“THE PURGATORY OF MAUNDY THURSDAY” HOMILY FOR MASS FOR THE LORD’S SUPPER
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 17 APRIL 2025
Recently released, The Return recounts the final events in Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Odysseus, played by Ralph Fiennes, washes up naked on the shores of Ithaca after two decades away. He’d been a great success in the Trojan War, being the one who proposed the Trojan Horse and led the Greek warriors within it. But he was physically and mentally scarred by the calamities that befell thereafter: monsters with one eye or six heads, lotus-eaters and man-eaters, sirens and witches, disgruntled gods and disembodied men, storms and shipwreck. He’d long pined for his queen and their now-grown son Telemachus. Yet his troubles weren’t over yet…
His wife Penelope (played by Juliette Binoche) is now a prisoner in her own palace and hounded by suitors, while his son faces death at the hands of those who would usurp the throne. Odysseus’ dearest no longer recognise him. But with the help of Athena, goddess of wisdom, his true identity is revealed, his enemies defeated, and godly order restored. The movie ends with a very Holy Week image of his blood and memories being washed away as if in a ‘baptismal font’.
Whilst “the blind bard’s myths” are just that—myths—they highlight something fundamental about human life. Ulysses’ success follows upon travail, the gory often accompanies the glory. Suffering, this tells us, is inescapable; it comes even to the greatest.
But what sense are we to make of the suffering of innocents like children, or of heroes like Odysseus, or of the most innocent and most heroic of all, Jesus? The ancient philosophers had some answers. Some said the universe was meaningless and suffering pointless. Others thought the gods capricious, even cruel, and we were their sport. Some argued that if human beings are truly free, they must exist in an ordered universe without too much divine interference, and that a natural order will inevitably advantage some and disadvantage others. Others suggested that when it comes to suffering, we must just grin and bear it.
Great poets like Homer went deeper. For some of our heroes it’s their trials that prove their mettle; indeed, those very trials produce their heroic character. Suffering can occasion renewal, purify the sufferer of evil deeds they carry, making them more perfect souls.
What Homer narrates through myth, God tells through His word, His people, His very self. In our reading from Torah, Israel is told to celebrate the first Passover (Ex 12:1-14). All the people suffered as slaves in Egypt, all their oppressors would suffer in their liberation, all that would follow in those lands in centuries to come, is told tonight in lamb’s blood. For this is the true “Liberation Day” and the only tariff an annual feast. Instead of a deal transacted for His own advantage, God offers freedom, a land of milk and honey, undying love, to mere slaves. But who will pay if they can’t?
The ancients appreciated, better than many moderns, that travails endured in the right spirit can be transformative, even liberating. But does God really want suffering and sacrifice as the price of self-improvement? Couldn’t it be achieved by our own good will and divine grace? What gain is all the blood?
Tonight’s Gospel tells the tale of another Passover meal, thirteen centuries after the first and twenty before now. Jesus gathers His disciples, celebrating an old rite to inaugurate a new. Instead of sprinkling animal fluids, He washes His disciples’ feet with water, declaring them His masters and friends. Instead of daubing lintels with lamb’s blood, He daubs lips with the Blood of the Lamb Himself. A new kind of sacrifice is enacted: power humbled as service, justice become mercy, friendship as self-giving even unto death. In washing and feeding His disciples, Jesus is preparing them and us for what is about to unfold.
For soon there will be a terrible bloodletting, not at the behest of a capricious or vindictive God, but at the hands of violent and merciless men; not of the sinners but of the sinless scapegoat; not of the first-born sons of men but of the only Son of God. He will experience the physical pain and mental anguish so awful He sweats blood in prospect. Yet before He gives Himself up on the altar of the cross, He offers Himself in perpetuity on the altar of the Eucharist. Our purgatory comes at His expense much more than ours. Our release, through His broken Body and spilt Blood. And so He utters His strange and portentous words: “This is My Body, given for you. This is My Blood, poured out for you.” (1Cor 11:23-26; Lk 22:19) A new covenant I offer you, God’s profession of love and your manumission, written in My Precious Blood.
Hard to comprehend, I know, hard to appreciate. But it means suffering need not be meaningless. It can be redemptive. It can occasion softening and conversion of heart, renewal of character and ideals, purification of history and memory, atonement for sins—so we depend more on God, even as we are made stronger by Him; so we conform more to His image, even as we become more ourselves.
Happiness and unhappiness, the ancients realised, are possible in any world in which we are free, rational and sensitive; otherwise, we would be rocks, puppets or in modern terms robots. Love, likewise, must allow the freedom not to love. But God will stop at nothing, short of doing violence to our dignity and freedom, to fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper prayer: “Father, I want all those you gave me to be with me where I am and to share in my glory” (Jn 17:24). So relentless is God in this, He allows further growth for us even in the age to come. Purgatory, the Church teaches, is the opportunity to attain the holiness necessary for union with Him (CCC 1030-31). It might come in this life or in the next, but it’s our last best chance of aligning our wills with God’s, righting our priorities and relationships, allowing grace to complete its divinizing work in us, washing us clean in the Blood of the Lamb.[1] And the Church Suffering in purgatory, like Church Militant on earth and the Church Triumphant in heaven: all offer prayers for our purification, joining themselves to Christ’s sacrifice (cf. Col 1:24).
“Now is the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified,” Jesus said. “My soul is troubled, but I came for this very reason. Now is judgment coming for this world.” (Jn 12:23-33) Tonight we see that the Purgatory of our trials in this life and the next can be means of our renewal. But what sense do we make of the hell of Death and the death of Hell? More tomorrow…
[1] Rev 7:14; 12:11; cf. Rom 5:9; 1Pet 1:18-19.
INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR THE LORD’S SUPPER – ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 17 APRIL 2025
Welcome to St Mary’s Basilica, the Mother church of Australia, for the great Mass that runs from tonight’s Commemoration of the Lord’s Supper, through tomorrow’s Memorial of His Passion, to the Saturday night celebration of the Resurrection. The Anglo-Saxons called these “the still days” because of the ancient practice of silencing all bells from the end of tonight’s Gloria till its return at Easter.[i] As Jeremiah prophesied, “In the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem I will stop the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” (Jer 7:34), that is of Christ and His Church. In medieval Europe all noisy activity was hushed and, to this day, some places down tools, close up shop and park all vehicles. It is into the quiet of the night that we will proceed with Christ tonight after His Last Supper, and in hushed tones that we will creep to His Cross and Tomb tomorrow.
I acknowledge concelebrating with me Bishop Terry Brady, Dean Don Richardson with the cathedral clergy, and Seminary Rector Fr Michael de Stoop with the seminary faculty. We are assisted by our MC, deacons and seminarian-servers.
As we witness Christ’s Last Supper, the Washing of the Feet, and the Institution of the Eucharist, and as our catechumens ready themselves for their own washing by Christ in Holy Baptism and reception of Christ in Holy Communion, we ask Him to ready us all to rise with Him from sin to new life at Easter…
[i] James Monti, The Week of Salvation: History and Traditions of Holy week (Our Sunday Visitor, 1993), 102-4.
