All the meals Jesus shared with his followers, and not merely the Last Supper, were seen by the early Christians as expressing not only human fellowship but also the divine acceptance of the participants in the present and the promise of their ultimate place in God’s kingdom.
Wretch that I am,
I have fallen into the hands of robbers—
my own thoughts.
My mind has been stripped,
and I have been severely beaten.
There is a phrase which the Greek Liturgy constantly applies to God in Christ: “O Lord and Lover of Men!” The whole meaning and drama of the Passion is gathered up in that. The Evangelists’ accounts—all the curt notes crowded together—reveal, when we take them separately and dwell upon them, the deep entrance into human suffering in all its phases,
If then we look at the Crucifix—“that supreme symbol of our august religion,” as von Hügel loved to call it—and then at our selves, testing by the Cross the quality of our courage and love; if we do this honestly and unflinchingly, this will be in itself a complete self-examination, judgment, purgatory.
You went into the holy city
with your disciples,
sitting on the colt of a donkey,
as though borne upon the cherubim,
so fulfilling what the prophets proclaimed.
Sometimes, you know, it’s necessary to go backward in order to go forward. (Yes) . . . Now that’s what we’ve got to do in our world today. We’ve left a lot of precious values behind; we’ve lost a lot of precious values.
Day by day, dear Lord, of you three things I pray: to see you more clearly, love you more dearly, follow you more nearly, day by day.
After long years of waiting on Heaven-commissioned men, who ought to have acted for us with alacrity, we at length obtained the Episcopate for America! But the condition of things here had been so long that of a Presbyter-Church, it was not an easy matter to put the Bishop in his right place. He had been imported for only two things, Ordination and Confirmation!
Passion Week may tell us, indeed, that the mere sight of the Lamb of God, in His outward form, could not soften the hearts of Jewish priests or Roman soldiers. It may tell us, that the hearts of those, who saw Him hanging on the cross, were hardened by that spectacle, so that they cried, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save.”
Sleep, sleep, old sun, thou canst not have repass’d,
As yet, the wound thou took’st on Friday last;
Sleep then, and rest; the world may bear thy stay;
A better sun rose before thee to-day;