Passion Sunday (The Fifth Sunday in Lent)
“You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”
One of the things I sometimes say in either pastoral work or from the pulpit is that so much of our time spent in prayer, in conversation with God, is really about learning what God’s will is for us, and aligning our will with God’s.
Put more simply, prayer is not something that we do to convince God to do something He’s not, but to convince ourselves to will God’s will, to want what God wants.
This often comes up in pastoral work, especially around death. There are times that we’re called into hospital rooms where someone is clinging to life after an accident or in their final hours after cancer has ravaged their body and we, as clergy, are looked to for prayer. Too often, perhaps, we go in and can sense immediately that the family gathered at the bedside is waiting on the miracle to happen: for the brain to suddenly spark back to life, for the cancer to suddenly recede entirely, or for the damaged heart to be made whole.
And in those moments, it’s hard to pray.
Do you pray for healing in those moments? Do you really believe that a person at the end of their life’s journey, dying from some aggressive terminal disease is suddenly, in their last moments, going to return to health because of the efficacy of your prayer? Of course the answer is both, at the same time, “no”, and, quoting Our Lord in Matthew’s Gospel, “With God, all things are possible.”
But this cuts to the very heart of our struggle: the struggle of our limited imaginations and selfish hearts to discern, to learn God’s will and to align our own with it. For us ‘healing’ only really means one thing, and so the pastor in those situations must pray not for the unlikely miracle to happen, the one that the family is clinging to like wreckage from a ship that has gone down, but the miracle that is surely to happen – the miracle of God’s presence with the dying, and of them being welcomed into God’s eternal kingdom.
More often than not, I imagine, we are all (speaker included) probably more like those clinging to the life raft – hanging on to those tiny, fraying threads of hope for what we want – than we are like the Pastor who is able to pray that we can surrender ourselves to what God wants. It’s a struggle of the mind and a struggle of the heart. And this applies to everything, not just sickness, it applies to all the things we hope and pray for but don’t get – it isn’t a question of “is God actually listening?” but rather, “Am I asking for the right thing?”
The practice of prayer – and I emphasize practice – is what gradually turns us to rejoice in everything that befalls us, knowing that it is all under God’s will.
The truly practiced pray-er can give thanks to God even for those awful things which befall them because they too are within the scope of God’s providence and grace, and God can redeem them not by stopping them to bring our wills to desire what God desires for us.
I say all of this because we see something happening in the Gospel today that happens because of a dissonance between the will of Man and the will of God.
You’ll remember that some of the first followers of Jesus, his earliest disciples are James and John, the sons of Zebedee the fishermen, who ditch their dad and his nets at the shore to follow Jesus. James and John were among the most ardent and zealous of Jesus’ disciples, earning them the nickname Boanerges – Sons of Thunder (A great name for a Christian motorcycle gang, if any of you are thinking of starting one).
Perhaps it was a case of sons feeling overshadowed, or a proud mother feeling like her devout sons were not getting the respect they deserve, but she brings them to Jesus like a mother dragging her son to the hockey coach to insist that he gets his chance to goaltend and asks him that they both get a seat next to Him in the Kingdom.
Jesus replies to her saying that she has no idea what she’s asking, but why?
Well, in some sense her and perhaps even her sons’ vision of Jesus, of His promises, of the coming Kingdom are skewed by her own heart. What Mother, after all, whose sons get called by the Son of God to be his first followers, would not think they are so smart, and handsome, and righteous, and clever that they should get the prime seats in heaven? But if she – if they – knew what that entailed, would they want it?
Jesus uses the language of drinking from a cup, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” Language that we are going to hear repeated very soon.
Today is a Sunday traditionally called Passion Sunday and marks the final countdown to the dramatic events of Holy Week. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem and his journey towards the cross enters its final leg. On Maundy Thursday night, before Jesus is betrayed by his friend, knowing that the next morning he will be nailed to a cross, he goes to pray alone in the Garden of Gethsemane and asks His Father that if ‘this cup’ might pass from his hands, that it be done; that is, if His Father can bring all things to pass without Jesus going to the cross, then let it happen. How often we pray for God to either give us what we want, or to cause not to happen something that we fear – this is certainly a relatable moment for us in Jesus’ life.
What is not relatable as much, I think, is how after each prayer Jesus says, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt…if it cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done.” This is surrender to the will of God, and one of the hardest things any of us can ever truly do.
Anthony Bloom – a Theologian and Metropolitan in the Orthodox church – has written a beautiful book called Courage to Pray and in it speaks about the absence of God. He clarifies that of course God is never truly absent, but always present to us, but that mostly it is the case that God somehow escapes us, just like how we can be lost in our own world, and our own thoughts and walk right by a good friend on the street without noticing them. Bloom goes on to say that we often seek a God that is made in our own image, rather than the other way around; we pray to a God that we build in our minds who is convenient to us – we like the idea of a God who answers every prayer exactly as we want, and so we pray to that God, and when God doesn’t answer we get hurt, we drift away from faith, and we blame God for our troubles.
“Are we prepared to find God as He is,” asks Bloom, “even if this encounter condemns us or upsets all the values that have so far been dear to us?” Perhaps this is what was going on with James and John and their mother – the God in their image gives out seats in the Kingdom left and right; God as he is, as he was before them, reminds them that they must also drink from the same cup to inherit that kingdom. Sharing in his life means sharing in his suffering and his death.
The desire of their hearts that day was to be granted seats of honour, but those who want high places says Jesus to them, must first become lowest, even the servants of all- just as God in Highest heaven became a lowly human, so that we the low might be raised with Him to that highest heaven.
The coming two weeks are going to be all about learning what it means to follow Christ and to share that cup with Him. Our hope is that we will see ourselves in every service – we will see ourselves in the rejoicing crowds of Jerusalem next week; we will see ourselves and our betrayal of God in Judas; we will see ourselves in our denial of Him as Peter; we will see ourselves in his disciples, falling asleep during their friend’s hour of need; in Pilate; in the angry crowds shouting for crucifixion; in the soldiers; in the thieves.
But, God willing, we will also see that despite this, despite us being Pilate or Judas or Peter – we can also see ourselves in the empty tomb. We can see ourselves in the light of his resurrection.
