Missing Dinner

The common phrasing phor life today offers one and sundry the common counsel, Live, Laugh, Love.

Jesus responds — preempts if you prefer it precise — with semi-characteristic frankness Love Love Love

I say semi-characteristic since only half the time is he blunt, while the other half he’s maddeningly opaque — like the dork in high school chirruping in his own private joke, as all and sundry stare at him, and around at one another, singularly and collectively shaking their heads going, What a dork.

The clarity and opacity may have to do with whether he’s answering fools according to their folly, but ’tis no matter for now. This is a different ship of fools he’s addressing on this first Maundy Thursday: the straight-up dumb kind not the sniggering ones — and instead of a smack upside the head, they need simply teaching, example, and love.

‘specially as all and sundry shall very, very, very, very soon put their singular and collective feet in their slack-jawed mouths.

So Jesus goes over it again and again and again and again, until Christ! What a dork says it like 87 times.

Even gets to the point where he says flat out, Do you understand what I have done to you? He says this after washing their feet, and as he’s about to institute Holy Communion. Every week we celebrate the latter; I haven’t washed anyone’s feet for nearly 30 years. Hell, I don’t even do my own every day.

The two acts — soap and water and bread and wine — are linked, not least by being both direct and opaque. Hence Christ’s question, Do you understand what I have done to you?

Which is itself direct and opaque, too.

For not for you, mark you, but to you.

In a single evening he’s both Man and God, feet and food, bowing and kneeling twelve times, ‘cluding to the guy who would betray him, in touching tactile ways. Later educators will suggest instruction, repetition, practice, and testing. Here ya go.

I kid, natch, but it’s good, isn’t it? You almost think they won’t need the smack upside the head like those other rubes. But they’re about to get some anyway, over the next several days, and decades.

They’ll get it, mostly, by the end of things.

For the moment, they’re simply engaged in missing dinner, as it were, which is to say, Do you understand what I have done to you?

What dorks, right?

We’ve made such strides in recent years. Else we might miss Jesus semi-characteristically getting to his point so directly.

Live, laugh, love?

Honestly, the first two are filler. Many Christians haven’t lived (none, by the end of things; but you get the idea), while more than a goodly number haven’t laughed that much. Even on the more recent Eat, Pray, Love bidness the first two commands two are strictly optional.

Love, Love, Love.

In fact, let’s take out the punctuation, too.

Love Love Love

Slows us down.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Time, Treasure

Saw an episode ages ago of one of the Twilight Zone reboots which, I’m pretty sure, starred Mark Hamill as this weird kid who collected toys. All this kitschy stuff from the ‘50s and grew up collecting them — and thus stayed weird and for the most part apparently lonely for his life entire. Of course

Read More »

Do Piece — Anger (Buechner)

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving

Read More »

Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

Read More »

Battalions Book

This is the second book in the duology, with IRS Agents and Crack Whores. Where the first goes after the Church for its sins, this one asks those outside of faith into the discussion.

Read More »

Related

Less Is More

I don’t know. What happened next? So, so beautiful. This is why. You like me. This is it. Red White Blue What the fuck? What if we … Why should I? God is love. Show me how. I love you. See you later. Yes, yes, yes! I’m leaving you. Please don’t go. I was wrong.

Read More »

Talks With A Duck

Obscured in the kerfuffle over Mr. Robertson’s coarser comments on the Fairer Sex is a simple fact that any five-year-old can tell us: Adults say the darnedest things. This has since been confirmed by the comments of many other adults, critiquing the original notes on the female form offered by the “Duck Dynasty” patriarch — responses

Read More »

When We Lie

If mere humans may have things abominable to them, mine is lying. I hate it in nearly all forms: commercial advertising and political propaganda, of course, as well as even when people doing good things feel compelled to pretend they are flawless: that the rotten thing they just did is required by that good thing

Read More »

Animal Planet Part XVII

Well we watched the end of Planet of the Apes. Oy. The 2001 version ends, as you may know, in a massive battle scene, like some simian Braveheart. Huh? This is how a Tim Burton film (almost) ends? Not with a weirdness but a boom? Then there’s the whole Lincoln Memorial (actual) end. Huh? Huh?

Read More »