Tonight we enter into the most sacred moments of the liturgical year: we enter into the Holy Triduum- the Holy three days. The central mystery of our faith is the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ; this mystery is known as the Pascal Mystery. These sacred moments begin with Holy Thursday and the Lord’s Last supper, the moment where Jesus before His passion, institutes the Holy Eucharist.

Jesus, in the Upper Room, ordains the apostles as priests and bishops in order to give them the Divine power to make truly present the Holy Eucharist. This Divine power shared only with the Twelve, and to their successors, all this priests and bishops throughout the ages. This Divine Power, Jesus own power, not only makes present Jesus, but also makes truly present in space and time, in our midst, the whole of the Pascal Mystery, that is Jesus actual suffering, death and resurrection.


Jesus instituted the Holy Eucharist before His suffering and death. The Holy Eucharist is then the doorway for us to enter into the suffering, death of Jesus in order to share in the resurrection of Jesus. The Holy Eucharist invites us to enter, body and soul into the death and resurrection of Jesus—a mystery of transformation and a journey of transformation. In other words, these three days symbolically recall our own life, our whole life, for we too will endure a passion-suffering and death in our own bodies. Just as Christ enduring suffering and death and then entered into His glory, we too in our struggles and trials of our life in our daily dying, we too are mysteriously called to unite this all to Jesus in order to come to share in His glory, to be transformed into His likeness, which is of Love.

The Holy Eucharist is more than a Mystery of Transubstantiation; it is a mystery of transformation. This tiny piece of bread becomes Jesus; And so the Eucharist calls us from death into life, calls us to change to be transformed deep within ourselves. We need to enter into this sacred mystery with littleness, with humility, with poverty, with hunger and thirst. Jesus is present in the Eucharist but we for our part have to draw out the life giving water of His love, we have to thirst for Him, we have to drink from the Heart of Christ.

Tonight is a chance for us to with faith, gaze on the Eucharist, to contemplate the Eucharist. Contemplate means to become one with what we see. Tonight is chance to look upon Jesus in the Eucharist and be transformed by Him who we look at, the Crucified one present there. After Mass you have a chance to spend time in silence before Jesus asking Him to transform you into His other self. Jesus is Love; and so we are call to be transformed into Love for the World.

It is especially in silence that we can hear the call of God within us. The problem is for us moderns is that too often we run from silence, we are too afraid of silence. Our modern world runs from silence as it runs from pain, runs from suffering, runs from the cross. But, true Christianity is all about what to do with your cross, what to do with your suffering and pain. Our world today is full of suffering and pain. This is always been the case, however our world today is different in that now it is world full of people who don’t know what to do with their pain.

There is an axiom in the spiritual life, that what is not transformed is transmitted. And so pain and suffering that is not transformed by the cross of Christ, by His love becomes anger and hatred, which is pain and suffering transmitted onto others. That is why in our world today we have so many who are so bitter; because a heart and a pain that is not transformed into Love, through the mystery of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, becomes a heart that transmits, hate violence and anger. Either we allow Jesus to take our pain and suffering and transform them into love by offering them, uniting them to His pain suffering and death or we become bitter and angry; we become bitter and angry because we try to run from the cross, which of course always and eventually finds us.

The truth is, we can’t run from the cross, nor should we want to. The world is running from the cross because it doesn’t know that love of which there is no greater. A love in which a man is willing to lay down his life for his friends. The cross then is the way to love, true love. No cross, no sacrifice, no self-offering no love.

Over the next few days, we need to ask Jesus to allow us to follow Him in his journey to Calvary. We need to beg Him for the grace to follow Him on the path of Golgotha, which is really a path of liberation and transformation, in order to share in Jesus’ sufferings, becoming like Him in death in order to know Him and become like Him in the power of His resurrection.

Our sufferings, our death, united to His become a path to joy, peace and life, not only for us, but for the whole world through us. This is the path that each one of us is called to travel with Jesus, in order to learn its lessons, lessons that lead us to glory. No cross, no glory; no pain, no gain; no death, no resurrection. We have to go through the Pascal mystery with Jesus in order to share in His glory; we have to die to self in order to share in the glory of His resurrection in our lives and share it with others. That is why, by the way, it is not enough just to be at Mass, or to learn our catechism, or even to go to confession, we have to allow ourselves to enter into the Pascal mystery, to share in the sufferings and death of Christ in our lives so that we can be transformed by His love and transform our world in His love.

When we receive the Eucharist, we have to let it transform us and change us into Jesus, letting us live in us anew, to suffering and die in us anew and so resurrect in us anew. The priest prays to the Father before the consecration of the bread and wine that they may transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, but there is this secondary meaning in these words. We too are to offer ourselves that by receiving the Holy Eucharist we too may be transformed into the body and blood of our blessed Lord in order that we can take him out into the world.

Jesus is constantly calling us into this going down with Him in order to rise with Him, becoming stronger and better people, holier people. He is calling us to carry our cross with Him and not be afraid or to resist. He is with us, one of us he has been weak like us, and He has suffered and died like one of us. And so, with Him and through Him, everything that happens to us can be used, all can be renewed and all can be saved.

Everything in our lives, especially our sufferings and struggles can be used to make us grow in love if we trust Jesus enough and stay close to Him. If we ask Him at and before the Holy Eucharist to transform all in our lives by the power of His own death and resurrection, nothing is wasted. Far from being negative this is optimistic, the cross is not a negative, it is positive, it is a way to joy and life; it is in fact, the tree of life.

St. John tells us, that when Jesus knew that his hour at come to depart out of this world to the Father having love his own that were in the world, He loved them to the end. So this is the night when Jesus reveals His love for us by giving us an Ultimate gift, the ultimate Gift…Jesus doesn’t just give us something, a thing, He gives us Himself. He is God and He gives us His body and His blood. Jesus becomes our living bread to satisfy our hunger for God. Tonight’s Gospel, tonight’s celebration helps us to fathom the depths of Jesus love. Jesus loved them, us to the end; end here doesn’t just mean to the end of his life, but it means to the uttermost of His capacity and His capacity is infinite because he is God, His everlasting infinite love.

We have to be like St. John resting on the bosom of Jesus in order to understand the intensity and the beauty and the awesomeness of this Sacrament of the Eucharist where God gives Himself totally to each one of us. Tonight we have that opportunity to rest on the bosom of Jesus by contemplating Him in the Eucharist. If we really contemplate Him truly present there all the unimportant and insignificant things just disappear. It is not enough to know Jesus is present in the Eucharist, we have to be present to Jesus there.

Being present to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist helps us to realize that as God He is present to us everywhere, no matter what the circumstance may be, even in our deepest sufferings. Let us, while contemplating Him in the Eucharist, ask Him, through the intercession of His Mother, to help us enter into the Pascal mystery, not only over the next few days, but throughout our own life in order that we may enter into the glory and the joy of the Eternal Easter, beginning this Sunday. (This homily is greatly indebted to Fr. Thomas Joachim, fj)