Dear Brothers in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ
We come to the chrism mass remembering painfully that in the month of march of last year 2025 just before the chrism mass we lost Fr Walter Nyatsanza followed by Sr Tecla a Holy Cross sister in May. On the 13th of September we laid to rest Fr Ciphas Manyanye followed by Fr Thomas Mandaza who we laid to rest on the 15th of October.
We, have also lost many of our lay faithful in the coarse of the year. We remember Mbuya Taderera, Mbuya Machache, Mbuya Mutsimba, Mbuya Rosary magura, Mbuya Mukaro, Mbuya Lydia Chikwangwani, Mbuya Agnes Kokera, Mbuya Panganai, Sekuru Hungwe and Mbuya Madzivire and many others whom the Lord has called from this life. We bring them all to this sacred banquet praying for them as is the work of us your priests.
My brother priests, Dear sisters and brothers, dear lay faithful, we gather today in this Holy Place, Saint Mary’s Cathedral to commemorate Holy Thursday the day of the institution of the Eucharist and the institution of the priesthood from which the work of our Redemption is carried out. We come to give thanks for the gift of every priest and for the gift of the Eucharist.
We remember the words of our Catholic hymns celebrating the gift of the priesthood and the Holy Eucharist, two gifts forever tied together. Because of who the priest is in relation to the Eucharist the people of God are forever praying for us and urging us to be the gift that our priesthood brings to the alter, Jesus the high priest.
“imi ndimi chizvarwa chakatsaurwa Muri vapriest vatsvene. Mubasa Renyu reufudzi Muina Mweya mutsvene Garai muchiziva kuti muri vanhu vamwari. Muri dombo rinokosha. Muri vaprieste vatsvene vanopira muteuro wemissa sande muteuro uye mupuro unoyera. Shingirirai kuitabasa rakristu mupriste Mukuru. Chi Ratidzai vanhu nomugariro wenyu kuti Mutoda mwari kupinda zvose.
We also gather during a time of upheavals in the world. The Middle East is in flames caught up in a war that has affected the whole world. With the bombing of oil fields the supply of fuels throughout the world has been greatly reduced. As a result of the scarce commodity We have witnessed increases in prices of fuel forcing increases in the prices of basic commodities. Some of the protagonists have this war as a show of power something that will make them feared because they want the world to give way to their greed as they plunder the world’s resources at will. The holy Father calls us to war and the greed behind it as evils that work against peace making the poor the primary victims.
The Holy Father in his Psalm Sunday Homily states: “brothers and sisters this is our God Jesus, King of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying ‘even though you make many prayers, I will not listen, ‘your hands are full of blood.’Isaiah 1:15.
We come to the Chrism mass today in a world full of crucified people. We carry with us the hurts of so many men and women today, the cries of the crushed who have no hope, who are sick and who are alone. We also carry with us the groans of the oppressed silenced by repression, by violence and by war. In this Holy Week we remember that among the crosses where the little lambs of the Lord Jesus are nailed is his cross. He appeals to the protagonists of war driven by greed to have ask for a new heart the heart of God who is love and who is mercy. It only with such a heart that we can lay down weapons, do away with greed and see in each other the universal call to brotherhood and sisterhood.
My brother priests we come to this Chrism mass bearing our own scares of battle as ministers of the gospel. Some scares have come from our fight with the devil in prayer and in life. We are indeed familiar with the suffering he brings to those who seek to be faithful to God. We carry the whole weight of our priesthood and like Jesus suffer a shoulder wound that won’t heal because we are constantly carrying the cross. In this chrism mass we gather to remember that we are not alone. We have been given brothers and sisters who we must treasure, love and respect and with whom we must share the cross of ministry.
Is it not our experience too that some scares have come from community wrangles, our failure to live in peace with each other, our battles in word, in thought and in deed?
You know very well that Holy Thursday is the day on which the Lord gave the twelve apostles the priestly task of celebrating, in the bread and the wine, the Sacrament of his Body and Blood until he comes again. (I cor 11:23-27). The paschal lamb and all the sacrifices of the Old Covenant are replaced by the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, a gift of himself and filled with this gift, we become his: creation returns to the Creator.
The priesthood of Christ unlike the Jewish priesthood is something new. It is no longer a question of lineage but of a call of Jesus Christ after spending the whole night in prayer (Mk. 3). Every Priest is an answer to the prayer of Jesus on that mountain night of prayer to his father asking for disciples. The calling of the twelve apostles after this night of prayer is the calling of every priest down through the ages to come and follow in order to perpetuate the memory of Christ the high priest. As priests we must take as our own that famous text in John 15 where Jesus says to his disciples “you did not choose me no, I chose you and commissioned you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
Called as we are, we must always remember even as we work in Jesus’ name that He alone can say: “This is my Body… this is my Blood”. The mystery of the priesthood of the Church lies in the fact that we, miserable human beings, by virtue of the Sacrament, can speak with his “I”: in persona Christi. Jesus wishes to exercise his priesthood through us. In this Chrism mass we remember in a special way this moving mystery which makes us his voice and hands and his very person. Surely this must disturb us and move the very core of our being.
