Wednesday of Holy Week    

Gospel – Matthew 26:14-25

A Day of Preparation

The Cenacle Room, Jerusalem       

I don’t know about you, but Ginger and I are busy preparing for our Easter Sunday dinner.  OK, well, sort of!  What we are really doing is this – what do you want for dinner?  I don’t know; what do you want?  Are the kids coming down? Are we hosting or are they?  Does that mean I have to clean the house?  When do we go shopping?  What about dessert?  Lamb cake? Strawberry pie? Ham? Roast beef? Those potatoes?  And make a lot of food!  There has to be leftovers! Where will everyone sit?  Buffet or sit-down?  How about we decorate eggs this year?  When is all this gonna happen?  Who’s in charge?   AARGH! I give up!  Let’s just order a pizza? 

Today Jews around the world are making their own preparations for Passover which begins this evening at sunset.  That means preparing all the food, the house, and themselves for this most sacred feast.  In today’s Gospel, we see a lot of preparation as well – but at opposite ends of the spectrum! 

We find the Apostles prepping for the Seder meal – finding a room, securing the proper food and then gathering for the feast of Passover.  The pic you see today is of the Cenacle – the room where the Last Supper was held.  But we also see Judas making his own preparations – plans for a betrayal – meeting with the chief priests, collecting 30 pieces of silver for his ‘delivery’ of the Messiah, and looking for the right moment to hand Jesus over to the authorities!

How are your preparations going?  Are you ready??  We all make plans for Easter?  Dinner, cleaning, cooking, etc. What about our hearts?  We’ve just observed 40 days of Lent – 40 days of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, 40 days of preparation!  Are we ready? 

Maybe, in the days we have left, we could all spend less of our time prepping our home and our dinner table for Easter. And maybe, just maybe, we could spend more time to prepare our hearts and minds for celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection.  How will you prepare for Easter??

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Feast of the Presentation Gospel – Luke 2:22-40 We Are Family Church of St. Joseph, Nazareth 5 extremely short stories to start the day! Once all the people in a village decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer, all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella. That is faith. When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them. That is trust. Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but we still set the alarm to wake up. That is hope. We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future. That is confidence. We see the world suffering, but still, we get married and have children. That is love. Faith, hope, love, confidence and trust!   Sounds like a perfect list of values/virtues for a happy family! Today’s Gospel tells us of another family – the Holy Family going up to Jerusalem with the baby Jesus to present Him to the Lord in ...
Read more
Image
  Second Sunday of Easter   Gospel – John 20:19-31 Faith and Family Us Decades ago, when Jaime was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I was having some stomach issues, bad enough to spend some time in the hospital to figure out what was going on.   Finally, one morning, with Jaime and Ginger in the room, the doctor comes rushing in to tell me in these overly blunt words – you have cancer, we will perform surgery today and start you on chemo treatments tomorrow!   After I got over the initial shock, I basically had 2 reactions!   First, how dare you blurt out such a diagnosis with our little daughter in the room without even consulting us beforehand.   How disrespectful! How insensitive!   And secondly, my personal health, or lack thereof, was the last thing on my mind.   All that mattered to me was Ginger and Jaime and how all this would affect them! Some things never change!   Truth be told, after all that stress and worry, his diagnosi...
Read more
Image
Tuesday - Third Week of Easter Gospel – John 6:30-35 Knead to Know Cooking Class Over the past month or so, I gathered together a couple groups of my altar servers for a cooking class!   They learned not only my recipe for zucchini chocolate chip muffins but how to make them from scratch!   And, YES, they took home their finished products, or at least the muffins they didn’t wolf down as soon as they came out of the oven!   It was a fun, wonderful (and messy) experience!   Who knew that cracking eggs and measuring out flour could be so ‘untidy’.   But it brought home the lesson that, in order to get those yummy muffins, it takes time, effort and a heaping cup of patience. And it reminded me not only of their loyal service but those long months of Covid when they missed their Mass ministry.   So from time to time during the pandemic, I stayed in touch with them by dropping off goodie bags filled with chocolate chip cookies, zucchini chocolate ...
Read more