Homily of the Most Reverend Earl K. Fernandes,
Bishop of Columbus
Mass of the Lord’s Supper, April 17, 2025
St. Joseph Cathedral, Columbus, Ohio
This evening as we gather for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper and enter into the Sacred Triduum, I am reminded of Josef Pieper’s book Leisure as the Basis of Culture. Pieper contended, even in 1947, that the modern economy has made the men and women of our day slaves to the total work state. The remedy for this is leisure, which isn’t simply the absence of work or vacation or taking the weekend off, but actually doing something for the sake of the enjoyment of the thing rather than for its usefulness. Pieper continues that the highest form of leisure is worship.
The purpose of creation is to come into God’s rest and worship God. The first and greatest commandment is to worship God alone. Adam and Eve in Paradise worshipped God before they sinned. The angels and saints in heaven worship God. The goal of our existence as disciples is to be saints to worship God in heaven. But what do we mean by “worship”?
A negative connotation of worship is falling down in submission to kiss the ground or the feet of a king. I don’t think this is why God created us! While we recognize God’s kingship, he did not make us to be his slaves, but to live in the freedom as his sons and daughters. God heard the cries of the Hebrews who were enslaved in Egypt, and, led them to freedom in that first Passover, through the hand of his servant Moses.
A positive and correct connotation of worship is to express love and devotion for God. When I was a child, I learned from the Baltimore Catechism. The third question in Lesson 1 asks, “Why did God make us?” The answer is that “God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” The next question asks, “What must we do to gain the happiness of heaven?” The answer is, “To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world.” The 5th question asks, “From whom do we learn to know, love and serve God?” The answer is, “We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.”
This is what Jesus shows us in the Gospel today: how to know, love and serve God. To know someone in the biblical sense is to be intimate with that person – to love them. At the Last Supper, Jesus gave us the gift of the Eucharist to share His love with us in the most intimate way possible: by coming into our hearts in Holy Communion.
In response to God’s love, Jesus asks us to imitate His love by serving others, which He demonstrates by washing the feet of His disciples. The mandatum or the ritual of the washing of the feed, I carried out at Pickaway Correctional this afternoon. Jesus wanted to communicate God’s love. Our God is not simply a God who is high in the sky, unknowable, and impersonal. No. Our God draws near to us. In His love, he is concerned about small things, and since He knows that we are made in His image and likeness, He sees us not as small and insignificant, but as great and worthy of His love. Jesus draws near to give us a share in the love He shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit.
He is near to us in the Sacrament of His Love, which He left us as a perpetual memorial – the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. This He gave to us, and in this Sacrament, He remains with His Church, even in the darkest times, even until the end of time, because despite human weakness and sinfulness, even in the Church’s ministers, His love for us does not cease.
In the Gospel, Jesus washed the feet of all of His disciples. He even washed the feet of Judas, such was His love. Knowing what Judas would do, He still loved Him. Still, Jesus says: You are clean, but not all. God loves us, but He does not force His love upon us. Judas’ love for money, his wanting to esteem himself among the enemies of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, and his lack of true concern for the poor are reminders of what it means to be unclean. He lives his life by worldly criteria of success, and, in the process, forgets about love. Not only does he forget about love, he rejects Love itself.
Of this mystery of iniquity, St. Charles Borromeo writes: “In this affair, we can only stand in wonderment at the detestable perversity of the traitor who could not be moved by fear of the Lord, nor reverence for his majesty, nor by the innocence of life, nor by the magnitude of the benefits he had received.”
This should cause all of us to pause to reflect on our own lives and fidelity to the Lord, to thank Him for the many blessings and graces we have received. We can ask ourselves: On what is my heart truly set – the things of this world or the things of the Lord? Furthermore, we are invited to consider the goodness of the Lord.
St. Charles continues: “But all the more worthy of wonder is the goodness of the Lord, who seeing and knowing the obstinacy of the traitor, did not cease to treat him with goodness and instead tried to soften his obdurate heart with every kind of benefit, leaving us an example so that we too might seek rather the conversion of our enemies rather than their ruin, and try to gain their souls rather than lose them” (In Sancti Caroli Borromei Homiliae, ed. Joseph A. Sax, Milano: Ioseph Marcellum, 1747-1748, vol. 1, Homilia II, 8-15)
Jesus commands us to celebrate the Eucharist and to serve others. In our Catholic “language”, we do not talk frequently about going to church to worship God as much as we speak about attending Mass, celebrating the Eucharist, and receiving Holy Communion. Of course, all of this is worship in the true sense of expressing our love and devotion for God, but they emphasize more specific aspects of our worship. The word Eucharist means to give thanks: we thank God for His love. The word Mass means to be sent out: Jesus sends us out to love and serve others. The word Communion emphasizes our oneness with God.
Commenting on the mystery of the Eucharist, St. Thomas Aquinas writes: “Material food first changes into the one who eats it, and then, as a consequence, restores to him lost strength and increases his vitality. Spiritual food, on the other hand, changes the person who eats it into itself. Thus, the effect proper to this Sacrament is the conversion of a man into Christ, so that he may no longer live, but Christ lives in him; consequently, it has the double effect of restoring the spiritual strength he had lost by his sins and defects, and of increasing the strength of his virtues.” (St. Thomas, Commentary on Book IV of the Sentences, d.12, q.2, a.11)
Elsewhere, he writes: “Since it was the will of God’s only-begotten Son that men should share in His divinity, He assumed our nature in order that by becoming man He might make men gods. . . . Yet, in the end, no one can fully express the sweetness of this sacrament, in which spiritual delight is tasted at its very source, and in which we renew the memory of that surpassing love for us which Christ revealed in His passion. It was to impress the vastness of this love more firmly upon the hearts of the faithful that our Lord instituted this sacrament at the Last Supper. As He was on the point of leaving the world to go to the Father, after celebrating the Passover with His disciples, He left it as a perpetual memorial of His passion.” (Opusculum 57, in festo Corporis Christi, lect. 1-4).
As we celebrate the institution of the ministerial priesthood and the Holy Eucharist tonight, let us thank God for this great gift, by which we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. As we are transformed into Christ by the very person Whom we receive in Holy Communion, may we be healed of our defects and strengthened to serve our brothers and sisters.