Reflection on Holy Thursday
What is so important about Holy Thursday night is the explicit connection between the institution of the Eucharist and a life of service, that is, the link between the sacrament and works of mercy, works of charity, which includes the commitment to social justice in all its forms. An ardent love of the Eucharist and relative indifference to those who suffer is a love that is essentially a farce.
Christ washes the feet of the Apostles, the dirtiest part of the body, a task reserved for slaves. The life of Christ was a descent. God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, descended and “set up his tent” among us and took the form of a slave, so it is fitting that at this time he would engage in the work of a slave, namely washing feet. All of us without exception are to descend to the level of slaves (Gk: doulou); for the only way to ascend to God is through a descent to the lowest place. God, like water, always seeks the lowest place.
I am reminded of a dream I once had early on in my career as a teacher. I was teaching in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto (a very broken neighborhood) and that year I was assigned a period of chaplaincy. The Vice Principal, a very good man, had just lost his father, and he was struggling with this loss as well as with a group of rather cantankerous staff members who were making his life miserable. One night–it must have been close to 30 years ago–I dreamt I was in a barn. I went to the barn door, the top part of which was open, and looked out. The entire pasture was covered in dung, feces, or cow manure. Over to my left was a beautiful stallion, standing deep in the manure. There was a woman next to the stallion, slightly older than I, but not by much (I was in my 30s), and she grabbed the hoof of the stallion, like a farrier, and with her hand would scoop up the dung and throw it on the ground. She kept doing that. Then she looks over at me and, with a bit of consternation in her voice that I was just watching her, calls me by name and tells me to get out there and help her. And so I did.
That was the dream. When I woke up, I knew exactly what it meant. The woman, I was convinced, was Mary, Our Lady. In that dream, however, she was more like an older sister, and she spoke to me with genuine familiarity. The stallion, I knew immediately, was a symbol of that Vice Principal who was going through a very difficult period in his life, with the loss of his father and the frustrations of having to deal with a very cynical group of teachers on staff. My job was to help her tend to him, wash his feet, serve him, keep him company in his difficulties, encourage him, keep the “crap” that was being spread around from discouraging him. I am reminded of that dream every time I drive to a certain small town in Ontario, for there is a barn on the way that looks exactly like the one in my dream.
We receive Christ’s body in order to become what we eat–Christ. But Christ lost his status, and in first century Palestine, status was everything. He lost it because he had table fellowship with those whom the religious leaders would have nothing to do with– prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners who fail to observe the requirements of the law because they don’t know the law, etc. To share a meal is to enter into intimate communion with all those at table, in this case with those considered to be forsaken by God. Genuine love of the Eucharist will therefore translate into love of others; if not, it is not love of the Eucharist, but love of something else in some way related to the Eucharist, such as ambiance, quiet, or ritual.
English poet and World War I British army chaplain G. Studdert Kennedy warned of those clergy who yearned to keep religion indoors. In 1920, Studdert Kennedy wrote:
The cry that is often raised, that we are going to secularize religion and take the clergy away from their purely “spiritual work,” is the cry of the man who dare not face the Cross. He wants to keep his Christ forever standing amid the lilies of the altar, with the sweet incense of worship rising around him, a weekly refuge from the distraught and vulgar world. He wants to lock Christ up in the Tabernacle, to keep Him in the silence of the secret place, where men must go down on their knees before they touch Him. But Christ wants to come out into the market-place, and down to the streets; He wants to eat and drink with prostitutes, to be mocked and spit upon by soldiers. He wants to call the dishonest trader from his office desk; to stand at his lathe beside the workman; and to bend with the mother over the washtub in the city of mean streets. He wants to go out into the world, that beauty and goodness and truth – beautiful things, good people, and true thought – may grow up around Him wherever He goes. You cannot keep Christ in your churches; He will break them into pieces if you try. He will make for the streets in spite of you, and go on with His own work; defying dead authorities, breaking down tyrannies, destroying shams, declaring open war against a Godless world. And wherever He goes the true Church will go with Him – the Church of those who are forgiven because they are bearing the sins of the world, and have learned how to forgive.
We are called to discover Christ in the Eucharist precisely in order that we might more readily perceive him everywhere. The Blessed Sacrament leads us, “not to a localization” (Studdert Kennedy), but to a deeper sense of the presence of God everywhere in the world, in and among the sick, the poor, the forgotten, and in and among all creation, every part of which sings the praises of God (Dan 3, 56-82).
Image: Paynter, David, 1900-1975. Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57351 [retrieved April 17, 2025]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_College_Chapel_Mural_(2).jpg.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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