Mysterium Fidei: Holy Thursday

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt on the Eucharist is taken from Father Romano Guardini’s book titled “The Lord.” Father Guardini, a Catholic priest who died in 1968, was designated “servant of God” when his canonization process was opened in 2017. The following brief Eucharistic reflection is one of many that will be published by Catholic San Francisco magazine as part of the U.S. Catholic Church’s Eucharistic Revival (eucharisticrevival.org) that began on June 19, 2022, on the feast of Corpus Christi, and continues through Pentecost 2025.

Jesus is with His disciples for the last time. The hour is heavy with the premonition of parting and all the pain and dark to come. The little group had not assembled by chance, but to celebrate the Pasch together, solemn reminder of the chosen people’s exit from Egypt, when God’s final and most dreadful plague, the smiting of the firstborn, forced Pharaoh to let the captives go. The Easter supper was instituted to commemorate this “high deed” of God. Upon this memorial supper of the Old Covenant, Christ founds the mystery of the new: the “mysterium fidei.”

During the meal, Jesus said to them, “I have greatly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, for I will eat of it no more until it has been fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”

What Jesus passes on to them is no longer mere pieces of unleavened Easter bread or the sacred drink-offering of the Pasch, but the mystery of the New Covenant just established. And all that takes place is not only the celebration of one high, fleeting hour; it is a sacred rite instituted for all time and constantly to be renewed until God’s kingdom comes and the Lord Himself celebrates it again with His own in the unveiled glory of the new creation.

For 2,000 years, people have prayed and probed and fought over the meaning of these words. Hence, when we ask what they mean, let us first be clear as to how they should be taken. There is only one answer: literally. The words mean precisely what they say.

It is certain that the disciples did not grasp the full meaning of what their Lord had done. But it is equally certain that they did not interpret it merely as a symbol of community and surrender, or as an act of commemoration and spiritual intervention, but rather along the lines of the first Passover in Egypt, of the paschal feast they had just completed and of the sacrificial rite celebrated day after day in their temples.

Human action is part of time, and when its hour has passed, the act is also a thing of the past. With Jesus it was different. He was man and God in one, and what He did was the result not only of His human and temporal decision, but also of His divine and eternal will. Thus, His action was not merely a part of transitory time but existed simultaneously in eternity.

Jesus’ passion, which actually had started with the crisis in Galilee and was both temporal history and divine eternity, He now molded into liturgical rite. As He spoke over the bread and wine, He Himself, the soon-to-be-slaughtered one, with His love and His fate, was word and gesture. He was instituting something that was to remain to the end of time. Hence, as often as those authorized to do so say these words, make this gesture, the identical mystery takes place and the passion, whose stand is in eternity, is caught and ‘brought down’ in liturgical rite.

In all truth may be said: This is His body and His blood — this is Jesus Christ in His propitiatory dying! The liturgy is a commemoration, yes, but divine commemoration, not human imitation and memorial, not pious invoking of the past by a faithful congregation, but divine in memoriam.

What then is the Eucharist? Christ in His self-surrender, the eternal reality of the suffering and death of the Lord immortalized in a form that permits us to draw from it vitality for our spiritual life as concrete as the food and drink from which we draw our physical strength. Let this stand as it is. Any attempt to “spiritualize” or “purify” it must destroy it. It is presumption and incredulity to try to fix the limits of the possible. God says what He wills, and what He wills is. He alone “to the end” sets the form and measure of His love (Jn 13:1).

The institution of the Eucharist is also revelation. It reveals the true relation of the believer to his God: not before him, but in him. Words that must scandalize and revolt those closed to faith, but that to others are “words of everlasting life” (Jn 6:68; Mk 9:24).