Restoring Our Rootedness

Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper

John 13:1-15

 

John’s Gospel has no ‘Last Supper’…instead he narrates this episode of washing the disciples’ feet.

It is a parable of the ‘breaking of the bread’. 

Here, let me give you another visual. 

This is what leading the Eucharistic Life looks like.

Now…go on…do THIS in memory of me.

On days like today I look to ‘the Cloud of Witnesses’

I found this…it gives me pause:

Through the bread and wine we become rooted again in nature; through the bread and wine we begin to live a divine life because we begin to be possessed by God.  There is a third thing: the breaking of the bread is the symbol of hospitality, of all that we mean by earth and home; and so through the bread and wine we are restored also to our roots in the human family, and our individualism is taken away from us, and the loneliness and frustration that come of it.

And again there is something more.  The sacrament of unity is also the sacrament of peace.  Have you noticed how it is always the rootless people who are restless, always struggling and scheming for power, for influence, for money?  The eucharist gives us peace precisely because it gives us roots, in this world and the next, in the human family and the divine.

-Gerald Vann, from Triduum Sourcebook, volume 1 page 45