The Last Supper takes place in a large upper room, already prepared to receive guests. This upper room is like a person who, after being freed from dark forces, should invite Christ in so that He may dwell constantly in his heart. Christ entered the upper room in Jerusalem to celebrate the Last Supper, but even today every heart is capable of becoming such an upper room through the Eucharist.

If Jesus is not invited into the swept and prepared upper room, then unclean spirits will settle there. Many times attempts have been made to justify Judas and to attribute lofty motives to his betrayal, but the Evangelist testifies plainly: Satan entered Judas. He entered precisely because Judas turned away from the Teacher. And we see that the other disciples too, though they did not commit betrayal as Judas did, thought in categories of earthly success. On the eve of the Teacher's sufferings, about which they had been warned, they frivolously argue about who is greatest... Fallen human nature is ready to distort everything; even Christian service it tries to turn into a means of self-assertion. And if such a temptation begins to overcome us, may the Savior's words never fall silent in our consciousness: let the greatest among you be as the younger, and the leader as the one who serves.

Against the backdrop of the terrible events of the apocalypse, when "people will faint from fear," amid wars and darkness, Christ's words sound paradoxical and astonishing: "...Then straighten up and raise your heads, because your deliverance is drawing near." This is precisely the dimension that has always been lost in all kinds of final predictions about the end of the world. People expected nothing good from it, and in any case they did not expect from it a meeting with Christ. Yet this is a relevant question, and not by accident these words are addressed to everyone: "this generation will not pass away until all is fulfilled." However the history of the earth as a whole unfolds, each of us has ahead of us our own personal end of the world, when history will continue its course without us. And here the most important thing is to remember that meeting God is joy and deliverance, including deliverance from fear.

Paul briefly mentions one institution characteristic of the early Christian church: the institution of presbyters, or elders. Judging by the fact that alongside the laying on of hands there is a mention of "prophecy" as a gift, or "prophesying" as a special spiritual state characteristic of a prophet at the moment when he experiences revelation (the corresponding Greek word can mean both), one may suppose that the community of "elders" (presbyters) was, at any rate in the Church of the earliest Christian period, a charismatic community. In any case, the laying on of hands involved prayer for God to send down the Spirit who was to renew the one for whom they prayed; and the whole Yahwistic, and later synagogue, tradition, as well as the tradition of the Jewish religious brotherhoods that existed in the Gospel era, connected such renewal with the gift of prophecy.

Of course, someone who had undergone this kind of experience did not necessarily become a prophet, but he experienced in himself the action of God's breath that, properly speaking, makes a biblical prophet a prophet. Among the people of God, certain ministries had long presupposed the need for such an experience; a well-known example is the first kings of Israel, who could not claim authority without passing through prophetic consecration (a typical example is Saul's consecration, 1 Sam. 10:1-12). However, Saul's example is also the best proof that no consecration in itself changes a person automatically, apart from his will and spiritual effort. That is why Paul urges Timothy to care for the gifts received from God during the laying on of hands, gifts that otherwise can easily be lost.

As for the community of "elders" (presbyters), it was apparently a charismatic community not in the sense that all its members were prophets, but in the sense that all of them had undergone the experience of the Spirit's descent, just as Timothy had. Probably after such a laying on of hands the one who had experienced spiritual renewal himself became a presbyter, as happened with Timothy, who before, judging by the context of the letter, had probably been an ordinary deacon heading the community. Now he became a deacon-presbyter, and, as one can see, unusually young from the standpoint of church practice that existed at that time; judging by the encouragement Paul sends his disciple, this caused some people to feel perplexity and contempt toward the young "elder."

As one can see, the apostle remembered what some of his fellow believers forgot: spiritual age and physical age are not the same thing. Physical age is determined by the number of years lived; spiritual age by the intensity of spiritual life and the measure of rootedness in the Kingdom. And Paul, as one can see, advises Timothy to care above all for the second, without giving great importance to the first.