complete the Father's plan: our salvation, the salvation of the world. The life of Jesus, what he said and did, is understandable in the light of the paschal mystery. He entered the world in view of the hour of his passion, where a duel is fought between life and death. A great father of the Church, Gregory of Nyssa, says that Jesus was born as a man precisely to be able to give his life, to die for us. In fact, God could never die. He was born to give life. Thus, Christmas leads us to the mystery of Easter.
The Eucharist, whose institution we recall this evening, is the gateway to the paschal mystery. We heard from Saint Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, the words of Jesus on the institution of the Holy Eucharist. By celebrating this ancient rite, Jesus indicates himself as the true lamb of God who takes away the world's sin, thus fulfilling the prophecies. In fact, Israel had experienced throughout its history that the liberation from Egyptian slavery had not been sufficient for definitive freedom. The people had repeatedly returned to being slaves, and above all, they had realized that the strongest slavery is not the external one but that of the heart, that of sin. For this reason, Israel was waiting for a messiah who was not only political but capable of expiating the guilt of the people; When Jesus appeared at the Jordan River, John the Baptist called him: "Behold the lamb of God, behold the one who takes away the sins of the world!". With these same words, the Priest invites the faithful to receive sacramental communion.
In the Eucharistic supper, Jesus anticipates with his disciples what, after a short time, he will accomplish in the solitude of the cross. He takes the bread and the wine and identifies them with his broken body, and sheds blood. In this way, he shows the true meaning of the cross. What would have been simply a meaningless injustice is completely transformed and becomes the most excellent gesture of love. In obedience to the Heavenly Father, Jesus welcomes the cross as a communication of the greatest love: to give one's life for one's friends, as Saint John says in his Gospel. At the same time, we must recognize that the apostles who participated in the last supper are directly involved in Jesus' gift of himself. He invites them to eat the bread he broke and drink from his cup. In this way, the apostles, and with them, all God's people, are involved in Jesus' mysterious hour, the hour of his passion.
In every celebration, Christ becomes contemporary with our life (he is here now among us). We are made contemporary with Christ (we are transported to the upper room together with the apostles): it is not a simple commemoration of a past fact; it is a “memorial”; what happened then happens again today in the sacrament.
With the Eucharist, Jesus interprets what will soon happen on the cross; that freely given body transforms an infamous death into the supreme act of love.
What most terrible thing a man could have done in the history of humanity, he has already done with Jesus: the world rejected the Son of God and put the innocent on the gallows. While we see so many horrors in the wars that exist in the world and in so much violence, let us not forget that the mystery of evil has already been revealed in killing the innocent Son of God.
In this way, Jesus embraced in advance all the ugliest things in history, the most horrendous atrocities. He attracted them to himself, making this horrible reality the place for the manifestation of the greatest love. Indeed, in celebrating the Eucharist, Jesus transforms the evil he will suffer from everyone into the supreme act of redemptive love. Without the Eucharist, Jesus' death would be one of the many unjust deaths that the history of humanity swallows up and then forgets.
Celebrating the Eucharist, we are called to give thanks to God because he has given us Jesus as the lamb of our ransom. We give thanks because Jesus has placed in history with the Eucharist the principle of transformation of reality. In the Eucharist, we are made participants in a love that transforms: just as the bread and wine become the body and blood of the Lord, we are called to bring this transformation to the core of our life, to the most intimate folds of existence.
From every celebration, we learn to live every circumstance of life according to the mystery we celebrate. As Saint Ignatius of Antioch said: Christians are those who live according to the mystery they celebrate; they live affections, work, rest and feast, birth and death according to the mystery they celebrate. The Eucharist is the principle of transformation of all things, starting from our heart up to the whole universe. We celebrate the Eucharist until Jesus returns at the end of time and completes all things, where God will be all in all.