Dear brothers and sisters, this evening we gather in memory of that Sacred Supper which Our Lord Jesus entrusted to the Church as a Banquet of Love. We come, in the Holy Spirit, to carry out the sweetest of tasks for any Catholic and say thanks to God Our Father and His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, for the surpassing gift of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for the Sacred Food of Holy Communion and for His real, abiding Presence among us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. We come to celebrate the Liturgy which the Son of God, Our Friend and Saviour, instituted at the point when He showed how perfect His love was for the world, being about to hand Himself over to death for the salvation of all peoples.
We come to say: ‘Thank-you, Jesus!’, but we are also here to pray for our world that it may grasp in this precious keepsake of Our Redeemer the depths of God’s love for humanity and the kind of life He offers our troubled planet in His Death.
The book of Exodus reminds us how the first Passover Meal, which is a type and shadow of the Holy Mass, was instituted while God’s People were still in slavery in Egypt and took place during a night when God allowed His Angel to unleash terrible wrath and manifest His awful might.
In parts of the world today, for our Christian brothers and sisters, these are times of similar fear and threats of subjection. In the Middle East and Africa fanatical religions are unleashing a new terror that has nothing to do with God or His Divine Justice, even if they claim, blasphemously, such atrocities are done in His name.
Recently I visited a family who have come to Paisley to find sanctuary here from Syria. It was a bitter sweet visit as they told me of the injustice they faced there that made them flee. Displaced from their homes and shops Christians have to find money to live in exile and are forced to sell their property for as little as 5% of its value to Muslim neighbours who get loans, they say, from local mafias funded by the United Nations. Their neighbours want them out,
to cut them off from their land so that the name of Jesus may be quickly forgotten. These Christian families feel they have no option but to migrate but the West insists they stay there to keep a Christian presence in the interests of post-war rebuilding and so 90% of refugees turn out to be Muslim. My meeting with this family was tearful but they were most grateful. It was a consolation that someone really heard their plight, and those of their brethren still trapped there, and believed their story. Yet, I could not get out of my head the thought that truly the world has conspired to make these Christians like new sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.
As we gather this evening, too, the blood is hardly dry of the four Missionary of Charity nuns who were shot dead by extremists at a care home in Yemen. Pope Francis noted how these martyrs of today, who gave their blood for the Church, are not on the covers of Western newspapers. He went on to say they are victims also of a globalisation of indifference, of a world that really just does not care.
We should add that these fanatical sects are just as ready to slaughter their own co-religionists for what they call apostasy. Many of us, too, know the Muslim brethren among us in these isles to be nothing but kindness itself. It is not any religion that is the problem but fanaticism which is the scourge. For these, the logic of domination through terror and of enslavement to diabolical ideologies seems to know no limit.
For the People of God in Egypt, when all around them was similar fear, desolation and oppression, and their freedom and security seemed far distant memories, the institution of the Passover Meal stood out as a prophetic sign that those days, though dark, were well and truly numbered by God. For them the celebration of the Passover was to be, even amid terror and darkness, an event of hope. The blood of the Lamb was a sign they would be spared impending retribution so they partook of the Sacred Meal and had Holy Communion with the Lamb with defiant faith, dressed for a march to freedom and ready for a journey of new life.
Nor were they disappointed! The hour of the Passover Meal did, in fact, trigger the unexpected arrival of God’s decisive justice in world affairs and was the occasion whereby their oppressors could no longer resist God’s will and had to let the people go. The Passover Meal brought God’s justice into world affairs.
But this was not its most significant feature. The overriding feature of the Passover Meal was that, by it, God brought about something entirely new in the world. The Passover did not just make things better by establishing God’s justice but created a completely new world order in the region. A striking sign of its newness was the Lord’s command that the national calendar be recalibrated by the Meal and world time reset by it. Thereafter the month and the year of the Meal would be like a new ‘year dot’, a fresh start for the whole region.
All this helps us to understand how the Holy Mass or New Passover is ordered not just to feeding the Church but contains a striking capacity to effect unexpected social change, to bring lasting justice in our times and even to arrange a new world order.
In this new Passover Meal God finds a way to peace not by wreaking vengeance on His enemies but by the sacrifice of His Only Son.
On Him lies a punishment calculated to bring world peace, and through His wounds the world is saved. The New Meal reveals that peace comes not by human retribution but by divine reconciliation. God shows His love is perfect not just in loving His friends to the end but even His enemies without condition, bending down to wash the feet of unclean men where necessary, so that all people can find something in common with each other by copying Him. In the Mass we see that. Though the Father had put everything into His hands, Jesus uses this prerogative not to set nation and religion against religion and nation, but to serve all mankind without discrimination, whether friend or betrayer. In the Eucharist His Church learns to copy His example that brings true justice and peace.
St. Paul does not attempt to understand how such a Sacrifice, celebrated in small communities throughout the world, can bring justice and peace and a new world order. He simply
passes on what he received. Perhaps he knew it would take generations of prayer and reflection to grasp the power of the Sacrifice of the Mass to change the world. He did know that the Proclamation of the Death of the Son of God, so that no other group need pay the price of vengeance, would be open to the world until He comes again.
Tonight let us commend our suffering brother and sisters and our troubled earth into the hands of our Mother Mary, whose flesh gave the world the Body of Christ and who was perfectly united with Her Son in the New Passover. Through Her Maternal intercession may our celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass never leave us indifferent to the plight of our brethren throughout the world, especially in the Middle East and Africa, but make us pray and work urgently for reconciliation and a new world of peace, freedom and faith.