Reflection by Lucas Folan
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Though meek and humble of heart, Jesus was truly a missionary force to be reckoned with. “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50). The urgency behind his words is palpable. Constantly moving from one town to the next, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head and instead resorted to getting what sleep he could in a boat at sea in the middle of a violent storm. Not a moment was wasted; not an idle word slipped from our Lord’s mouth.
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Yet, when we arrive at the scene of the Last Supper, time seems to slow down. With Jesus’s instructions to his apostles to find the “man carrying a jar of water” and follow him to the “large upper room furnished,” (Lk 22:7-13), we get the sense that everything is deliberately and carefully planned. Desiderio desideravi, “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15).
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Do we know our Lord to be speaking those words to us? Here and now? I am sometimes tempted to think that my Lent would be more fruitful if I could only step away from the rush of my everyday duties and commitments for 40 days and find a more peaceful setting to enter into the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving with greater focus and intentionality. Perhaps this is the challenge: to allow these small sacrifices to carve out the space in our busy days, distracted minds, and divided hearts to find ourselves face-to-face with our Savior as he breaks his body and pours out his blood for us, bidding us eat, drink, and be transformed. He does not demand that we understand right away. The apostles had not yet seen (or, for the ten who abandoned him, heard about) the horror of the Crucifixion when Jesus gave them the new commandment: “That you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples;” if our love also bears the shape of the Cross (Jn 13:34-35).
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No doubt these words were present in the minds of the disciples in the days they spent in the same upper room after Jesus’s Resurrection and Ascension, praying “together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers” (Acts 1:14). May we not delay in finding our own upper room, a place of intimacy with the Lord hidden within our daily lives, so that we may emerge from it renewed in the Holy Spirit, ready to take up our share in his mission:
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“I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12:49).
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| Lucas Folan is a 1st Year of Theology seminarian from the Diocese of Paterson.
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