The Moment It All Changes

Maundy Thursday -- the Thursday in Holy Week -- is dedicated to remembering the last supper of Jesus with his disciples. It is this moment, this meal, that becomes the foundation for Christian worship, whose centerpiece for most Christian communities is the remembrance and reenactment of this meal as the Eucharist (this was the central act of worship for all Christians until the more extreme forms of the Protestant Reformation jettisoned it, reserving it for just a handful of Sundays each year).

Hearing the story of the Last Supper once again last night, I was struck by the fact that this gathering of Jesus with his disciples is the moment that everything changes. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that it is the threshold moment just before everything changes. Jesus will never share a meal with his friends again. One of them is about to go off and betray him. While the remaining disciples will come together again, their gatherings will be entirely different. Their days as students are over. They are about to be thrust out into a dangerous and uncertain world without the one they had come to depend on as their guide. They will depend on the memory of that guide, on the things he showed them and said to them, to navigate their own lives from this day forward. And as the Last Supper unfolds, they really have no idea of any of this. They have mostly not picked up on all the hints Jesus gave them about what was going to happen. They will not realize the threshold nature of this moment until Jesus is arrested.

There are many moments over the course of our lives that are threshold moments like this -- the moment before everything changes. Sometimes, we realize it when we are in it. As, for example, when we sit beside a dying loved one, knowing that they are about to depart. Many times, we don't recognize these moments except in hindsight. It was the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who said, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." As we look back and reflect on our lives, we can see those times that turned out to be threshold moments -- the moment just before the next moment when everything changed.

In the threshold moment of the Last Supper, Jesus sought to prepare his friends for what was to come. He asked them to love one another as he had loved them -- for he knew that only by walking together in love would they be able to navigate what was to come. He washed their feet as an example of selfless service -- for he knew that only by serving each other would they be able to carry on. He showed them that the Christ in him was also in them, and that this bound them together always, and could be invoked whenever they shared this sacred meal -- for he knew that shared deep connection to the Source through the mysterious economy of sacred presence was the thing they would need to sustain themselves and each other. As they met together on the threshold of change, he gave them everything they needed for the next moment. And for every moment thereafter.

We are not always so fortunate. Very often we find ourselves in the next moment when everything changes and feel utterly unequipped to navigate the shift. Often we panic, we become anxious, we forget our best selves and get carried off into the whirlwind without an anchor. This is why spiritual practice before everything changes is so important, because that practice becomes our anchor no matter the nature of the whirlwind.

This is really what Jesus was doing for his friends -- and for us. Giving them a set of practices rooted in love, in humility, in connection to Source that could carry them through -- that can carry us through.

Whenever we celebrate the Eucharist -- the ritual rooted in the Last Supper -- we are reminding ourselves that every moment contains the possibility of being a threshold moment. We are reminding ourselves that the next moment could always be the moment when everything changes. And we are rooting ourselves in love, in humility, in connection so that the whirlwind will not entirely overwhelm us when it comes.