THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER TEN
We have the secret now
Water pots are often seen in
catacomb pictures. They may indicate the miracle of Cana or they may be meant
to recall the great act of humility and love with which Christ began the Last
Supper. Just before that meal was to begin, Christ laid aside His outer
garments. He girded Himself with a towel. Then He poured water in a basin and
went from one Apostle to another, washing each man's feet and drying them with
the towel which hung from His waist. On Holy Thursday* of 1964, while this
book was originally being written, Pope Paul VI performed the age-old ceremony
as it is performed every year. He removed his outer vestments, descended the
papal throne in the apse of St. John Lateran* to wash the feet of certain
people present. They happened to be five Mexicans, one Cuban, one Chilean, one
Paraguayan and others from Latin American countries, a total of
thirteen.'
2 Many
find this washing a moving sight. It strikes them as dramatic that the Pope,
the supreme pontiff of Christendom, should kneel to perform such a menial task
for them. And yet, how faint a picture this is of what Christ did. The feet of
modern men are usually clean. In fact, since the men to be washed by the Pope
are selected in advance, they carefully scrub their feet to prepare for the
ritual. The washing is not physically necessary. But the feet of the men at
the Last Supper were dirty. How could they be otherwise? The Apostles had been
walking all day along the dusty roads leading to Jerusalem and also over the
spittle and dung strewn city streets. In short, it was a nasty job that Christ
undertook, a job quite different from the ceremonial ablution which the Pope
annually performs in Christendom's first church. Why did Christ do it? Peter
protested the act. He thought it unseemly, even shocking, that Christ, the Son
of God, should minister to them in such a lowly manner. Admittedly the job had
to be done. In those days when people reclined at table, the couches would
have become soiled from dusty feet. But usually people washed their own feet
unless they were affluent enough to pay a servant to do it for them. Christ
gave His reason. He washed the feet of the Apostles to show them that they
must love one another and be humble in their attitude toward one another. He
spelled it out in exact words: "If then 1, being your Lord and Ma
te4_Washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have
given you an example that as I have done to you, so you do also." A few
minutes later He expatiated: "A new commandment I give you: that you love
one another as I have loved you....
3 This
is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another."
Christ had a second reason also: He did it because He Himself loved them so
much that He yearned to express His feeling in any way that presented itself.
After all, service is love made manifest. Christ became the servant to show
that nothing was too insignificant, nothing too great for Him to do for them.
Love filled Him. "Having loved His own, He loved them to the end."
He loved until His last few hours on earth, until His very death on the cross.
Then this love burst forth into soaring words which have haunted the world
like an unforgettable melody ever since: "As the Father has loved me, so
I have loved you. Live on in my love. Yes, love was the theme song of His
every act and word that night: love of the Father for Him, His love for the
Father in the Holy Spirit, His love for man and men's love for one another. A
11 this was the prelude to the great Act of Love, the giving of Himself under
the appearance of their ordinary foodstuffs. "Jesus took bread, blessed
it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. 'Take this and eat it,' he said,
'this is my body.' Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them. 'All
of you must drink from it,' he said, 'for this is my blood, the blood of the
covenant, to be poured out in behalf of many for the forgiveness of
sins."' (Mt. 26:2628) Early Christians were able to accept this because
they saw love as the key to God's relationship with man. The Apostle John had
written that God is love. They saw that love, especially divine love, tends to
share and to give, and that every action of God, indeed His very Being in
Trinity, is an expression of love and of giving.
4 One wants to consume the
beloved. Modern man, for reasons too profound and too ramified to explore
here, often has become alienated from God. There seems to be a general feeling
that God is not interested in the affairs of man, and in this atmosphere the
acceptance of a divine love which would go to the point of a sharing such as
Christ declared is simply out of grasp. For this reason many Christians,
although believing in Christ and accepting the Bible as an honest and
believable account of all that Christ did and said, take refuge in the idea
that He did not mean His words literally. They think that He meant to say this
represents My Body, rather than what He did say: "this W' My Body. As
mentioned in the last chapter, we must have the assumption that the reader
either believes and wants to understand more of the world's greatest secret,
or that he does not believe, but for the sake of understanding is willing at
this point to take a position of belief. Since the Eucharist, and all other
mysteries of Faith, fit like the spokes of a wheel into the central mystery of
the Triune God's loving nature, the Eucharist cannot be 'grasped even remotely
without some understanding of God Himself. Most Christians who find difficulty
in believing Christ's words about Himself as food probably do not disbelieve
God's ability to perform such a miracle, but cannot believe that He loves man
that much. During that historic Last Supper, Christ told His disciples about
this. He revealed to them the nature of God.* He told them that God is love,
and that love is the explanation of His being with them. He even demonstrated
it.
5 He washed their feet, like
a servant, before telling them unequivocally that "I and the Father are
one... when I you see me, you see the Father also.-- Every word Christ spoke
at that first Eucharistic Liturgy was a word of love. The disciples felt it,
even though they could not understand. Today, many of us understand but do not
feel. Theologians today use the word "circumincession" express the
complete and reciprocal interchange of life and love which flows between the
three Persons without beginning and without end - an interchange reflected in
the Eucharist which Christ revealed to us that night. Each of the three
Persons, possessing the loving nature, took a distinct part in the institution
of the Blessed Sacrament. The Father gave the Son: "the Father sent
me," Christ said. The Son gave the Eucharist: "This is my
body." And the Holy Spirit reached out to men and made possible their
mental and spiritual acceptance of such a mystery: "It is better for you
that I go ... whereas if I go, I will send the Parakleet to you." So the
reason for the Eucharist is found in the nature of God: God's love. This alone
ultimately makes the world's greatest secret understandable. The loving nature
of God desired to give us His very Self. Love can be given in half measures
from man to man, but God gives all: Himself. He unites with us; He united us
to Him. Love always tends to union. Through the Eucharist we are joined to God
and through Him to our fellow Christians. "That you may be one even as
the Father and 1 are one," was the way that Christ expressed it.
6 Father Walter Burghardt'
describes a day during World War II when "A tremendous event took place
over the face of the earth. That day Christ, our Lord, hiding His Godhead and
His manhood under the appearance of bread, pillowed His head on the tongue of
a child in Baltimore's Cathedral. The same day the same Christ slipped past
bursting shells and past the lips of a Marin in the Marshalls. The same day
Christ braved the beaches of Normandy to rest His brow beneath a British
helmet. The same Christ made His home next to the throbbing heart of an
Italian peasant woman and below to a bomb shelter in Berlin. The same Christ
rod with a pilot in the cockpit of a Japanese Zero fighter an( fed the brave
on a Burma road. Even the barbed wire could not keep the same Christ from
lighting up a brown face in the Bataan." Christ came that day also to the
pope, to presidents o nations, labor unions, corporations. He made all the
people one in the love which is Himself, the Giver of the, Eucharist, the
Sacrament of Love. Yes, only love - an infinite love - can explain it.
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