Homily for Holy Thursday, Mass of the Lord’s Supper

April 17, 2025
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14
Psalm 116:12-13, 15-18
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

One of the traps that frequently ensnare us as practicing Catholics is a misunderstanding that the focus of our religious life is to become a good person. The problem is that we begin to assess ourselves by comparison with other people instead of examining our conscience in light of the Commandments and in conversation with Christ. We soon accept the self-assessment that we are good enough because we have not committed the gravely evil actions we see in others portrayed in the sensationalism of contemporary media. We adapt a stance of false humility and soon become tepid in our love for Christ. He soon becomes a casual acquaintance.

This is what we see in the example of Peter in tonight’s Gospel when he says to Jesus, “You will never wash my feet.” In other words, I do not need this, and I am self-sufficient. I am good enough and I do not need a savior.

I have heard many self-identified Catholics utter the phrase, “I’m a good person,” simply because they have not killed someone or robbed a bank. As a result, it seems like they think that they more or less have “mastered” the values of Christianity because they have avoided committing a few grievously evil acts which nearly every human being — religious or not — knows to avoid. “Why do I need to go to confession? What have I done?” It is too easy to justify ourselves.

This self-justification leads me to think that a big reason for many Catholics to stop practicing the Faith is that they conclude that they have no need of a Savior…because they have justified themselves as good enough. The mystery of the Triduum shows us that this is a grievous error.

God loves us in the gift of His Son and in this gift rejects this evil spirit of self-justification. In the first letter of St. John, the Apostle writes, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us…If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His Word — [God’s Word] — is not in us.” As Jesus puts it to Peter in today’s Gospel, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”

As Benedict XVI observed, “Peter had to learn repeatedly that God’s greatness is different from our idea of greatness; that it consists precisely in stooping low, in the humility of service, in the radicalism of love even to total self-emptying. We too must learn it anew because we systematically desire a god of success and not the God of the Passion; because we are unable to realize that the Pastor comes as a Lamb that gives itself and thus leads us to the right pasture.”

In stooping down to wash our feet — in stooping down in His Passion and His Death — our Lord reveals the truth that we are exceedingly small and can never lift ourselves up to heaven. Only He can do that — and He does so through His humble stooping down to us in His Incarnation, in His Life, in His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and in His continuing presence in the Scriptures, the Eucharist, in the poor, and in His humble Body, the Church. The Lord’s humility reveals to us our true condition: we are small, sinful creatures who cannot have life or an inheritance with God without communion with Jesus our Savior.

The Lord’s humility reveals to us also that we cannot receive Him in the Eucharist without the grace of forgiveness, the willingness to accept forgiveness and the willingness to change, being washed clean first in Baptism, and more pointedly renewed in that purity through the grace and absolution offered in the sacrament of Reconciliation. We soon lose not only our awareness of our sinfulness but also our friendship with Jesus.

This world that we know is a world that is passing away because of ingratitude to God and a refusal to love. We cannot transform ourselves on our own. To die and to rise with Christ sacramentally purges us from sin. Then in this grace we may rightly do as He commanded and eat His Flesh and drink His Blood, so that we might become one with Him. This night calls us to keep watch with Christ, to humble ourselves, to give of ourselves, to allow ourselves to be washed, to let ourselves be fed, and to let ourselves be converted in love. For our blessing cup is a communion in the Blood of Christ.