22nd Sunday After Pentecost
Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
October 20, 2024
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. Can you feel it? The Season of Creation comes toward its close and the Fall Triduum of All Hallows, All Saints, and All Souls draws near. The circuit of the Church Year heads into its annual, turbulent, thin space of endings and beginnings as Advent approaches shortly thereafter. The journeying through all these events is both familiar and new. The year brings us through certain passageways again and again, but never in quite the same way. Week by week this living sequence gives us texts from our tradition to accompany or lives.[1] With and through them, or pressing back against them, we are invited to offer our questions, our struggles, our victories small and large, to the God who hears and is present with us in the midst of it all, transforming us as we press onward, as we drink our cup.
Our passage from the letter to the Hebrews evokes this sense of life offered, a journey in progress. One word in particular challengingly suggests this lens: τελειωθεὶς in Greek, translated in our passage as “having been made perfect,” from the verb τελειόω (“I advance toward fulfillment”, “I progress toward completeness”). I have to confess to you that I am not immediately inspired by terms associated with “perfection,” connected as it is in my experience with cultures of mastery. I think of the important, commonplace warning not “to make the perfect the enemy of the good.” And I carry negative associations of this concept in relation to the dynamics of body image, and how media in general and social media in particular can create impossible and even life-diminishing ideals of beauty or prowess. Perhaps some of these concerns resonate for you as well. But the phrase from our passage, “having been made perfect,” has a different frame of reference. τέλος, the noun form sometimes translated as “perfect,” can also be rendered as “complete” or “whole.”[2] For the letter to the Hebrews, Christ is the pioneer and perfector of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the One who goes out ahead of us, carrying our in-progress struggle “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7) to the very heart of God in whom we are finally received in the fullness and wholeness of our humanity. Christ’s “perfecting” in Hebrews is what the biblical scholar Harrold Attridge characterizes as “a vocational process by which Jesus is made complete or fit” for that role.[3] His journey carries and encourages the call of our lives, accompanied all along the way by what the letter later calls, in language evocative of All Saints, a “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). Christ’s journey in its fullness, its completion, accompanies and hallows ours in all its ambiguity and ongoingness.[4]
That shared journey is also strongly evoked in our passage from the Gospel of Mark. Once again, the disciples have expressed their longing for favor, power, and mastery as they make their way with their confounding leader. “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you” (Mark 10:35), James and John the sons of Zebedee, declare (in the Gospel of Matthew version their mother asks on their behalf! Mt 20:20-21). Jesus is patiently game. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mk 10:37). At which point Jesus turns a question to them: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They blithely answer, yes! They truly have no clue. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could. But they would indeed drink and be baptized with Christ’s cup and baptism, Jesus goes on to say (Mk 10:39). To follow him would pour out their lives in service and discipleship, transformed beyond their wildest imaginings.
Whenever I hear this passage or its parallel in the Gospel of Matthew, I always think of the theologian and spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen. As I have shared here before, I had the good fortune to hear him when I happened to be visiting Yale Divinity School in the spring of 1995 on a day he was speaking in the chapel. I remember him so clearly asking the burning question of our passage: “can you drink the cup?” Again and again, Nouwen asked it with deep emotion and passion. His words that day became part of a beautiful little book that was published at the time of his sudden death in the fall of 1996, titled simply Can You Drink the Cup? Nouwen uses the image of the cup to speak moving of our lives. It is the cup of sorrow as well as the cup of joy – it is both/and. It is a cup we are called to hold, to lift up, and finally to drink, even as we, like Jesus, may sometimes cry out, “O God, if it is possible, let this cup of sorrow pass us by.”[5] Nouwen writes of hearing this cry, of lifting up this cup, as “the endless plea for justice and peace all over the world… a prayer rising up to God not as incense but as wild flame.”[6] Thirty years later, how piercing that plea remains. “Jesus inviting us to drink the cup without offering the reward we expect is the great challenge of the spiritual life. It breaks through all human calculations and expectations. It defies all our wishes to be sure in advance. It turns our hope for a predictable future upside down and pulls down our self-invented safety devices.”[7] Jesus is able to drink that cup because of the bond he shares with the divine Parent, the love, “completely open, completely free” that flows between them and out to us in the power of the Holy Spirit. “Living a spiritual life is living a life in which the Holy Spirit will guide us and give us the strength and courage to keep saying yes to the great question.”[8] And this affirmative response, this holding, lifting, and drinking of our cup is something we are strengthened to do in community. “We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”[9]
St. Aidan’s friends, as people of the cup, we know that our journeys are far from simple, far from straight forward. Ours are complex lives woven in communities – here at 101 Gold Mine and in various other contexts. We are privileged to share our lives together in the power of the Holy Spirit, to offer them in the charism of our patron as “wild flame.” In these waning days of the season of Creation we now begin a time that will bridge us through the fall triduum to our extended season of Advent, and that is our stewardship campaign. Our theme, Walk in Love, about which we will hear more shortly from Doug Barnett and from others in subsequent weeks, emphasizes our shared journey of faith in this particular community. We walk in love, practicing the depth of care and compassion to which Christ calls us in all facets of our lives, a love that seeks healing and justice, peace and liberation. To walk in love is to journey with intentionality, with support for one another and our wider neighborhood, and with commitment to help equip this community in offering such support. To walk in love is to seek to authentically to follow Christ, the pioneer of our faith who struggled and completed the journey of his self-offering that the world, the cosmos, be made whole, who lifted up the cup of his life that together we might drink it to the full. May we drink this cup together in strength and solidarity, and in the process be transformed beyond our wildest imaginings.
[1] I am influenced in this sense of sequence by Evelyn Underhill’s description of the Church Year in Worship (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936, 1957), as well as Vida Dutton Scudder’s in eds. Christopher Poore and Andrew Raines, Social Teachings of the Christian Year: Lectures Delivered at the Cambridge Conference, 1918 (Galesburg, IL: Seminary Street Press, 2022).
[2] Or “end,” or “goal”
[3] Harold Attridge, Hebrews: A Critical and Historical Commentary (Philadel;phia: Fortress Press, 1989), 86.
[4] With “ongoingness” I’m also thinking of Pauli Murray’s sermon “Ministry” in ed. Anthony Pinn, To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 49.
[5] Henri Nouwen, Can You Drink The Cup? (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Marie Press, 1996), 37.
[6] Nouwen, 37-38
[7] Nouwen, 107
[8] Nouwen, 107
[9] Nouwen, 57
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