Holy Thursday

“The Hebrew Pasch was and is a family feast. It was not celebrated in the Temple, but at home. In the account of the Exodus the home already appears as the place of salvation and of refuge in that dark night of the passing over of the Angel of the Lord. In another way, that night in Egypt is an image of the power of death, of the destruction and chaos which are always rising up from the depths of the world and of humankind, and which threaten to destroy the ‘good’ creation and transform the world into a desert, into something uninhabitable. In this situation the home and the family offer a place of shelter; in other words, the world has to be continually defended from chaos, creation must always be protected and made new.

In the nomad calendar from which Israel took the paschal feast, the Pasch was the first day of the year; it was the day on which Israel had again to be defended against the threat of annihilation. The home and family are the protecting wall in life, the place in which we are safe and at peace, the peace of being together, which lets us live, and preserves creation. 

In Jesus’ time also, after the immolation of the lamb in the Temple, the Pasch was celebrated at home, in the family. It was prescribed that on the night of the Pasch no one could leave the city of Jerusalem. The whole city was considered the place of salvation against the night of chaos, and its walls as the barriers defending creation. Israel had to resort in pilgrimage to this city every year at the Pasch so as to go back to its beginnings, be created anew, and receive anew its salvation liberation and foundation. In this there is great wisdom. In the course of a year a people is always in danger of dispersion not only exteriorly but also from within, and of losing the inner supports which govern it. It needs to return to its authentic foundations. The Pasch was to be this annual return of Israel, from the dangers of that disorder present in every people, to what had founded it and governed still, and been its steadfast defence, and to the recreation of its origins. And since Israel knew that over it shone the star of election, it knew besides that from its fortune or misfortune would be derived something for all the world, and that according to its existence or its fall the destiny of the world and of creation was at stake.

Jesus, too, celebrated the Pasch in compliance with the prescription: at home with his family, for the Apostles had become his new family. In this he was, on the other hand, obeying a precept then existing according to which the pilgrims who made their way to Jerusalem could form pilgrim groups called chaburot which for that night constituted a home and family for the Pasch. And so the Pasch has become a Christian feast also. We are the chaburah of Jesus, the family he has founded with his company of pilgrims, with the friends who travel the way of the Gospel with him through the land of history. As his pilgrim company we are his home; so the Church is the new family, the new city, and it is for us what Jerusalem was; that living home which keeps away the forces of evil and is the place of peace, which preserves creation, and us. The Church is the new city, Jesus’ family, the living Jerusalem; her faith is a barrier and a wall against the threatening forces of chaos which seek to destroy the world. Her walls are fortified by the sign of the blood of Jesus Christ, that is by the love which goes on to the very end, and is without end. This love is the power able to fight against chaos, the creative power always founding anew the world, its peoples and its families; and in this way offering us shalom, the place of peace, in which we can live with one another, for one another, and protected bit one another...

This feast should be once again today a feast of the family, the true bulwark for the defence of creation and humankind. Let us pray for this warning note to be heard once more for the family to be held in honour again from now on as a living home where humankind can grow, and chaos and emptiness are shut out. But we must add that the family, this setting for humankind, this protection for the creature, can continue to exist only whenever it is under the banner of the Lamb, when it is itself protected by the power of faith, and called into existence by the love of Jesus Christ. The family cannot survive by itself; it breaks up if it is not inserted in the larger family which gives it stability and security. Therefore this should be the night on which we pass along the way towards the new city, the new family, towards the Church, on which we enroll ourselves again, unshaken in our resolve, as in the new homeland of the heart.”

~Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)