In the morning of the first day of the feast of Unleavened Bread, Thursday, while they were all at Bethany, the disciples asked the Master where he wanted them to prepare the Passover Supper.
The Passover was the most important feast of Israel. The center of the feast was the Paschal Supper, which most be celebrated according to minutely detailed rules, which Jesus and his group would rigorously follow. In this paschal scene, the Poor Man would fulfill the most fantastic display of mysteries on this night of nights.
Evening was falling. The disciples oscillated between fear and paschal joy. Any attempt to describe the interior horizons of the Poor Man at this moment would be a useless effort.
Jesus told his disciples: – Friends of my loneliness and my exile: I believe in the beauty of pain when impregnated with love. I believe in the ultimate compassion when one bears humanity’s suffering -. The disciples remained silent without understanding the exact meaning of the words.
The first stars appeared. The Master and his disciples were already in the Cenacle, seated on straw mats.
It was not an idyllic atmosphere, but an atmosphere charged with tension, crossed by various shafts of light that would illuminate the night with reddish splendor: the washing of the feet, the institution of the Eucharist, the announcement of the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter, the testament of love, the farewell… they were contradictory crossed swords that wove a plot that was starkly dramatic.
The Poor One of Nazareth, leaping from the heights of the Father into the womb of his mother. But the time has once more arrived to return to his Father. He did only one thing during the passage: He loved. And now, at the end of his life, he prepared to launch the supreme offensive of love.
Jesus said to them: – From the depths of my being, I want to speak to you tonight, and I want my words to be echoes of eternity. My children, I am going. If we do not leap into the precipice, wings will not grow. I will have to be submerged in a bath and after the bath there will be a miracle: Pain will have been transformed into love, and love will raise up the walls of the Kingdom. Therefore, I bid you farewell. I will no longer dine with you until the day of the Great Banquet of the Kingdom. But, before I go, tonight I would like to make myself an eternal companion and an inseparable friend of all men until the end of the world.”
-As for the rest – he concluded, -this is the last of those suppers that we have celebrated throughout our apostolic adventure and the first of all those suppers which, in my absence and my memory, will be celebrated until the end of the world as a sign of unity and a bond of fraternity: whoever eats of the same bread should have one heart; whoever sits at the same table ought to constitute one and the same family.-
-So then, this Gift and Death of mine will be unforgettably united in your memories until the end of time.-
Extracted from the book The Poor One of Nazareth, by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga
