This Triduum was, for me, focused on Jesus’ relationships with the people close to him. In the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday, I was pierced by how his friends ran away or fell asleep—were generally not present—at the moment of his deepest agony. At the moment he wanted them there, they were not, and what pain that is.
So going into the rest of the Triduum I was asking him, how do you keep loving your friends when they don’t love you well? What’s going on in your heart that you die for them when they’re hurting you? That emboldens you to die for them while they are still sinners? When being a sinner means that? In your humanity, how do you live that?
It’s a question I never want to stop asking and pondering. The rest of the Triduum was such a beautiful blessing. Not a direct answer to the question, because the mystery and the beauty are too rich. But still a beautiful response.
On Holy Thursday, we enter into the Last Supper. Where, as Abbot Driscoll says, “Love is the meaning of this hour….Love is what Jesus will express in the washing of his disciples’ feet, but what he does here in symbolic gesture he will do later in actual fact.” I read that right before Mass and the whole thing flowed out of that for me. I was so moved by this sense of Jesus wanting to make this night so special for his friends, to honor them. It’s their last night together before his death. Just this sense of him wanting to make the most of this last moment in which he gives himself to them in different sacred ways. You try to make the night special for people you really cherish.
The same night, they ran away, fell asleep, denied him, betrayed him.
But it was from that place of love in his heart for them that he kept loving. Through it all.
And it was from that place in his heart that he walked with Peter on the shore of the Sea of Galilee after it was all over and honored him no less than the night he washed his feet.
