The Desiring God: Homily for Holy Thursday

Desiderio desideravi                                                 
hoc Pascha manducare vobiscum,                          
antequam patiar                                                       

 

I have earnestly desired

to eat this Passover with you

before I suffer.

                                                        (Lk 22:15) 

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ. Tonight we celebrate the great gift that, quite literally, allows the Church to be. The great gift of the Eucharist, the real body and blood of Our Lord, that allows us to become the mystical body of Christ.

Listening carefully to the words from the Gospel of Luke, we can attempt to plumb the depths of the desire that Our Lord expresses, for it is when we begin to appreciate the depths of that longing, that we can begin to appreciate the depths that our own response must fathom.

              “Desiderio desideravi”

Earnestly, or greatly have I desired. In other words, “I have longed.” An appreciation of the depth of this longing desire, must commence from the fact that this was not the first time that God sat with humans and ate with them. In Genesis (18: 1-8) we read of Abraham entertaining three angels – understood to be the Trinity – to a meal. In Exodus (24:9-11) Moses and the elders were privileged to eat with God. But these meals do not compare with the meal that Our Lord was preparing for his disciples when He said these words. This was no ordinary meal, it was the memorial meal of the Passover – remembering the time when God saved the people of Israel from death and rescued them from Pharaoh. We can appreciate now, the depth of the desire of God, it was from the time of this first Passover that He wished to share the Passover meal with us. And not just any Passover, but this particular one, when He would finally become the very lamb that would be sacrificed.

In his letter to the Hebrews (9:26), St. Paul teaches that Our Lord:

appeared once for all at the end of the ages for the removal of sin by the sacrifice of himself

The Paschal Lamb that until then was only a promise, only a shadow, of the Saviour to come, would now finally achieve its fullness!

In his letter to the Galatians (4:4-5) the apostle Paul captures this desire well:

when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.

In other words, God the Father, and in obedience His Son, were waiting, not simply from the time of the first Passover, they were waiting for this moment for centuries, since the fall of Adam which they were now, in association with the Holy Spirit, going to undo. Adam, who had willingly sundered himself from God, was now going to be brought back into communion with the Trinity.

The words, fullness, could also be used to evoke the fullness of a pregnant woman’s belly. How great must be her desire to hold the child that she holds in her belly and will, in the fullness of time, issue forth! Our Lord, to whom belongs all time and all the ages, was similarly filled with like desire, though perhaps greater, since the child He would birth from the sacred wound on His side (John 19:34), would be the Church itself.

And as his words “antequam patiar” reveal to us, Our Lord was fully aware of what was to follow, that after “hoc Pascha” His Body would be broken, most finally on the Cross. Pope Francis, in his Apostolic Letter Desiderio desideravi (2022) teaches us:

Only a few hours after the Supper, the apostles could have seen in the cross of Jesus, if they could have borne the weight of it, what it meant for Jesus to say, “body offered,” “blood poured out.”

His desire to eat this Paschal meal with us, corresponds directly to His desire to offer up and pour our His blood for us. As St. John (15:13) tells us in his Gospel:

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

How does one respond to the depths of such desire? How does one love Him in return?

Speaking to us from across the centuries, St. Athanasius teaches us:

Above all, however, I wish to remind you and myself along with you that the Lord does not want us to come irreverently or unprepared to the Easter feast. We must have our doctrine straight, follow the proper liturgy, and do all things properly. The historical record of Israel’s feast tells us, “No foreigner, no slave purchased with money, no uncircumcised man, may eat the Passover.”

The first step toward responding to this love, towards the return of His desire, is reverence. We proceed towards Easter with reverence. And reverence above all, on this sacred night, towards Jesus really and truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.

Tonight we worship Him in adoration, on bended knees, and in silent worship. In three days, we will commune with Him more substantially. And so that we may be prepared for this great feast St. Athanasius reminds us:

no uncircumcised man, may eat the Passover

As I have preached before, the circumcision that Our Lord wishes of us is the circumcision of our heart (Deu 10:16, Jer 4: 4). And how do we circumcise the stony ground of our sinful hearts? We apply a blade, the blade of the spiritual plough to the soil of our hearts, so that the imperishable seed of Christ, born at the table of the Last Supper, may find rich soil in our hearts, instead of stony, thorny hearts. This blade is, of course, the soul-searching that we do prior to a confession, and the sacramental confession that we submit to, so that absolved of these and other sins we may have forgotten, we may appear before Him, with hearts of flesh, and give Him residence within these hearts of ours reverently, so that our own hearts may burn with the fire of His Sacred Heart.

St. Paul’s words regarding to reverence for the Eucharist we consume are well known:

For all who eat and drink [in an unworthy manner] without discerning the [Lord’s] body, eat and drink judgment against themselves (1 Cor 11:27-32).

More recently, reading through his letter to the Hebrews (10: 29), I realized that first Corinthians was not the only time he warned us to approach the Most Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord with reverence.

How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?

When we approach this perfect food irreverently, my dear brothers and sisters, and without preparing our hearts, we effectively profane the blood of the covenant by which we have been sanctified in baptism. When we receive communion on our hands and then consume Him casually, we do worse than trample Him underfoot; He who gave us of Himself with such great desire.

In other words, the reverence we must reserve for the great gift we celebrate today, is at least two fold; a physical reverence, where we approach and consumer the Body and Blood of Our Lord in a solemn and dignified manner; and a spiritual reverence where we do not permit His presence within us unless we have been sacramentally cleansed.

This evening, sacramentally prepared to return His love, let us approach the altar of repose, and in the silence of this sacred night, listen to Him speaking to us:

Long have I waited,

For your coming, 

Home to me and,
Living deeply our new life.

