Reflection for Holy Thursday: Eucharist Amid the Ruins, April 9, 2020
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TRIDUUM 2020
Holy Thursday
The Solemnity of the Lord’s Supper
Parish of Holy Cross—St. John the Baptist
Midtown Manhattan
Eucharist amid the ruins
Empty tables.
Empty tables, stacked chairs, shuttered windows, shattered lives.
Candor demands the admission that New York City is a boastful town: Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim Museum… you get the point. Indeed, among its most prideful claims is the quality and quantity of its culinary options available to locals and international visitors alike. Current estimates suggest 27,000 or so eateries to be found in the city, with barely less than 11,000 in the borough of Manhattan alone. Foodies one and all – we expect it to be virtually impossible not to find just about any cuisine from around the globe.
Except not now. Not here. Not amidst this biological menace whose scope and duration elude calculation or corralling. Empty tables. Have we savored our last meal here?
As we commence this year’s Triduum – the heart of our liturgical worship commemorating the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, our Passover from death to life indestructible – the Table of the Lord remains a table of plenty. Yet we can only gaze from afar through our church doors and windows now shuttered to prevent unspeakable death tolls beyond comprehension. And so, we join our Jewish forebears in exile: We have in our day no prince, prophet, or leader, burnt offering, sacrifice, oblation, or incense, no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you.
The synoptic accounts of the Last Supper imply that there were other meals preceding it – a good many in fact. All our canonical gospels attest to this, as well as the scandal Jesus triggered among those who exercised leadership among Judaic believers: This man eats with sinners and tax collectors! Meals with Jesus always bore the prospective of controversy, accusation, tumult and disorientation. The Last Supper was no different.
Amid our present dislocations, it is helpful to remember the ruptures and apprehensions present at the Table of the Lord on this night. The night he associated the entirety of his life and mission with the Eucharistic banquet intended to accompany his disciples through thick and thin. Indeed, on the night he was betrayed.
On this night, those Jesus had drawn most intimately into his life and mission exhibited a general incomprehension of the depth of his desire. Peter, especially, proved himself unable to recognize or receive the profundity of the foot-washing towel with which Jesus approached him. Later, of course, as calamity morphed into deathly foreboding, Peter would rescue himself by feigning ignorance of the man.
On a night crumbling into ruins, the figure of Judas Iscariot remains singular. His motivations, anxieties, hesitancies and calculations remain forever concealed from our thoughts and assessments. Nevertheless, his fateful decision occasioned Jesus’ arrest in a gloomy garden as his trusted companions first slept, then fled. The establishment of the Eucharist and its ensuing celebration is decidedly not without its tragedies and threats.
This is true for us, right now, right here. The existing imposition of our provisional fast from the Table of the Lord on this most holy night nullifies neither its promise of deliverance nor its provision of strength for the journey through thick and thin. Our current moment represents not our abandonment, but our being swept up into the salvific mystery of a crucified and risen Lord.
These halting observations have been expressed far more succinctly, more aptly in the final decade of the 20th century by the accomplished sacramental theologian David Power:
The memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection is today celebrated amid the ruins. There are first the ruins of a Catholic piety that for four centuries seemed to hold Eucharistic devotion at the center of church life. When faulted for its inadequate basis in scriptural origins and early church tradition, it seemed to fall asunder. It remains in ruins, whatever nostalgic efforts are at times made to recapture it …
It collapsed along with the nineteenth century Catholicism that had attempted to protect people against modernity and the rise of a post-Christian society …
The ruins of the ecclesiastical edifice are found amid the ruins of an idyllic age of civilization marked by the conviction of progress in things human. Ironically, when the Christian churches became alert to modernity this latter was itself at the point of collapse. The coherence of states and societies within themselves began to dissolve as people contended over the values that must prevail for the human good. The coherence of a world order collapses as political, cultural and economic empires crumble and interaction between populaces is endangered …
The eucharist makes the church. It makes it as G-D’s covenant people. It makes it in the memory of Christ’s suffering, into which the memory of all human suffering is to be gathered. It makes it as a witness, in the midst of the collapse of the human, to G-D’s fidelity and love. Paradoxically, the sacrament can take on new shape as a coherent church action to the extent that Eucharistic memorial is alert to the human, to the ruins in the midst of which it is celebrated, to the victims of human history and the sufferings that show forth when the edifice of the human collapses.¹
Our time of danger and chaos is enfolded into the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. As ambiguous the end of our exile, as indeterminate the path forward, ours is a truly eucharistic moment – passage from death and its long shadow to life in the embrace of the G-D revealed in Jesus Christ.
Empty tables, stacked chairs, shuttered windows, shattered lives … rescued, renewed, raised up.
Eucharist amid the ruins.
¹ David Power, The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition, (New York: Crossroad. 1992): vii-viii.