So that daily life with its sweat and toil, it’s fears and tears, will not dull what is great and mysterious in us, we need this specific commemoration such as today’s celebration, to return to that hour in which he placed his hands upon us and made us share in this mystery.
My brother priests let us reflect once again on the signs in which the Sacrament of the priesthood has been given to us. At the centre is the very ancient rite of the imposition of hands, with which he took possession of me and you, saying to you and me: “You belong to me”. In saying this Pope Benedict says that God is also saying: “You my priest are under the protection of my hands. You are under the protection of my heart. You are kept safely in the palm of my hands, and this is precisely how you find yourself in the immensity of my love. Stay in my hands, and give me yours”.
Let us always remember that our hands were anointed with oil, which is the sign of the Holy Spirit and his power. Why one’s hands? The human hand is the instrument of human action, it is the symbol of the human capacity to face the world, precisely to “take it in hand”.
The Lord has laid his hands upon us and he now wants our hands so that they may become his own in the world. He no longer wants them to be instruments for taking things, people or the world for ourselves, to reduce them to being our possession, but instead, by putting ourselves at the service of his love, they can pass on his divine touch.
If human hands symbolically represent human faculties and, in general, skill as power to dispose of the world, then anointed hands must be a sign of the human capacity for giving, for creativity in shaping the world with love. It is for this reason, of course, that we are in need of the Holy Spirit.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus presents himself as God’s Anointed One, the Christ. Let us once again put our hands at his disposal and pray to him to take us by the hand, and lead us to act in his name, to the glory of the Father in the power of His Spirit
In the sacramental gesture of the imposition of hands at our ordination, it was the Lord himself in the person of the bishop who laid his hands upon us. This sacramental sign sums up an entire existential process. We now belong to him and to no one else yet how often we have sort to belong to someone else short-changing ourselves.
One of my favorite prayers is the request that the liturgy puts on our lips before Communion: “…never let me be separated from you”. Let us ask that we never fall away from communion with his Body the church, and its head Christ himself, that we equally do not fall away from the Eucharistic mystery. Let us ask that he will never let go of our hands….
The Lord makes us his friends; he entrusts everything to us; he entrusts himself to us, so that we can speak with he himself – in persona Christi capitis.
What trust! He has truly delivered himself into our hands. The essential signs of priestly ordination are basically all a manifestation of those words: the laying on of hands; the consignment of the book – of his words that he entrusts to us; the consignment of the chalice, with which he transmits to us his most profound and personal mystery.
The power to absolve is part of all this. It also makes us share in his awareness of the misery of sin and of all the darkness in the world, and places in our hands the key to reopen the door to the Father’s house.
My brother priests what is priesthood without friendship with God, without a serious prayer life?
The Evangelists tell us that the Lord frequently withdrew – for entire nights – “to the mountains”, to pray alone. We too need these “mountains”: they are inner peaks that we must scale, the mountain of prayer. Only in this way does the friendship develop. Only in this way can we carry out our priestly service, only in this way can we take Christ and his Gospel to men and women.
Activism by itself can even be heroic, but in the end external action is fruitless and loses its effectiveness unless it is born from deep inner communion with Christ. The time we spend on this is truly a time of pastoral activity, authentic pastoral activity. The priest must above all be a man of prayer.
Jesus says to us “I no longer call you servants, but friends”. The core of the priesthood is being friends of Jesus Christ. Only in this way can we truly speak in persona Christi, even if our inner remoteness from Christ cannot jeopardize the validity of the Sacrament. Being a friend of Jesus, being a priest, means being a man of prayer. In this way we recognize him and emerge from the ignorance of simple servants. We thus learn to live, suffer and act with him and for him.
Being friends with Jesus is visible always in our friendship with his followers. We can be friends of Jesus only in communion with the whole of Christ, with the Head and with the Body; in the vigorous vine of the Church to which the Lord gives life.
I would like to end this Homily with a word on Andrea Santoro, the priest from the Diocese of Rome who was assassinated in Trebizond while he was praying.
Fr Santoro once said: “I am here to dwell among these people and enable Jesus to do so by lending him my flesh…. One becomes capable of salvation only by offering one’s own flesh. The evil in the world must be borne and the pain shared, assimilating it into one’s own flesh as did Jesus”.
Jesus assumed our flesh; as priests and as Christian’s let us give him our own. In this way he can come into the world and transform it.
Happy anniversary by brother priests. Happy anniversary to you people of God for whom this gift of the priesthood has been established. Love your priests, encourage your priests, forgive your priests, pray-for your priests
