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We have to celebrate

Next week, Holy Week, we will enter the holiest week of our lives. Passion (Palm) Sunday begins the journey. It is aptly named—”Passion Sunday”—and is a key to what is about to unfold. The words passion and patience originate from the same root word which means “to suffer” or “to endure.” Later on, the word passion took on the more informal connotation as a strong “desire.” Jesus enters his Passion with these words, “With desire have I desired to eat this Passover meal with you before I enter into my suffering” (Lk 22:14). Why does he want to do this before he enters into his suffering? Because this Last Supper will be an interpretation of what will happen the next day—the Crucifixion.

To those who will be welcomed into the Church this Easter Vigil, I invite you to listen to Jesus personally inviting you. “With desire have I desired to eat this Passover meal with you. It’s the last one I’ll eat until we all eat together in the Kingdom of God. It’s my last meal but not yours. Keep coming so that I can keep feeding you. You have journeyed through the R.C.I.A. process, you’ve invited Me into your heart, you’ve rode the roller coaster of faith and doubt, you’ve prayed publicly and in secret, you’ve questioned your motives, you’ve even wondered why me? Why now? Am I worthy? Now is the time to come to the Table to look for your personalized place setting and sit among saints and sinners. You belong.”

If that invitation is for our Elect, it’s also for every one of us. The desire on Jesus’ part is so intense, it’s beyond an invitation. It’s a command for the rest of us, who regularly partake of Eucharist, to go to the highways and every backroad and extend the invitation—no, the command—to bring everyone we meet into the banquet hall. Jesus commands as much when he said, “when you have a party, invite the poor, the lame, the blind, all the unlikely people who never get invited to anything and who are in no position to return the favor. Invite those people.” “Those people” are actually every one of us.  

A hint. Before you invite everyone else, come yourself, with all you are. Be “all in” as Jesus was. Come to the foot-washing on Holy Thursday with desire on top of desire. Come to the Cross on Good Friday saying inwardly, “With desire have I desired to be here.” Come to the Easter Vigil with a yearning to be nowhere else but around the bonfire which gives light and warmth. Jesus said, “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were burning already” (Lk. 12:49). Those are the words of a man of passion, a man of desire, and this is the fire of transformation and renewal.  

From the fire of the Easter Vigil, we hear the Word—the ancient “love story” of God for the outcasts of this world. From Word, we are then accompanied to the Waters of new birth flanked on both sides by the Saints each holding their own baptismal candle and cheering us on. These men, women (and child saints) guide our way for they have walked their own path of dying and rising. After fire, Word, and water comes the pinnacle, the raison d’être you might say, of what draws us each Sunday—Eucharist. We are called to be a Eucharistic people, and the call is given week after week after week, “With desire have a I desire to eat this meal with you.”

We have to do this, for this is who we are. The desire of the Son is the desire of the father in the “prodigal son” story. “We have to celebrate, for these brothers and sisters of yours were lost and are now found, they were dead and have come to life.”

~Fr. Phil