Holy Thursday meditations

Today, Holy Thursday, a day we remember as the day when the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist was instituted, I would like to meditate on the powerful and moving thoughts of Pope Francis’ recent Palm Sunday homily during mass at St. Peter’s Square. It is especially touching considering that he had just been discharged from his recent hospital stay.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Pope Francis says this is the only cry that Jesus utters from the cross as the Gospel records. Those words emphasize the very heart of Jesus’ passion, the “culmination of the sufferings he endured for our salvation.”

Consider all the sufferings he has endured, those of the body: slaps and beatings, flogging and the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion itself. His spirit, his soul was not spared: there was the betrayal of Judas, the repeated denials of Peter, the condemnation of the religious and civil authorities, the mockery of the guards, the jeering at the foot of the cross, the flight of the disciples.

The most “searing,” the most painful of all, is the seeming abandonment of God, of his Father.

Pope Francis says the word “forsake” is a powerful one.  It is heard at moments of the greatest of pains: a failed love or one that is betrayed or rejected; children who are rejected and aborted; the travails of widows and orphans; broken marriages; instances of social exclusion, injustice and oppression; the solitude of sickness. All these, we are reminded, Jesus brought to the cross, carrying these on his shoulders and then suddenly feeling God so alienated, so distant. Thus, the feeling of abandonment.

He experienced this abandonment to be one with us, so that we are not left to despair, so that even while “plunged into the abyss of abandonment” and whys which find no answers, we experience hope.

Turning to the words of Pope Francis, “That is how the Lord saves us, from within our questioning ‘why.’ From within that questioning, he opens the horizon of hope that does not disappoint… In the hour of his abandonment, Jesus continued to trust.  Even more: at the hour of abandonment, he continued to love his disciples who had fled, leaving him alone, and in the abandonment he forgave those who crucified him.

“He wants us to care for our brothers and sisters… those experiencing extreme suffering and solitude… there are also many Christs, there are many, many Christs, people who are abandoned, invisible, hidden, discarded with white gloves; unborn children, the elderly who live alone… who could also maybe be your dad, your mom, your grandpa, your grandma, abandoned in geriatrics – the sick whom no one visits, the disabled who are ignored and the young burdened by great interior emptiness, with no one prepared to listen to their cry of pain and who find another way toward suicide. The abandoned of today, the Christs of today.”

Pope Francis ends by enjoining all of us to love Jesus in his abandonment and to see and love Jesus in the abandoned around us. God has never left us alone, so let us turn to and care for those who feel alone and totally abandoned.

It is an interesting though belated discovery to come across two “Holy Thursday” poems by the great English poet William Blake. We remember him for “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night…” but these two poems are timely and relevant to this day.

“Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience criticizes the Church who he feels is not doing enough for the poor children of London, especially as they attend Maundy Thursday services.  It is akin to Pope Francis’ message for us to look at the abandoned and the uncared for. There are contrasting images of poverty and bounty in the first two stanzas:

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduced to misery,

Fed with cold and usurious hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

It is a land of poverty!

Blake asks how a city can be content with such suffering in its midst.

“Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence depicts children in their innocence, walking into a ceremony at St. Paul’s, but points out beadles with wands who exercise perhaps harsh authority on them. The images of flowers and lambs and innocent hands further emphasize the innocence of these children.

‘Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,

The children walking two and two in red and blue and green:

Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,

Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames waters flow.

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!

Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,

Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

The poem’s final line in the last stanza tells the reader to have compassion for the poor. The song of the children now become “mighty wind” and “harmonious thunderings.” Again, Blake is critical of Christianity and English society and how they have ignored the “abandoned.”

May today lead us to deep meditations on how Jesus totally “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7) for us.

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