Reflection for Holy Thursday

Today's Mass Readings

“Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father” (Jn. 13:1).

One of the great beauties of the Sacred Liturgy of Holy Thursday is the mystery of how God sanctifies time. We know it in the way Jesus entered “his time” on earth.

Jesus’ “hour” – his time – was a moment when the world’s history was building to a climax, like a jar of some precious liquid being slowly filled. We first heard about it in St. John’s Gospel at the wedding feast of Cana. “When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come” (Jn. 2:3,4). There is any number of times in this same Gospel where the evangelist notes that Jesus’ hour had not yet come. For example, “then they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come” (Jn. 7:30).

But tonight we hear, “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.” Time for Jesus is not fatalistic but the result of a loving, Divine Providence: “fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God…”
Jesus came into the world to lead us away from our enslavement to time. He desires to lead us away from a fatalistic understanding of our time on this earth which would say that we are just put here by a throw of the dice. Christ is with us to teach us, to empower us, to accept our “hour,” our time, as a loving gift of the Father. It is given exactly in the measure which God the Father has allotted us out of love. Seen in this view, our life becomes a period of worship in which we gratefully accept, trustingly carry out, and serve in imitation of Christ.

At this “time” in the history of the world, we are all trying to accept, and live in, God’s “hour” – his time. One thing our faith gives us as certain: our time, our hour, has meaning only in relation to eternity. Christ seeks to live in us, and through us, in our time and place. When our hour does come to pass out of this world, we will be doing just the right thing: serving and loving God and our neighbor.

The British Dominican, Fr. Gerald Vann, put it this way:

“… all things are in the hands of God. You must do your planning for the morrow, you must make efforts required of you, you must think of your problems and act as you think best; but then leave God to accomplish his will in you; make the moment as it comes and passes, a love-gift to the unsleeping love of God. He has care of you all, your Father who is in Heaven. Small things and big things, the sorrows and the joys, take them from him and give them back into his hands with thanksgiving: not my will but thine be done.”

Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB