When he was a child his mother told him of how she and Joseph had been turned away from their ancestral home –the House of Bread – on the night of his birth. The story taught him that rejection and hunger gnawed with the same teeth. Grown, he walked through towns and countryside, feeding hollow-eyed hundreds who pursued him by day. But a bottomless ocean of hungry mouths flooded his dreams. He learned that the memory of yesterday’s bread could not relieve today’s hunger.
On the eve of this death he at last found a way to keep rejection and hunger at bay. He held his life in his hands and said to his friends, ‘Take. Eat. This is my body, broken for you.’ And when they were filled, commanded ‘Feed the hungry. Do this. Re-member me.’” (Irene Zimmerman, OSF)
You stumble unseeing from the upper room and no number of lanterns and torches can dim your darkness now, Judas. When did you let the light go out? When did you begin to guard the hoard and spend starry evenings behind drawn tent flaps, running the coins through acquisitive fingers while the company sat in a circle outside, breaking bread and talking of light in the crackling campfire?
When did you fine-tune your ears to the clink of copper and silver and gold,
letting the words of the Master fade out unheeded? When did you start to
begrudge begging hands and when did you welcome disciples more for the
treasures they gave than the treasures they were?
Now, in the dark of Gethsemane’s garden, you touch greedy lips to the Master’s cheek –
A cheap giveaway to your cohorts of night.
(Irene Zimmerman, OSF)
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Caravaggio’s “The Betrayal of Christ” c.1603 |
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