Visualize the Last Supper of Jesus. I bet the picture in your mind looks a lot like da Vinci’s masterful mural of the disciples whispering and quarreling, all lining one side of the table.
As we enter this final week of Lent, a different rendering of that famed event haunts me.
Barna da Siena’s medieval painting of the Last Supper portrays more of a family meal. The disciples are seated all the way around the table. And there is an open space, directly across from the Lord. It’s an invitation, as if Jesus is saying, “We saved a place for you.”
In my mind’s eye, I throw my legs over the bench. Around me I hear the murmured conversation and try to think of something witty to say. The smell of spices fills my nostrils. Someone slides a serving dish my way.
Then I glance to my left. It’s Judas.
The meal continues. I take a few bites. Then suddenly Jesus announces, “One of you will betray me.”
Each disciple responds in shock: “Is it I, Lord?”
Jesus doesn’t say so at that moment, but the answer to each is “yes.” By the end of the evening, one will betray him with a kiss. One will deny they have even met. The others will just melt into the night without uttering a word.
There is no hiding from this: I have a seat at the table and I, too, am a traitor. Through my actions and also through my inaction, I turn my back on Love. I am reeling, falling, yet I refuse the hand extended in salvation.
If a soundtrack accompanied Barna’s painting, it might be the haunting melody of J.S. Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion: “Mine, mine was the transgression, and thine the deadly pain.”
Faced with such wrongdoing, my instinct is to deny, deny, deny. I want the finger pointing elsewhere. I tell myself that I am my own truth, and therefore I am without fault. I alone may draw the line defining guilt, I say. Conveniently, I draw it so that I am on the side of innocence.
This strategy should work. After all, if there is no truth, there is no sin. If there is no sin, there is no guilt.
But if there is no guilt, there can be no forgiveness, and my heart remains heavy. I feel anxious about a future I cannot control. In my panic, I judge the disciples for a weakness I fear will be uncovered in my own heart. “Those cowards! Had they not been with the Lord? Had they not seen his miracles?” My response would have been oh-so-different, I tell myself.
But Barna’s depiction of the Last Supper plants me firmly in the middle of the messy truth. I am among the guilty.
I do not like this. Not a bit. The young adults I minister to don’t like it either. One asked, “Why must there be bloodshed for salvation? Isn’t there another way?”
Jesus himself asked this question just hours before his crucifixion. I ask it during every crisis. I ask it of history’s sweep: why is it, as Will Durant calculated, that only 268 years of recorded time have found the world at peace?
We must be rescued from the madness, but how? In the Eucharist, the minister offers the cup of Jesus’ suffering by saying, “the blood of Christ shed for you.” This is not the bloodshed of one giving his life so that we may live our remaining years with fewer difficulties. It is the excruciation (literally, “out of the cross”) of the Eternal One entering time to reverse death’s story. Twenty years afterward, the Apostle Paul exulted, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
When I am in charge, the center does not hold. But in Christ all things weave together (Colossians 1:17).
As Barna added the finishing strokes to his Last Supper masterpiece, a deadly pandemic had begun circling the globe. We know it as the Black Death. In the horror of that day and the distress of our own, the Passion of Christ reminds us that light has come into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it. Suffering will cease. Death will not win.
And I am offered forgiveness.