The decisive events happened during the evening. Those who recorded it (The Evangelists) did so with a wealth of detail and striking similarities. All four seem driven to put down everything they know and everything they can remember, hour by hour, minute by minute.
Moses instituted The Passover (then as now underway in Jerusalem on that original night and among our Jewish brethren). Successive Bible-based film epics have depicted how Jewish doorways marked with the blood of the lamb are spared The Angel of Death and about the feast of lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs — not that I can claim to be familiar with those passages in Salvation History as recorded in the Old Testament. I saw it at the movies, then read it in The Book.
There are conflicting early Church accounts of the exact day on which the Apostles’ and Jesus’s feast took place. St. John plainly says that the day of Christ’s death. The other Evangelists say it was the fourteenth day of Nisan (the first month of the Hebrew calendar) and that Jesus died on Friday the Fifteenth. According to the fourth Gospel (John’s), the supper took place on the thirteenth and the crucifixion on the fourteenth. Days reckoned from midnight versus days reckoned from sunset (as they were by Jews of that era) might account for some of the discrepancies.
Scripture is full of such discrepancies, we are reminded by my primary source, being French historian Henri Deniel-Rops (1901-1965), who, as a Catholic-turned-Agnostic-turned Catholic, who had long questioned whether Christianity had any relevance or force in an increasingly mechanized and industrialized world in which so many putative Christians seemed indifferent to the sufferings of those around them. He’d come to experience a world capable of two world-consuming wars. He’d seen Marxism or various iterations of socialism (right in the German Third Reich, left in the Soviet Union) claim to restore national and spiritual meaning to the human order. He’d seen them dissolve into a rivers of blood.
But the bloody events following upon the breaking of bread on that long-ago Passover eve seemed to promise ultimate deliverance from ourselves — to (as Daniel-Rops puts it) “break the shell of pride and envy, the matrix of the human creature, which stifles even the best of us.”
Thus night fell on the Upper Room. The little clay lamps had been lighted in their candelabras.
It was the night of Judas. Most of us know the story.
I’ll head out to a service this evening — an ancient commemoration, reminding us, though amid much ceremony and beauty, that there’s a little Judas in all of us, but that repentence and deliverance are available to all of us, as it was to that errant apostle who despaired of forgiveness and did himself in.
And then, there is the bread.
I turn to a favorite German-born theologian with an Italian name, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), to clarify the meaning in that bread shared at that particular feast of parting on that first Holy Thursday night.
Guardini, in his book The Lord, writes that…
What Jesus passes on to them (the Apostles) is no longer mere pieces of unleavened Easter bread or the sacred drink-offering of the Pasch, but the mystery of the New Covenant just established. And all that takes place is not only the celebration of one high, fleeting hour; it is a sacred rite instituted for all time and constantly to be renewed until God’s kingdom comes and the Lord Himself celebrates it again with His own in the unveiled glory of the new creation.
Mysterium Fedei: The mystery of faith. I hear that phrase at every consecration of bread at every mass I attend.
It all goes back to that first Holy Thurday.
And to think I’m about to go out to pick up — a pizza! We’ll call that Bread of the World, Anno Domini 2026.
I’ll partake of the other Bread, the Eucharist, hours later, hopefully in the right state of mind and soul.
It can make you sad to think what followed that Upper Room meal — that year and every year thereafter, including this year, to this very hour. Judis always slipping off into the shadows.
Anxious, faith often faltering like a guttering candle, I try to stay by Him, and take what He offers me. I can’t say I always deserve it, or always succeed.
I go for pizza. Thereafer, for the real Feast.
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