October 22, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Mark 10: 35-45

Cup: coffee cup, tea cup, paper cup, Styrofoam cup, tin cup, china cup, loving cup. Imagine each of them: from pedestrian to ordinary to modest to precious to triumphal. Each of them a cup.

The paper or Styrofoam cup is disposable and is disposed of as soon as one has drunk its contents. The tin cup is held out by the blind or otherwise disadvantaged supplicant seeking succor on the street corner. The china cup is collected by your grandmother or Aunt Mildred. The loving cup is displayed with pride by one who won the race or helped his team prevail, by one who won the match or came in first in the regatta.

Which one is the cup mentioned in this passage from Mark chapter 10? The Zebedee brothers wanted the best seats available in the heavenly realm. All they were offered was the cup from which Jesus said he would drink. He meant the cup of sorrow and sacrifice. Kind of like the cup of hemlock that became Socrates’ lot.

So the Zebedees sought glory. What they got was a cup. And not a loving cup from having triumphed, either. And not a china cup that bid the pinky be held primly in the drinking. Not the ordinary, not the pedestrian cup. Nor the disposable one. But the cup and its contents that came with casting their lot with the Sage of Nazareth.

What was entailed in drinking from that cup? The Zebedees presumably found out if they stuck around for the arrest and trial of their leader, and for his execution by the Roman cohort. Who needs such a cup? Who wishes to drink from it? Who yearns to sip that bitter vintage?

So much religion that travels under the banner of Christianity ignores the challenge of this gospel passage. TV evangelists tell you that God wants you to be rich and happy and satisfied. Just send in your prayer offering and wait for the good times to roll. Other purveyors of cheap grace will tell you that all you have to do is believe some poppycock or another, and heaven is yours for the asking. And, oh yes, send in your prayer offering, and you may get a good seat up there.

Next Sunday in the sacrament of baptism, this community will be formally welcoming into its midst two unsuspecting infants. Neither of them will have any memory of the wing-ding we and their families plan to put on for them, or at least with them at the center of our elaborate rituals, both religious and social. The babies will fuss and cry while we smile. – You know what? They will be afraid when they look up into this face and see the shell of water about to cascade down on their heads. We’ll think it’s cute. They’ll sense a threat.

You know who will be right about that? The babies. At some level they will know what the writer of the Epistle of the Hebrews set down at the end of the first century: It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

If that’s what baptism at least potentially does to and for the baptized, then one is right to be apprehensive. – The Zebedee boys evidently thought that in signing on with Jesus they were bound for glory. Wrong. They were bound for trouble, and plenty of it.

I had a moment like that in my life when I had to decide if my commitment to this whole church and ordained ministry thing was to be more than an ordination in fancy vestments and being fawned over as a new priest and to behave myself in a way that would get me one ecclesiastical promotion after another until I got to be a bishop. That was me being one of the Zebebees: holding out for glory.

The moment of truth, as the saying goes, came for me. I had to decide to seek the glory or drink from the cup. In the end, I chose the cup, and I have been drinking from it ever since. It has gotten me into plenty of trouble. People have walked out on my sermons, not because they were boring, but because they were challenging.

A senior warden very early in my career told me sternly that it was my job to save souls and to keep politics and social action out of my sermons. I ventured to ask that if there were actually some function known as soul-saving, wouldn’t it be something God did?

Then came the open-housing controversy of the late 1960s. The rector under whom I then worked, wanting, if not glory, at least to avoid the cup, assured our congregation (almost all of whom were well-off white people)
that they didn’t have to worry about supporting a program that would allow black people to move into their neighborhoods. The rector said not to worry. “There is open housing in heaven.”

It was my turn to preach the next Sunday, and you can imagine what I said in response. In effect, I seized the cup, drank from it, and then was compelled to look for work elsewhere. Me and the Zebedees.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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