My key word for today is Thanksgiving and I wish to look at two celebrations of Thanksgiving. Namely: the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharist. Why those two? Because in today’s Gospel Jesus is headed toward Jerusalem for the feast of Passover and when he gets there, he will celebrate the Eucharist.
The celebration of Passover is a major feast for our sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith. This sacred meal includes a ritual in which the youngest child asks questions and the elders provide the answers.
During a typical Passover meal, the child will ask, “Why do we eat bitter herbs tonight?” And one of the adults will say, “To remind us of the bitter slavery which we endured at the hands of the Pharaoh before the Lord came to our rescue and set us free.”
Why do we have salt water on the table? To remind us of the tears that were shed in our struggle for freedom.
Why do we eat lamb during our Passover Meal? Because the lamb saved our lives in the land of Egypt. The angel of death stayed away from those homes that had the blood of the lamb on their door posts.
Why do we have unleavened bread? Because the bread reminds us of our freedom. When our ancestors were living as slaves in the land of Egypt, God set them free from the tyranny of the Pharaoh. When they ran to safety they left in a big hurry and they did not have time to let the bread rise. That’s why unleavened bread is called the bread of freedom. We celebrate Passover so that we can thank the Lord for helping us to pass over from slavery to freedom.
Now let’s move forward to the Holy Eucharist, the sacrament that Jesus celebrated on the night before he died.
He celebrated the Holy Eucharist during the Passover meal, and his prayer was a prayer of Thanksgiving. Scripture says that Jesus took up bread and gave thanks. And then it says that he took up the chalice of wine and once more he gave thanks. What for? What was he thanking God for? He was thanking God the Father for always maintaining a close and loving Covenant relationship with his people.
In today’s Eucharistic Prayer we will give thanks to God the Father for creating the world, for sending his Son to be our savior and for sending the Holy Spirit to change the bread and wine into the Body and blood of Christ. I will repeat because this is very important: We will give thanks to the Father for creating the world, for sending his Son to be our savior and for sending the Holy Spirit to change the bread and wine into the Body and blood of Christ.
The church calls this prayer the Eucharistic Prayer because Eucharist is the Greek word for Thanksgiving. We begin this prayer by saying: It is our duty and our salvation to give you thanks, O Father most holy. So the spirit of the Passover and the spirit of the Mass is thanksgiving.
With that in mind, I wish to encourage everyone to think of things that you are thankful for during our prayer time today. I think that we should thank God for the spiritual freedoms that we have. We are free to forgive without seeking retaliation. We are free to serve our neighbor without seeking reward. We are free to live for others, rather than for ourselves. We are free to be kind to people without worrying about what others will think.
We are free to pray even when prayer does not give us the good feelings that we wish it would give us. We are free to pray with the understanding that God will answer us in His own time and in His own way. I believe that during our Mass today we should give thanks to God for our spiritual freedoms. We take a moment now to thank the Lord because we are free. Free to love, free to serve and free to pray.
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