Drink The Chalice

Two brothers ask for thrones about ninety seconds after Jesus tells them he is going to be handed over, condemned, mocked, scourged, and crucified. That is the scene the Church sets in front of us today on the Feast of Saint James, Apostle. Their request is more familiar than it looks. James and John believed in the kingdom, they believed Jesus would get there, and they assumed the road to glory ran alongside the cross instead of straight through it. We make the same assumption. We want the fruits of redemption, the peace, the answered prayer, the household that holds together, and we would rather receive them without being handed over ourselves. Jesus answers the request with a question about a cup. Saint Paul, writing to Corinth, answers it with a clay pot. Both readings agree on something that costs us. The glory is real, and it comes through the dying.

Rustic clay earthenware of the kind Paul’s Corinthians would have pictured. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 527439879.

The Readings

First Reading: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

Gospel: Matthew 20:20-28

Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him, with her sons, and kneeling before him she asked him for something. And he said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Command that these two sons of mine may sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” But Jesus answered, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” They said to him, “We are able.” He said to them, “You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.” And when the ten heard it, they were indignant at the two brothers. But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Treasure And The Pot

Paul has just finished writing about glory. Four verses earlier he described the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shining on the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Then he turns a corner and spends the rest of the chapter on suffering. The two belong together in his mind, and verse 7 is the hinge: “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.”

What is the treasure? The context gives us three possibilities that all point the same direction. The knowledge of God’s glory on Christ’s face (4:6), the gospel of the glory of Christ (4:4), and the new covenant ministry itself (4:1). There is no reason to pick one.[1] Paul has staked his whole life on it, the way the man in the parable staked everything on the field with treasure buried in it (Matthew 13:44).

The pot is the surprise. Paul reaches for the image of a cheap ceramic jar, the kind Jeremiah watched a potter shape and reshape (Jeremiah 18:1-6), the kind Leviticus tells you to smash if something unclean falls into it (Leviticus 11:33). Ordinary. Breakable. Worth almost nothing. And he means his own body, as the next verses make plain when he writes “our body” and “our mortal flesh.” One commentator notes that a strictly dualistic reading has to be excluded here: apostolic life is lived by the whole person, and its tribulations are not undergone by the body alone.[2] Paul is talking about himself, all of himself, wearing out in the work.

Then come four pairs. Afflicted but not crushed. Perplexed but not driven to despair. Persecuted but not forsaken. Struck down but not destroyed. In the Greek, “in every way” sits in the prominent first position, which tells you these sufferings are typical and ongoing, the weather of Paul’s whole ministry.[3] In each pair the first word names the hardship and the second names God’s rescue. The second pair is worth sitting with, because earlier in this same letter Paul admitted that in Asia he “despaired even of life” (2 Corinthians 1:8). The contradiction is only apparent. Sometimes it is only afterward, through the eyes of faith, that we see how God was present and helping.[3]

Carrying The Dying Of Jesus

Verse 10 is where Paul stops describing and starts interpreting. He says he is “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus.” The Greek word is nekrōsis, and it names a process, the putting to death itself. The adverb “always” and the present tense of “carrying” tell you he is describing his ordinary week.[4]

Here is the part that changes how you read the whole passage. In verse 11 Paul says he is “being given up to death,” and the verb is paradidōmi, the same verb the New Testament uses for Jesus being handed over. Paul recalls the night the Lord “was handed over” (1 Corinthians 11:23) and the tradition that Jesus “was handed over for our transgressions” (Romans 4:25). But that verb has an active voice too, and Paul uses it that way of Christ: the Son of God “loved me and gave himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). So when Paul says he is being handed over for the sake of Jesus, he means both things at once. Things are done to him, and he chooses to spend himself in love for the people he serves.[5] He is a slave to the Corinthians for Jesus’ sake (4:5), and he means it as a description of his daily labor.

