I’ve spent some time starting to write for you today, feeling a little, perhaps, like a chef in a cooking competition: “Judges, today I have made for you words about Maundy Thursday. On a base of Judas’s betrayal there is a side of bitter herbs and a synthesis of implications of unleavened bread. The invisible but likely present lamb was roasted with suggestions of Peter’s denial and sliced with a sword.”

And then I gave up on trying to offer new insights, unnoticed interpretations.

On that night, the disciples gathered for a meal, knowing that Jesus had been pointing toward a conclusion, and yet thinking, as we often do, “I know it’s going to happen sometime. I just didn’t expect it tonight. Not like this.”

It’s too easy to draw lessons, to talk about what we would do.

There was, that night, for them, catastrophe.