Can You Drink the Cup?

We have been asking ourselves four key questions as a personal and communal way into discernment.  Where are you? puts us in touch with the place from which we begin.  What do you want? invites us to name the desires that dwell deep within.  If we allow ourselves to imagine a future in which the beauty and goodness we want for ourselves and others exists, we begin to realize it will require patience, perseverance, effort, and sacrifice to get there.  Here we arrive at our third question: Can you drink the cup? (Mt 20:21).

James and John approach Jesus to ask him to give them what they want.  This is how Mark puts it.  But this seemed so bold to Matthew, that he had the mother of James and John do the dirty work.  But let’s listen first to what they are asking for.  When Jesus asks them, “What do you want?” and they respond: “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mk 10:37).  Perhaps you can feel within yourself the impulse to ridicule or rage.  Who the heck do you think you are?  Children of God?  Intimate friends of Jesus?  Fundamentally, they are asking to be close to the one they love, so close that they can reach out and touch him.  Given what we say we believe about desire as the fundamental energy source of our human being, about God as its ultimate source and final goal, this would seem to be yet another example of a counter-message: It’s not ok to want what you want.

Notice that Jesus does not discourage their desire, but very gently puts it in perspective: “You do not know what you are asking.  Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” (Mk 10:38).  The cup that Jesus asks them about is what he longs for more than anything, the fulfillment of his Father’s will: “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50).  And yet even Jesus would tremble before this cup in the garden of Gethsemane: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will” (Mk 14:36).  In other words, Jesus is telling them that what they want is precious, so precious that it will cost them everything, and will require a demanding process of purification.  They may not receive what they long for in the way they think they want it.

What Jesus does not say, but what we all suspect, is that they James and John’s desire is not only for God’s will or intimacy with Jesus, but for all the fringe benefits they think will come along with this – pride, prestige, power.  Like gold from which the dross is sifted, or like a flourishing vine pruned so that it will produce fruit and not just leaves, our desires require sorting and selecting.  Here we find ourselves very solidly in the realm of monastic ascesis.  Familiar territory.  So let us consider just briefly how our life of vowed commitment provides us with a necessary education of desire.

By our vow of stability, we commit ourselves to waiting, dwelling, trusting that one place and one group of people will bring us to our goal.  To remain in one place while not being continually entertained or stimulated by something outside ourselves is increasingly difficult.  But if we are to see our deepest desires realized, we must be willing to remain in the presence of God and others and of ourselves, over and against our impulse to run away as quickly as we can to reduce our distress as expeditiously as possible.  We must remain for a lifetime.

By our vow of conversatio morum, we commit to a life of conversion, to be open to change, to adapt in order to keep moving toward the goal by the means our circumstances provide.  Conversion and change are difficult.  Why?  One reason is that our brains are wired in such a way that repeating certain actions or ways of thinking reinforces neural pathways, so that it is easier to go the same way again, much as a path is formed by many feet walking on it.  Wanting to change a habit, or a neural pathway, takes deliberate effort over the course of time to create a new pathway.  Neuroscientists tell us that neurons grow at a rate of two millimeters per day.  It takes about 6 weeks to rewire our brain in regard to a particular habit, if we are consistent in walking that new path.  We know it will take a lifetime to be renewed into the persons we desire to be.

By our vow of obedience, we commit ourselves to saying a deep and life-affirming “yes” to God, but this also means saying “no” to what is not of God, to our addictions, or what in biblical terminology we would call our idols, our almost-but-not-quite simulacra for what really matters, what we really want.  Saying “no” in this way, setting boundaries to our appetites and our destructive passions, can be excruciatingly painful, as we well know.  To flourish in life, in the real world, and not a pretend one, means to suffer, to swim against the current of selfishness.  And then there is letting go – letting go of what we once believed to be essential to our life and well-being, but gradually is revealed to be unnecessary and even superfluous.  We will spend a lifetime in recovery.

Johannes Baptist Metz describes the need for real poverty of spirit to accept the “chalice of our existence”.  To accept our personal and material limitations, the actual circumstances and the real people who surround us, as gifts of God’s providence.  This is also obedience at its most basic: to accept myself as I am from the hands of God.  Crucially, this does not mean passive acquiescence to the status quo, but active commitment to the time, effort, difficulty, and expansion of the imagination that is required for us to grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ.  Just imagine, God may be getting ready to give us even more than James and John asked for!

So let us ask ourselves, allow Jesus to ask us: can you drink the cup?

Source:
Thompson, C. (2021). The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community. (Chapter 9, “Inquire,” pp. 175-210). InterVarsity Press.

Image: Icon of the Prayer of the Cup