Holy Thursday 2019 - School Prayer Service - Lessons from the Last Supper

We’ve come now to the final hours of Lent. And in just a few hours the Church will gather for the Evening mass of the Lord’s Supper, where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, where he turned bread and wine into his body and blood, where he made his apostles the first priests of the Church, and where Jesus prays, for his disciples.
Jesus,  at his last supper knew he was about to die.  Like a man on his deathbed, he will speak the words that he wants his disciples to remember, the lessons, he wants them to learn.  We hear and see at the Last Supper what is most important to him, what he values most—the priorities of his entire life.  And what are they?  I submit to you, they are three.

First of all, he is going to show us the priority of humility and loving service.  This was just proclaimed in the Gospel.  Consider what happens when Jesus washes feet. God, the creator of the universe, washed the dirty, smelly feet of the disciples who walked on those dusty, muddy, manure-ridden streets of Jerusalem.  God washes feet.

And Jesus says, “I have given you a model to follow”.  Jesus mandates that that we are to serve God and our fellow man in all humility.  Not shunning those dirty, hard, humiliating tasks, but performing them out of duty and love.   Here God shows us how we are to live. Not to trample your neighbor, not to hate your neighbor, but to kneel down before him in service.  So lesson number one: loving, humble service.

The second: At the Last Supper, Jesus gives us the eucharist. Jesus knows he is going to die, and so he turns bread and wine into his body and blood. And he makes his apostles priests, so that they can continue to make the Eucharist available for all of time.

Jesus doesn’t want us to simply remember what happened all those 2000 years ago. He wants to be with us now. This is why when we come into a Catholic church we bend the knee to the tabernacle. To acknowledge that we believe that Jesus is here now. And anytime we want. We can come to Church and know that Jesus is here. We can speak to him, we can kneel in his presence and pray to him. We can know that God loves us and cares for us and wants to be part of our lives. He wants to nourish our souls like food nourishes our bodies so that we can become the people he made us to be.

Finally, at the last supper Jesus prayed. Chapter 17 of St. John’s Gospel contains the longest prayer of Jesus to be recorded in Scripture. The prayer he prayed at the Last supper. In this prayer, he lifts his eyes to heaven, as he will hours later on the cross. And he prays: “Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify you since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”. Jesus’ mission is to help us know God and believe in God, that we may have eternal life.

He then prays: Father, I am giving up my life, that they may be one, that they may be one. Humans have many reasons to be divided. Different color skin, different parents, our families are from different countries, we have different ideas about how the world should work. But Jesus prayed that we may be one. Unity through him, peace through him, eternal life through Him.

May we use the time we have been given to think about how God is calling each of us to grow in those three lessons of Jesus: how we can grow in humble service, how we can open our hearts to the ways God wishes to feed our souls, and how we are called to be one, to work together to bring about God’s kingdom…for the glory of God and salvation of souls.