That is why verse 12 can say something so strange: “death is at work in us, but life in you.” Paul is claiming that his sufferings, joined to Christ’s, do the Corinthians actual good. Divine life is being mediated through him. Consoling and ennobling is the right way to describe knowing that our own dyings can be joined to the dying of Jesus, which is where God brings life out of death.[6]

Paul then quotes Psalm 116, “I believed, and so I spoke.” Read the whole psalm in the Greek Paul used and you find a righteous sufferer who calls himself God’s slave, who was brought low, who was caught in the cords of death and cried out for rescue, and who declares that precious before the Lord is the death of his holy ones. That story runs remarkably close to the story of Philippians 2:6-11, where Christ takes the form of a slave, humbles himself, becomes obedient unto death, and is exalted. So the words in the psalm can be heard on the lips of Jesus, and the faith Paul shares is the faith Christ himself had.[6] That is the reason a fragile man can keep going. He is running on borrowed fidelity, and the lender is the Son.

The Catechism puts the same truth plainly: redemption comes to us above all through the blood of the cross, and yet the whole of Christ’s life is a mystery of redemption, and this mystery is at work throughout that entire life (CCC 517). Every hour of his obedience was already redeeming us. Saint John Paul II drew the conclusion for us in Salvifici Doloris, teaching that every person is called to become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ, and that the Church is the dimension in which Christ’s redemptive suffering can be constantly completed by the suffering of her members.[7]

The Request And The Cup

Matthew places this Gospel immediately after the third and most detailed prediction of the passion (Matthew 20:17-19). Jesus has just told the Twelve about betrayal, condemnation, Gentile hands, mockery, scourging, crucifixion, and resurrection on the third day. The response is a request for cabinet posts.

Matthew has the mother, Salome, make the request. Mark has the brothers ask directly (Mark 10:35), and Saint Thomas Aquinas reconciles the two simply: the mother asked, prompted by her sons. He also names her mistake with real sympathy. She had heard about the passion and the resurrection and had formed a fleshly picture of it, imagining that Jesus would arrive in Jerusalem in glory right away, so she wanted her boys positioned for it.[8] There is something admirable in her too. She wants the best for her children and she has come to believe Jesus is a king.[9] Her error is about what kind of king.

Sitting at a monarch’s right and left was the highest honor the ancient Near East knew (1 Kings 2:19; Psalm 110:1). Matthew, who knows how the story ends, has planted a terrible irony in the request. When Jesus enters his kingship, two men will hang crucified “one on his right and the other on his left” (Matthew 27:38).[9] James and John are asking for those places and do not know it.

“You do not know what you are asking.” Aquinas offers several readings of that line, and one of them cuts deep: if they were thinking of spiritual things, they were asking for eminence over every creature, since to sit at the right hand belongs to no creature at all. Which of the angels did God ever tell to sit at his right hand (Hebrews 1:13)?[8]

Then Jesus reframes the whole conversation with one image. “Can you drink the cup that I am to drink?” The cup has a long history in Israel. The prophets used it for the wine of God’s wrath poured out on the wicked (Psalm 75:8; Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15; Ezekiel 23:31-35), and Jewish writings knew the idiom “the cup of death.” Read against that background, the cup Jesus drinks carries three meanings at once: an agonizing experience of suffering and death, the bearing of God’s just penalty for sin in a representative and redemptive way, and a cup he shares with his disciples. Early Christians spoke of the cup of martyrdom, and one ancient account says the martyrs have a share in “the cup of Christ.”[10]

Aquinas notices that Jesus draws them toward the passion gently by calling it a chalice, and he hears behind it the psalm verse “I will take the chalice of salvation,” which continues, “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:13, 15). He adds a sly observation: it is called a chalice because it inebriates.[11]

“We are able.” Why answer so fast? Aquinas gives three reasons, and the first is the one I keep coming back to. They loved Christ so much that they could not imagine death separating them from him. The second is ignorance, since they had never measured their own strength, and things that look easy before the deed fail in the doing. The third is plain eagerness to get what they had asked for.[11] They meant it. They just did not know what they were promising.

They both drank it. James was the first of the Twelve to drain the cup, beheaded in Jerusalem by Herod Agrippa around AD 44 (Acts 12:2). John died an old man, yet he was scourged, exiled to Patmos (Revelation 1:9), and Aquinas concludes that he suffered enough that he “was not exempt from the chalice’s draught.”[11]

Authority Turned Inside Out

The ten are indignant, and Aquinas will not let them off. The two brothers wanted to be higher out of vainglory, and the ten resented it out of vainglory. “Among the proud there are always contentions” (Proverbs 13:10).

