Maunday Thursday
I have a surreal feeling just typing the title, “Maunday Thursday.” Thursday of Holy Week is supposed to coincide with the last supper when Jesus kept company with his disciples. It is never a pleasant thing to leave this life. Many have no opportunity to sit with friends or family, eating together, and exchanging final thoughts.
Dying is either so swift that there is no time left for anything else. Or dying is so pain wracked that the mind and good intentions are swept away and no extended conversation is possible. Did the last supper really happen? I do not know.
It is reasonable to assume that any observant Jewish individual, would make provision to celebrate Passover. In this case the irony is obvious as the Passover tradition remembers a time when death passed over, and did not visit loss upon the community. Not this time though. There was to be no near miss, a divine “get-out-of-jail” card, or some slight of hand.
The Romans like any imperial power, were like a cancer. Their advance was aggressive and uncompromising. They eliminated dissidents. Unlike functioning democracies, they did not work with those who had a different point of view. You signed on, full-throated, unambiguous support for the system or you suffered their “justice.” It was a rigged game and no one need pretend otherwise.
Common to both the Gospel of Matthew and Luke’s account of the last supper was the internal conflict, the jockeying for the advantage of position between the disciples. Another mention: the stain of betrayal was woven into the fabric of Jesus most inner circle. These dark aspects have a cautionary function. They are to always, uncomfortably be kept in awareness for a supremely important reason. A new mode of relationship, a new covenant was on offer, wherein the subscribers make their way by sacrificing themselves for one another. This is the obverse of the typical Roman way, or the way of any empire which looks to sacrifice the powerless, to strip them of their resources, in order to aggrandize the power of the ruling few.
This is, by definition, what it means to belong to the 1%.
There is more to say, but Good Friday is tomorrow. I’ll do my best to say more tomorrow.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
–excerpt East Coker by T. S. Eliiot
