Jesus Challenges Us To Drink The Cup He Drank
(By Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp)
Gospel Reading From Mark 10: 35-45
Jesus challenges us as His disciples, not to be consumed by positions of authority.
A few weeks ago I moved to Erin in Trinidad’s southwest and yesterday I drove from the funeral of the father of a former parishioner and rushed home to carry out an important interview with a member of the parish who lived at a place called Rancho Quemado, a few kilometers from my presbytery. My friends, when I was finished, the road was flooded – water everywhere! I could not return home! What amazed me was that the rainfall was not that heavy yet we were so quickly inundated! I had to drive for two hours, all the way back to Siparia, as if I was returning to Port of Spain then take the Southern Main Road and return to my house via Point Fortin. For those of you who know this part of Trinidad, you would understand that this was a journey of almost 100 kilometres, making a huge loop, over roads that were sometimes in poor shape. All along the way, the words of this weekend’s gospel reading played over and over in my head: “Can you drink the cup that I must drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized?”
Persons who work in distant parts of the country suffer right along with the persons that they serve. As a stranger from outside the community, as a leader, you take upon yourself a different reality – and often this reality is not a glamorous one. What you encounter, more often than not are fantastic people living in difficult circumstances, in times that are often challenging. This challenge is the “cup” that I must now drink. The occasional sufferings, the inconveniences and heartaches of life in the southwestern peninsula, where Oil once ruled and unemployment is now a growing threat, this is the “baptism” with which I am now to be baptized.
Jesus, in today’s reading put the reality of his own situation before James and John. In telling James and John that his work was not some kind of ‘glorious adventure’ by earthly standards, he was also offering them a clear truth about life, a truth that was meant to free them. Jesus in answer to their request asks them a question of his own, a challenge: ‘Can you drink the cup that I must drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized?’ On hearing their eager response ‘we can!’ Jesus divides the question. They would share his cup and his baptism, symbolic language for the passion and death that would lead eventually to glory, but he goes on to say, “The cup that I must drink you shall drink and with the baptism with which I must be baptized, you shall be baptized, but as for seats at my right hand or my left, these are not mine to grant; they belong to those to whom they have been allotted.”
Here then is Jesus’ message. The only offer that stands before the disciple is the decision to follow Jesus in his life of service and self-sacrifice. This is a life that is costly, and which can be described as a ‘cup’ of suffering. One can willfully choose to follow Jesus. Success and recognition in the eyes of others, symbolically rendered as ‘seats on his right and his left’ are not Jesus’ to grant. Recognition by others is not under our control. No one has the power to make others love us or recognize us or even be grateful to us. What we CAN control, the only thing we have any control over, is our deliberate decision to follow Jesus.
This is important teaching for the workplace today. So many people live their lives working for the praise and adulation of others. They are driven by what other people have to give them rather than by any values and principles living inside of them. We live to become supervisor, or senior minister, or a bishop, or a senior executive or manager, or principal or supervisor. The question is, can we not be free enough to live – for ourselves, to live a particular kind of life simply because it is the right way to live?
