This is a night of mixed emotions. We began with joy and exaltation, proclaiming the love of Christ, which He demonstrates this night with His example of humble service, with His gift to the Church of His Body and Blood, and with His priesthood that will perpetuate this gift until He comes again. The bells rang out as we sang the Gloria for the first time since the beginning of Lent. But now the bells will be silent for 48 hours, and an eery clacking will take their place.

          We began singing “Lift High the Cross” as an approximation of the words the Church would place on our lips in the entrance antiphon: “We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This seems strange, to begin this joyful night by recalling the Cross upon which the Lord will suffer tomorrow. But do we not at every Mass, as the Eucharist is consecrated, hear that this great and beautiful mystery took place, “on the day before He was to suffer”? On this night alone the Church prays, “On the day before He was to suffer for our salvation and the salvation of all, that is, today,” as She recalls with solemnity tonight’s events.

          It is tonight, after this great and beautiful gift, that the betrayer will take the morsel and leave, “and it was night.” It is tonight when the Lord will tell the chief priests and elders, “But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

          At the same time, while we see the forces of darkness bearing down on the Lord’s chosen One, fulfilling all the words that David and the prophets spoke of Him long ago, Christ is completely in control. Through it all, a marvelous plan is unfolding. For the past few weeks, we have read almost exclusively from St. John’s Gospel. Most of us know that John’s Gospel differs significantly from the other three. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke devote the bulk of their Gospels to the Lord’s teachings and miracles in Galilee, John tells us almost exclusively of the events that take place in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, the city of His ancestor David, the city where His destiny is to be accomplished, the city of the royal priesthood, the city of the Temple sacrifice, of the one place where God meets man.

John begins His stirring account of the Last Supper with these beautiful words, “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” Every gesture is pregnant with meaning. Every act is filled with drama and power.

While we heard on Sunday from St. Luke of the blood that dripped from our Lord’s brow because the intensity of His agonized prayer to the Father, St. John tells us of no agony in that garden tonight. He doesn’t mean to deny that it happened, but he wants to leave us with the very clear impression that it is Jesus who is in control. Right before the Last Supper, John tells us of our Lord’s words anticipating His coming Passion: “And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.”

Instead of the agonized prayer and the bloody sweat, we will hear in St. John’s Passion tomorrow that when they went to the Garden after the Last Supper tonight, “Jesus, knowing all that was to befall him, came forward and said to them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ They answered him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am he.’ … When he said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground.” He has not been caught in their trap. They, unknowingly, are in His.

John will not tell us about those agonizing words reported by St. Matthew: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Instead, “After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), ‘I thirst.’” Jesus is completely in control.

All this drama is present as our Lord rises from table, removes His outer garment, and shockingly begins to wash the feet of His disciples. Here we see St. John’s affirmation of what St. Matthew told us yesterday, on Spy Wednesday, when the betrayer went to sell the Lord to the chief priests and the elders. In a stunning and precise fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah, they give him thirty pieces of silver.

This was not an arbitrary sum. It was not what they happened to have on hand. In the Mosaic law, which those chief priests and elders knew like the back of their hand, thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave. It was what you owed to a slave’s owner, if your ox gored his slave in the field. “Thus was I valued by men.”

On the night on which the Israelites were set free from slavery, the true lamb foretold by the blood marking the Israelites’ doorposts, finally setting them free from centuries of servitude in Egypt, on that night, the true lamb is sold, as a slave.

We saw four weeks ago that the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years, not because of the distance of the journey, but because the entire generation that came out from Egypt had to die – a generation that only knew how to be slaves. Thus, during the season of Lent, we having been asking ourselves, “What is the part of me that only knows how to be a slave? What is the part of me that needs to die?”

But in two nights we will cry out, “O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!” Tonight, as He is betrayed, as knowing everything that is to befall Him, He still loves His disciples to the end, He becomes a slave, or in those daring words of St. Paul, He became sin, so that with His death tomorrow and His Resurrection after three days, He will ransom all of us who, without Him, would only know how to be slaves. Through it all, a marvelous plan has been unfolding. There has been a plan all along, and now is the time for the works of God to be revealed.

As we have heard countless times, every time that the Church celebrates the Eucharist, we are mystically present at the Last Supper, and at Calvary. This is why we call it the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, because the Eucharist is an anticipation of how He will give His life away: “This is my body,” He says in the Cenacle, and on the Cross. The Cross without the supper, without the free and loving gift of His Body and Blood, would be only death, only torture and pain, and it could not save. But tonight, He transforms His sacrifice of tomorrow into a free offering of love.

Likewise, the Eucharist, without the sacrifice of the Cross, would be cheap love, a love without cost. But together, we have the presence of Christ in the midst of the darkest suffering. We have the transformation of every pain and sorrow, the redemption of every failure and disappointment. This is the gift of the Eucharist: the gift not of a thing, but of a person, of a mystery, that takes hold of us, that re-shapes our very being, that makes us new. Here, the old things are passing away: “Over ancient forms of worship, newer rites of grace prevail.” And something incredibly new is coming.

This mystery is so great that He gave up His life to give it to you. So He is entirely right to ask everything of you in return. It is a mystery worth giving up your life for as well. It is worth letting go of the part of you that only knows how to be a slave, it is worth saying “yes” to that deeper desire of your heart, the desire for Him that transcends all that attracts you in this life to obtain the gift that costs no less than everything … something given and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, A.D. MMXXV