So Jesus gathers all twelve and gives them a lesson in government. The rulers of the Gentiles “lord it over them,” katakyrieuousin, and their great men “exercise authority over them,” katexousiazousin. Both verbs carry the prefix kata, which implies domination over another. Aquinas draws the distinction carefully. Holding office is good, and princes exist to procure the good of those under them. What Jesus condemns is subjecting a free man in a servile way, and Aquinas gives the reason in one sentence: “a free man is one who is for himself, while a slave is one who is for another.”[12] The ruler who reduces his people to instruments has misused the office he was given.

Against those two power words Jesus sets two humble ones. Diakonos, the man who waits on tables. Doulos, the slave.[13] Greatness in the Church runs on the vocabulary of the kitchen. The Catechism states it flatly: authority in the Church is ordered to service (CCC 876).

And then the ground of it all. “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Lytron, ransom, was a real transaction in Israel. Land sold off in hard times could be bought back (Leviticus 25:26). A man who had sold himself into slavery could be redeemed by a kinsman paying the price (Leviticus 25:51). Jesus takes that legal image and applies it to sin: he saves his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21), and the phrase “for many” reaches back to Isaiah’s fourth Servant Song, where the Servant gives his life and takes away the sins of many (Isaiah 53:10-12).[14] Aquinas puts it in the language the Church has used ever since: Christ made himself the price, and his death is sufficient for all and efficacious in those who receive it.[15]

The liturgy knew what it was doing when it set these two readings side by side on this feast. James asked to sit at the right hand of a king. He was given a chalice and a sword, and the Church has honored him for nineteen centuries as the first of the Twelve to be handed over. The treasure went into the earthen vessel, and the vessel broke, and the light got out.

Daily Application

Jesus lets the ambition stand. He corrects what greatness is made of, and then he hands James and John the real thing. That should change how we pray.

Most of us bargain the way Salome did. We bring God a request that already contains our solution. Fix this, and here is how. Give me the outcome, and I will handle the rest. What Jesus offers is participation, and participation runs through the chalice. The interior movement he asks for is consent, the same active handing over Paul described with that double-sided verb. Things will be done to you this week that you did not choose. Underneath them, quietly, you can still choose to spend yourself for someone.

This is where the earthen vessel becomes good news. Paul treats his weakness as the proof of his commission. The transcendent power belongs to God precisely because the jar is cheap. So the thing about yourself you would most like removed, the illness that limits what you can give, the temperament you keep confessing, the exhaustion that makes you feel useless in your parish or your family, is the clay God chose. Ask him to shine through the cracks instead of sealing them.

And take the second reading at its word: “death is at work in us, but life in you.” Your patience at 6 a.m. with a child who will not remember it does something. The forgiveness you extend to the relative who has not asked for it does something. Saint John Paul II taught that our sufferings, joined to Christ’s, are taken up into the Church’s ongoing share in his redemption. That doctrine gives you something to do with the hard thing this morning. Offer it for a name, out loud, and watch what happens to your resentment.

Then there is authority, and nearly all of us have some. Parents have it. Managers have it. Deacons and priests have it. Aquinas gave us the test: a free man is one who is for himself, a slave is one who is for another. When you use your authority, are the people under it becoming more themselves, or more useful to you? Leo XIII made the same demand of employers in Rerum Novarum, insisting that a worker’s dignity forbids treating him as a thing to be used up.[16] The Gospel puts it more sharply still. Wash their feet.

James said “We are able” without knowing what he was saying. About fourteen years later, Herod’s sword made the answer true. His “We are able” was a promise he had to grow into, day by day, and the growing looked like ordinary service long before it looked like martyrdom.

You will be handed something today you did not ask for. Drink it, and let the life of Jesus show through the cracks in the clay.

Sancte Iacobe, ora pro nobis!

Saint James, pray for us!

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Notes

1. Thomas D. Stegman, SJ, Second Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 104.
2. Jan Lambrecht, SJ, Second Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 8 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 71.
3. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 105.
4. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 107.
5. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 108-9.
6. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 110, 112-14.
7. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris (February 11, 1984), nos. 19, 24.
8. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 2, nos. 1656, 1658.
9. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 258.
10. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 259.
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 2, nos. 1659-60.
12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 2, nos. 1663, 1667.
13. Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 287.
14. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 260.
15. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chap. 20, lect. 2, no. 1670.
16. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891), no. 20.