Food, Glorious Food! (Holy Thursday 2023)

 

When I was twelve years old, I appeared in Oliver!, a musical based on the story of Oliver Twist. While you may find it surprising when you look at me now, I was one of the starving orphans in the workhouse.

(Even then I didn’t look starving—I failed the audition for the title role because the director remarked that I looked too well fed.)

The workhouse boys’ show-stopping song was a rousing number called “Food, Glorious Food.” Believe it or not, that is the title of my homily this Holy Thursday night.

But please don’t think I’m being irreverent. St. Thomas Aquinas says much the same thing when he calls the Mass a “sacred banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.”

Although the Mass is fundamentally a sacrifice, it is also a meal—a sacred and sacrificial meal. And a meal has to have food.

“That the Eucharist … is a meal shows us that we do not have life in ourselves. We must receive it, eat it … if we refuse to receive, refuse to eat and drink him, we remain without life.” We starve.

That thought comes from a new book on the Eucharist called Bread That is Broken by a Carmelite priest from Belgium, Father Wilfred Stinissen. His opening sentence is: “What is most striking about the Eucharist is that one eats and drinks. The Eucharist has to do with food and drink.”

My first thought was “thanks for telling me what I already know.” But that thought didn’t last long before the author began offering marvellous insights that can deepen our understanding of the Lord’s Supper that we celebrate tonight.

He shows how the Eucharist, which is directed to the new creation, is related to the original creation in which food and drink were very important. When God created Adam and Eve he said “Behold, I have given you every plant … you shall have them for food” (Gen 1:29). The fact that our first parents needed to eat even in paradise reminded them of their fundamental dependence on God. By eating, they were living in communion with God.

And even their Fall had to do with food. After all, Adam and Eve ate the apple.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that when Jesus comes to renew creation, he also comes with food. Both the first creation and the new creation have, in the end, to do with food.

Father Stinissen reminds us that Jesus did not improvise the Eucharist. “He meditated for a long time on what and how he would act when his hour came. That he chose bread and wine was the fruit of an intensive listening to the Holy Spirit.”

The book is filled with startling and fresh things about the two elements Jesus chose to transform into his Body and Blood at the Last Supper.

Father Stinissen starts with the obvious: “Bread is loaded with a rich symbolism that Jesus understood.”

“In the first place, as we hear at the Offertory, bread is the ‘fruit of the earth’.” We hear that all the time, but the book points out that when grain falls into the earth, it draws energy from the earth itself. To sprout it needs “all the powers of heaven: rain, light, warmth, wind”—the entire physical world.”

“The Father places all of creation into the hands of the Son so that he will transform it to his body and thus divinize it.”

This hidden symbolism is matched by something more evident to us: “The bread is also the result of ‘the work of human hands’. There would not be bread if man did not sow, harvest, grind, knead, and bake.”

And all of this work “is or should be a concrete expression of love.” We do not work primarily to nourish ourselves but rather to nourish our family and loved ones. “We are created to give life to others, never to ourselves.”

And “by our work, we create possibilities for deeper fellowship.” That deeper fellowship is expressed when we sit down for meals with others. We even use the expression “breaking bread” together.

Father Stinissen then turns to the wine, in a very interesting way. He points out that bread “is the normal, necessary food. Wine, however, is not necessary. One could be content with water.”

Bread is for survival; wine is for joy.

“Wine,” he says, “is also a symbol of ecstasy … the joy that the wine brings about anticipates the joy of the world to come.”

But that’s not all. “In the Bible, wine is also a symbol of God’s wrath and of suffering and punishment.” We see that when Jesus begs the Father to take away the chalice from him.

Thus, “the Eucharistic wine is a symbol of both joy and suffering. By choosing wine as a sign of his presence and his sacrifice, Jesus indicates that his death, despite all the bitterness it entailed is nevertheless a source of exuberant joy.”

These are just a very few of the new things reading Bread That is Broken taught me about the bread and wine that we will soon consume as the Body and Blood of Christ. I also learned something more general, and I want to share that with you too.

As this little book offered me so much in so few pages, words of St. Paul kept going through my head: in the Letter to the Romans, he exclaims “how deep are the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!”

How much meaning and treasure is in front of us at every Mass—should we not do more to discover these riches?

Yesterday, together with the other priests of the Archdiocese, I renewed my priestly commitments at the Chrism Mass at Holy Rosary Cathedral. I did, of course, look back on thirty-seven happy years, but I also took stock about where I am right now and what the future holds.

Somewhat to my surprise I realized that I am particularly grateful for the fact that I am still learning exciting things about the Eucharist, even after all these years of celebrating Mass.

I suppose there must come a time in the life of lawyers when they pretty well know just about everything there is to know about their area of the law or a time in the career of engineers when there is little more to be learned about building a machine or a skyscraper. And I sure hope there are no pilots who jump up in the middle of a book about flying and exclaim, “Oh! I hadn’t thought about that before!”

But as a priest and a Catholic, I know I can never stop learning about God and his wonderful ways.

Let’s go deeper. The Eucharist is “an excellent school” where we learn and live what Christ wants from us and wants to give us.

And tonight we are in the most privileged of classrooms. As we witness the washing of feet, recalling our Lord’s own wordless teaching, we enter into the heart of the Eucharist. “To be nourished by Jesus in the Eucharist implies that we become nourishment for others ourselves.”

If we eat and drink Love himself, we start to long to make our life a life for others. We live less and less for ourselves, and seek to say in action rather than words “this is my body given up for you.”

I am challenging you—and I’m challenging myself—to deepen our understanding of the Eucharistic sacrifice. For some, this might mean re-reading one of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper. For others, it might mean purchasing this inexpensive book, easily available on Amazon. And of course the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a priceless online resource about the Eucharist.

Tonight’s one-sentence summary tonight is therefore: Let’s not be content with what we already know about the Mass.

But let me give the last word to Father Stinissen, who says “Nothing lies outside of the Eucharist. The answer to the question: ‘How shall I live?’ ought always to be: ‘live Eucharistically’.”

And how do we live Eucharistically? Strengthened by the ‘glorious food’ of the sacred banquet in which Christ is received.