The Eucharistic Plan

Mass of the Lord’s Supper
    When I was a young kid, one of my favorite pastimes was building stuff with my Legos.  Sometimes I would just put blocks together, but I’m Type A enough that I would always return to the plans that I came with the Lego set.

The Upper Room in Jerusalem

  Christ today sets out for us a plan, a plan centered around the Eucharist, whose institution we celebrate tonight. We don’t hear the entire plan tonight, as we hear just one snippet from John’s Gospel, but we are all (hopefully) familiar enough with what happened on Holy Thursday that we can extrapolate from other Gospel accounts the plan that Jesus gives us for how to follow Him.
    Jesus demonstrates the first part in the Gospel we heard tonight.  John is the only evangelist to recount this beautiful encounter between Christ and His Apostles, His first priests (tonight also celebrates the institution of the priesthood).  Christ takes off his outer garments, and washes the feet of His disciples as a demonstration of love and humility from God.  And this is the first part of our Lord’s plan for following Him: allow Him to come to us and show His love and care.  
    We can often think that we have to make the first move when it comes to our relationship with God.  But that’s not how it works.  God always comes to us first.  Even the desire to know God is itself a gift from God.  God has loved us from all eternity, and He makes His love known to us in real ways.  Maybe that love is the love we receive from our parents.  Or maybe it’s a moment that we acknowledge the presence of God because we sense it deep within ourselves.  But God comes to us to invite us to enter into a relationship with Him.  
    Sometimes that invitation comes to us in ways that unsettle us.  Peter did not want the Lord to wash his feet.  He felt that was beneath the Messiah.  But, let’s be honest: taking on our human flesh is beneath God, inasmuch as the God who created heaven and earth and all that is in them humbles Himself to be bound in time and space, to feel the pressing heat of the day, to get chilled in the cool of the night; to hear a stomach growl because the food didn’t fully satisfy the desires of the body; to lick chaffed lips which had dried out.  God did not need to experience any of that, and yet He did, because of His great love for us.  So, in our desire to be good disciples, good followers of Jesus, we need to be attentive to God revealing Himself to us and sharing His love for us, sometimes in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.
    Secondly, we knew what happened after that.  Matthew, our patron, Mark, and Luke, record it well, and St. Paul speaks of it as well in our second reading: our Eucharistic Lord takes bread and changes it into His Sacred Body; He takes wine and changes it into his Precious Blood.  The second part of God’s plan is to allow Christ to offer Himself for us.  Of course, the offering on Holy Thursday night was a prefigurement of the total offering of self on Good Friday on Calvary.  The Eucharist always points to the sacrifice of the Lamb of God on the altar of the Cross.  But Christ desired that all generations would not only remember, but also share in, the once-for-all sacrifice, and so He gave us His Body and Blood, without which, Jesus says in the Gospel according to St. John, we do not have life within us.  
    That is the great joy of what we celebrate tonight, and at every Mass.  Christ, mindful of our need for Him, offers Himself for us, so that we can have His life flowing within our veins.  If Christ is the Vine and we are the branches, the Eucharist is the sap flowing through the branches, keeping us alive on the vine.  This is one of the greatest sadness of those who walk away from the Catholic Church: no matter how good the preaching is; no matter how much the music moves them; no matter what other programs are offered; they lack the spiritual sustenance which keeps us alive in Christ.  Tonight should not only stir up in us the sense of how much we need Christ feeding us, but also encourage us to reach out to those who have fallen away, and bring them back, first to the mercy of God in confession, so that they can fruitfully receive the Body of Christ and restore them to life.
    Third, and all the Gospel writers communicate this action, Christ goes out with His Apostles.  In the case of our Lord, He goes to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray to His Father for the strength to endure the Passion which awaited Him.  But the Eucharist does not mean we hunker down and stay hidden from the world.  It means we go out, to take that life and share it with others by the increased joy and love that we have because of Christ.  The going out, as Christ shows us, is not always easy, and sometimes involves great pain and sacrifice.  But the Upper Room is not an end in itself.  Our worthy reception of Holy Communion should push us out, like an infant who wants to leave the comfort of the womb in order to begin to realize a fuller potential.

An olive tree in Gethsemane which existed at the time of Jesus

    So, this pattern for us is: to allow Christ to come to us, even in unexpected ways; to receive spiritual nourishment from Christ Himself; and to then allow that spiritual nourishment to push us out and follow God’s will.  All of our Catholic life can be broken down into one of those three parts of the plan for us following Christ.  And they all happen, or are meant to happen, time and time again throughout our lives, in this continuing cycle on our pilgrimage to heaven.  
    Build with the plans God has given us.  Allow God to come to you tonight, in whatever way He wants to.  Receive worthily the Eucharist and be fed by God to have strength for God’s mission for you.  Joyfully share the love and truth of God which you have received in Holy Communion.  The plan may include heartbreak and suffering; it may take us out of our comfort zones.  But the plan will help us to be the disciples and the saints that God wants us to be, and so transform the world according to the plan of God.