Pope's Homily:

in AsiaNews' translation:

In the washing of the feet, Benedict XVI said, Jesus removed the robe of his glory and wrapped himself in the ‘garment’ of humanity, making himself into a slave. He washed the dirty feet of the disciples and thus let them join the divine banquet to which He had invited them. Instead of cultic and external purification, which only ritually purifies man and leaves him as he is, a new bath takes over. By means of his word and love, by means of the gift of himself, he makes us pure.” And “if we welcome Jesus’ words with an attitude of meditation, prayer and faith, they will develop in us their purifying strength. Day after day we are covered by all sorts of filth, empty words, prejudices, reduced and altered knowledge; many half- or open falsehoods continuously seeps into our innermost self.

"All this darkens and contaminates our soul, threatens our capacity to see what is true and good. If we welcome the words of Jesus with an attentive heart, they will turn out to truly cleanse and purify the soul, the inner man.”

“If we pay close attention to the Gospel,’ said the Pope, “we can see two different aspects in the act of washing the feet. When Jesus washed the feet it was first and foremost a personal act—a gift of purity, of offering them the ‘capacity for God’. But the gift also turns into a model, the duty of doing the same thing to one another.

Together example and the act of giving “are typical of Christianity’s nature. In relation to moralism Christianity is more and something different. It is not our capacity of doing at the beginning, our moral capacity. Above all Christianity is giving: God gave him to us—he did not give something; he gave himself.” And this goes on ‘continuously.”

However, men are not “passive receivers of divine goodness. God rewards us as personal and living partners. Love given is a process of ‘loving together;’ in us it wants to be new life with God as the starting point. It is this way that we understand the words that, at the end of washing the feet, Jesus uttered when he spoke to his disciples and speaks to us all: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn, 13:34). The ‘new commandment’ is not a new, difficult norm that did not exist until them. The new commandment means loving together with the One who loved us first. It is this way that we must understand the Sermon on the Mount. This does not mean that Jesus had no new precepts reflecting the needs of a new humanism, more sublime than the one that came before. The Sermon on the Mount is a path to learn how to identify oneself in Jesus’ attitudes (cf Phil, 2:5), a path of inner purification that leads us to a life together with Him. What is new is the gift that introduces us into Christ’s frame of mind. If we consider this, we can perceive how far we often are in our lives from this New Testament novelty; how rarely we give humanity an example as to how to love in communion with his love. Hence we remain in its debt as far as showing the credibility of Christian truth, which is demonstrated in love. For this reason we want to pray the Lord even more in order to make us through his purification mature for his new commandment.”

There'll be no papal homily tomorrow; the preacher of the Papal Household, Capuchin Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, customarily takes pulpit duty for the Good Friday liturgy in St Peter's.

Tonight we celebrate and, it goes without saying, we commemorate the Last Supper of Our Lord Jesus Christ with his disciples. This is the first of our parish celebrations of the Easter Triduum. We celebrate the beginnings of the Holy Eucharist, the first Mass, in which Our Lord, Jesus Christ, offers himself to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, for us. Today the Church invites us to meditate on various aspects of this Holy Thursday celebration.
At the end of this Mass, the Most Blessed Sacrament will be taken in procession . This is done to commemorate those hours that the Lord spent in the garden and prison as he waited to be judged and crucified. But before we do this, the Church calls us to meditate on the events that occurred during the Last Supper.
For the Jewish community Passover was the principal “feast day” of the year. It commemorated something that occurred on an extraordinary night when they were still slaves in Egypt. Our First Reading tells us that during that night God sent the last plague, the death of all of their first-born children, to the Egyptians. In this manner, the liberation of the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt was assured. During the Passover, Jews would eat a spotless lamb, to commemorate the lamb sacrificed on that first Passover night whose blood was spread on the doors of their houses so that their first-born children would escape death. In our Second Reading, Saint Paul tells us that during the Last Supper Jesus explicitly mentioned the new alliance, or testament, that would be sealed with his blood. Jesus, by his death on the Cross, shows us that he is the true Passover Lamb who offers himself to the Father in sacrifice to free humanity from the slavery of sin.
In our Gospel reading, Saint John tells us about the surprising occurrence that we call “the washing of the feet.” Jesus ties a towel around his waist and, doing what a slave does when his master arrives home, he washes the feet of his disciples. He did this during the Last Supper just after celebrating for the first time with his disciples the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. By washing their feet, Jesus wanted to show that if we eat his Body and drink his Blood, we are, in essence, vowing to serve others. Our celebration today, Holy Thursday, is based on something that Christ wanted to show – not only to his disciples but to us also – the importance that love and humility have in Christian life. In reality, the life of every Christian should be based on love and humility. Christ instituted, in the Eucharist, the sacrament of love par excellence and he showed, when he washed the feet of his disciples, that love is shown in humble service to others.
This celebration calls to mind what Jesus did on that Holy Thursday evening just before he was given up to death. In reality this celebration is not different from the the Eucharist we celebrate every day of the year. In every Mass Our Lord becomes present among us as “the holy and perfect sacrifice: the bread of life and the cup of eternal salvation.” Nevertheless, this Mass today is especially important because it reminds us of what Jesus Christ did at the Last Supper.
We celebrate here together the sacrament of the infinite love that God has for all of us. When he washed the feet of his disciples, Jesus showed us the humility and total giving that we should all show towards God and towards our neighbor. May the the Lord to show us how to follow his example.