 

(This homily was written exclusively for a virtual audience.)

Know Him! Homily for Palm Sunday

when he entered Jerusalem
the whole city was shaken and asked, "Who is this?"
And the crowds replied,
"This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee."

The crowd’s response, from the Gospel according to Matthew, read at the start of the procession with palms, intends to tell us who Jesus is. The crowd’s response, however, merely gives us a geographical indicator, that He grew up in Nazareth, in Galilee and that He is a prophet. If we reflect on it, we realise how imprecise this response is!

Prophet, we know that He is not. We also know that Our Lord’s residence in Nazareth in Galilee was the reason why many refused to recognize Him as the Messiah (Jn 7: 41-42).

The crowd’s response does not tell us enough. And so, we must ask again, “Who is this”?

In his Introduction to Christianity, Pope Benedict XVI suggests that we Christians need to ask this question to be:

in accordance with the interior law of love, which wants to know more and more him to whom it has given its Yes, so as to be able to love him more. (Introduction to Christianity, Benedict XVI, Communio Books, 2000, p.80)

Asking this question is important, because the Catholic identity MUST rest on a personal encounter with Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is only when we know Him personally, and intimately, that ours is a living faith, resting in our engagement with a living God.

A deeper, more profound, response to the question of Our Lord’s identity is offered to us today in the reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

he was in the form of God

Ancient Christian commentators on the Bible draw our attention to the fact that it is not said of Our Lord that He was of the “likeness” of God – this would be a description of Adam, and ourselves, who were made in the likeness of God (Gen 1:27). The Son is of the form of God. He shared, from before time began, and continues to do so, in the very essence of God (Jn 1: 1-2). Let us be clear, therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, that it is wrong to think, as so many are wont to do, of Jesus as simply a good man, an excellent man even. Nor is Our Lord one among many prophets and preachers, offering one way among many others. No! He was of the very form of God! He is, therefore, unique, and His way is the Truth, and above all, Life!

Despite being one with God, present before all time, He took:

the form of a slave,
    coming in human likeness

Recognizing this fact about the person we greet with palms allows us to also understand something about ourselves – children of Adam. This, my dear brothers and sisters, is who we are; slaves, because unlike Him who existed from the beginning and was never made, we were made, from mud – as we were reminded at the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday – and owe our very existence to Him, who made us (Jn 1: 3). Even if he had not died for us on the cross, to rescue us from sin, He would have still been our king.

St. Paul then develops this fact further:

though he was in the form of God,
    [He] did not regard equality with God
    something to be grasped.

The crucial feature of Our Lord is His humility. In these lines, my dear brothers and sisters, we grasp the heart of who Our Lord is and His difference. We see here, the difference between the Son of God, and Adam. Adam, despite being a creation of the Most High, i.e. a slave, sought in his arrogance, to “be like God” (Gen 3: 5). This is the mistake that has also been committed throughout time by the descendants of Adam (Gen 11: 4), right until our time, where we seek to set ourselves up as gods, and rival God.

It was to remedy this fault in our nature that:

he emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

Humility, that is recognizing our reality as slaves before God, is the primary lesson Our Lord teaches us, by taking the leap from heaven into our human form and nature.

And;

found human in appearance,
    he humbled himself,
    becoming obedient to the point of death,
    even death on a cross.

In obedience, the Son emptied Himself, not just at His conception in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when He took on our human form and nature. At the Last Supper, He went further, stripping Himself and washed the feet of His disciples (Jn 13: 3-8), offering us an example to follow. He deepened this example when, after the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane (Mt26: 36-42), He consented to die the cruel and agonizing death of the criminal on the Cross, demonstrating to us the real meaning of love, which is distinct from the cuddles and cuteness that Hollywood and the media feed us.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (Jn 15: 13)

This is the nature of Him who we greet with palms, my dear brothers and sisters, this is who He is. And these facts, and this knowledge of Him, has, MUST have, implications for the way we live, as I have just described, and for the way we worship.

… at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,    
    and every tongue confess that
    Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

If we are worshiping God and King, our maker and our Lord, can we treat Him at the Holy Mass as if He were merely a friend? Can we be casual with the way in which we approach the altar and communion?

He is, of course, our friend, He has said so with His own lips (Jn 15:15). But, do we not know from our social lives that when we are admitted into the company of those who are superior to us, we are always wary of presumption, conscious that we have been offered a privilege and must never abuse it, always treating this person with respect?

I recently encountered a reel on social media which pointed out that genuflection is the one thing that distinguishes us as Catholic. And yet, this bending of the knee has all but disappeared from the practice of our faith. Is it because of a lack of humility before Him who saved us? Or the lack of obedience to the traditions of our Holy Mother Church?

Knowing that God became man, gave up His life for us, does it not behoove us to treat the Mass, treat every Mass, not simply as a coming together of a community, but a solemn recollection, and representation, of the sorrowful sacrifice at Calvary?

When we receive communion, does it not make sense that we take care that we have confessed prior, so that this precious Body and Blood of Our Lord may not be placed in an unworthy receptacle? Furthermore, can we be casual in the way in which we receive and consume the precious Host?

This Palm Sunday, let us continue with this Mass, and return to our homes, in solemn appreciation of who our Lord is, and with this knowledge then keep repeating:

Hosanna to the Son of David;
blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord;
hosanna in the highest.

May God bless you all and grant you the grace of a reflective Holy Week.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the anticipated Sunday Mass at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 28 March 28, 2026.)

(Image reference: The Triumphant Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, Alessandro Turchi, 1640, The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.)