Overview:

Tuesday of Holy Week

A Reflection for Tuesday of Holy Week

Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled and testified,
“Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”
The disciples looked at one another, at a loss as to whom he meant (Jn 13:21-22).

Find today’s readings here.

Praying through Holy Week is like watching a season of television with the episodes all out of order. The finale is in the right place, for sure. Saturday will become Sunday, and a man will rise from the dead. But it can feel disorienting on Palm Sunday, when the long reading of the Lord’s Passion seems to skip our imaginations ahead to Good Friday, past the anointing at Bethany or the Last Supper. If Palm Sunday is the only liturgy you attend until Easter (which is the case for many Catholics, and there is no obligation imposed by the church to attend any others), then the sequence perhaps makes sense. But if you attend Holy Thursday or Good Friday, or even pray with the readings throughout the week of Holy Week, the narrative jumps around.

Take today’s Gospel: Jesus announces to his disciples that one of them will betray him. Shock and confusion spread throughout the table. But tomorrow’s Gospel goes back (this time in Matthew’s Gospel) to Judas preparing the betrayal. And today’s Gospel comes immediately after Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, which we’ll hear at Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Thursday evening. 

But stay with today’s Gospel, for now. And consider “The Last Supper.” Yes, that one. The painting, by Leonardo da Vinci. A painting so ubiquitous and omnipresent on refrigerator magnets and posters and reproductions can lose its power to move us, but I believe it is still possible. Even staring at a digital reproduction of the image for 10 minutes does the trick. Da Vinci captures today’s Gospel in a moment, frozen in time. Or is it a moment? Walter Isaacson, in his biography of da Vinci, disabuses us of that notion:

Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated…each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.

The drama begins the second after Jesus’ words have been spoken…. Like a stone thrown into a pond, his pronouncement causes ripples outward, spreading from him to the edges of the picture and creating a narrative reaction. 

I am always struck by how disorienting the events of the Passion must have been for the disciples. Jesus has just completed the surprising and intimate act of washing their feet. And now he is announcing his betrayal? One night they are celebrating a feast with their friend, brother and teacher. In less than 24 hours, he will be dead. These moments and scenes are not isolated incidents, even though we encounter them as such in our prayer and liturgies. 

Isn’t this how our lives work, though? Anyone who has sat vigil at a deathbed knows that dying is a collection of moments more than it is a time of death that a physician calls out. Or that falling in love can begin in an instant but unfolds and deepens over decades. This week’s liturgies and readings are a river. They will carry us, wherever we step in, toward the same destination: a crucified and risen Lord waits for us.

Zac Davis is an associate editor and the senior director for digital strategy for America. He also co-hosts the podcast, Jesuitical.