Twenty Ninth Sunday
Drinking From the Same Cup
Mk 10: 35-45
We can smile at the sight of the sons of Zebedee asking Jesus to guarantee them good seats in his Father’s house. We all like to be ‘on the inside’. But charting a path through a complex world is more than just about getting a share of the glory; it is a serious business.
In this wonderful wounded world of ours God gives us people to heal, relationships to mend, and personal knots to disentangle. All of these can be worked out with the help of God’s grace, but we have to get real about it if we are serious about ‘catching’ this grace.
Jesus gave us a programme of action to follow, a plan of service of God and neighbour, a plan of self-appraisal and making amends, and a plan of prayer and witness that could cost us dearly. This is what Jesus meant by the ‘cup that I must drink’ and ‘the baptism I must go through’.
There will be rewards a-plenty for those who follow this path, but we have to be serious about it.
In fact after the birth of the church the sons of Zebedee went on to drink this cup in their own different ways.
By tradition James was beheaded on the orders of Herod Agrippa, grandson of the Herod who met the Magi.
And John survived several cruel persecutions to go on to write a gospel. They were not given conventional ‘good seats’ but simply the joy of having witnessed to Jesus and then raised to life with him in the company of all God’s holy people.
Fr.Austin scj