Thursday's God Has Far To Go...

That supper was the end of the innocence. That's how I remember it. Yes, I believed things were changing when he got on that beast and the pilgrims cheered, but even then there was still the 'follow me' that hung in the air, we were still the little boys dressed in new, chasing after the piper. But after that supper we knew there would be no more parties, no more dancing, the fifes had grown still. His was an evening show-and-tell, a command of how we must dress for the grisly hours that followed, and beyond. Jesus gave us hand-me-downs, blackened shrouds of love for one another, the rags of a true disciple.

As I leaned into him, literally, I felt the maundy pulse and it chilled me. What we all-too-soon experienced was an appalling succession of bleak and bare, a way filled with thorns of a seemingly eternal winter. What we would witness was Thursday's God becoming Friday's clown. And he still had so far to go to get there.