Mtr Mary Trainor
This is the day that the Lord has made…
Dear friend,
Maybe you’ve had the same experience as I have. You’re with someone close, family or good friends. And you are trying to prod their memory about a mutually shared experience. “Remember, Aunt Gracie was there…” “She brought her little dog that got out of the yard…” “Cousin Bob brought his girlfriend, the one before the one he married...remember?”
Sometimes these mental proddings are successful. You picked the right events to jog memories.
Today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew calls this to mind. I can see his followers, in a much later conversation, talking about this night, prompting memories in others: “While we were eating, remember, Jesus took a loaf of bread?” And then “he took the cup, gave thanks, and passed it to us. Remember?” And “ how could we ever forget singing that hymn, on that night especially?”
“When they had sung [that] hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.”
Our passage, if it’s not obvious, describes what we call the Last Supper, but which for Jesus and his disciples was a Passover meal. And Passover meals end with singing the last of the six Psalms comprising the Hellel, the last psalm being 118.
O give thanks to the Lord, for [the Lord] is good...
We’ve had these nights ourselves, on a much smaller scale. Times of great change, change that initially we can only see as loss. But in time, we see better, more. The loss, the sorrow, the tragedy, the injustice are not wiped away. It’s just that we now know the rest of the story, as is said, and the rest of the story has moments of sheer beauty.
The Lord is God, and [God] has given us light…
Most of you know by now that I grew up working in my family’s business, a small garden center in central Los Angeles county. Long hours, hard work, missing out on most high school events, not wearing the latest fashions, all of those things that are so terribly important in our teens. To be truthful, I wasn’t always gracious and cheerful. Not to mention it just seemed to stretch out forever into an unfocused future. Not only did I log the difficulties in my mind, it also was hard for me to believe they would ever end.
Now, many decades later, I see a truth I could not see then. Nothing lasts forever, and very few things are “only” bad. In retrospect, those years were far too short, and my difficulties were not that many, or that great. In fact, many of the challenges I now count as “gift” in that those experiences shaped who I have become.
...God’s steadfast love endures forever.
The Last Supper, the last night with friends, was pain-filled, as would be the coming hours for Jesus and his companions. Later, and from a distance, we can more easily sort through that time--and see in it more clearly God’s great and enduring gift. Remember?
This is the day that the Lord has made…
Mtr Mary