Drinking the Cup.

John 18:1-11.

Palm/Passion Sunday

March 20, 2016

I.

Jesus finally gets arrested.  His hour has come.  He is placing himself into the hands of the authorities.  For the next 2 chapters we will follow the Lord through the legal system, from court to court, as he is subjected to the machinations of a corrupt system.  That system already knows what it is going to do.  All this traipsing between jurisdictions is mere window-dressing, a meaningless charade meant to convince people that this really is a fair and open process.

But it isn’t.  And it never is.  It never is because of the inherent corruption of power.  When some people are given power over others, it is always abused.  Always.

How do we respond to a world like this?  How do the weak respond to the predations of the strong?  How to we retain our freedom, responsibility, dignity, decency, and integrity?  How do we retain our faith, our hope, and our love, in the face of pervasive injustice?

This is a question that has colored Jesus’ entire ministry.  Jesus has been playing tag with the police since way back in chapter 2, when he upset the commercial status quo in the Temple.  Ever since then he has been known as a troublemaker, a subverter of the law, a religious extremist, a terrorist who wants to blow up the Temple, or whatever epithet they might have thrown at him to make people afraid of him.  They have had a file on him.  And that file has grown thicker and thicker.  They have shadowed him.  And they have developed an informant in his inner circle.

In Matthew, Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount, much of which is advice for poor people about how to survive being powerless.  Don’t fight back with violence.  Treat your oppressors with graciousness and love.  Above all do not respond in kind because then you will become like them and lose your soul.  He teaches mainly about spiritual survival.  His advice does not really have to do with how to stay alive and free physically.  Because the system will kill or incarcerate people at will without any particular reason.

Jesus has decided that it is now the right time.  This is the third Passover of his career.  On the first one he instigates that incident in the Temple, throwing out the merchants.  “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” he shouts.  On the second Passover he is up in Galilee where he very pointedly feeds 5,000 people on a hillside, without resorting to merchants or money.  Now it is the third Passover.  And Jesus is betrayed by one of his disciples, the one who was most involved and corrupted by… money.  The last time we heard from Judas, he was bitterly complaining about the waste of some expensive aromatic ointment of which he knew the precise market value: 300 denarii.  In the other gospels, Judas received 30 pieces of silver as payment for his betrayal.  He is always presented as the disciple most concerned with money.

II.

So Jesus is back in Jerusalem.  The authorities probably want to keep him away from the Temple at all costs, fearing his intentions.  

But they do not understand that the Temple-building has become irrelevant to Jesus.  He is himself the new Temple.  He is himself the place where reconciliation happens.  And because of who he is — the Word of God, who was in the beginning with God, through whom all things came into being and without whom not one thing came into being, and the Son of Man, the revelation of our true, shared, common humanity — he expands the Temple, the place of reconciliation, so it is no longer limited to one piece of real estate.  Now Jesus reveals that the true and actual Temple, the place where God dwells and people find God’s Presence, is the whole creation, and the human heart.  The Temple is no longer a stone building on a particular hill in Jerusalem.  The Temple is now within each one of us, and within everything.

Making this clear and real to people is what he is about to accomplish, and what he starts to accomplish now, as he and the remaining disciples make their way to this garden across the Kidron Valley, the steep canyon on the east side of Jerusalem.  They had been using the garden as their gathering place since they had come to the area a few days before.  Judas knows where it is.

Shortly after they arrive Judas also shows up — with 600 soldiers and some Temple police, showing that the religious and political authorities have collaborated from the beginning.  They are carrying torches and are heavily armed.  Jesus keeps the initiative for this whole encounter.  He is in charge.  First, he asks whom they are looking for, and they say, “Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Lord responds, “I Am he.”  In the Greek it’s just “I Am,” which is the Name of God received by Moses at the burning bush in Exodus.  This Name was forbidden to be spoken; Jesus has gotten himself in trouble over this before. 

The text then indicates that some of them apparently fall to the ground when Jesus says this.  It is an odd thing to happen.  Perhaps it is a reflex on the part of at least the Jewish members of the arresting party, to make a ritual prostration at the mention of the holy Name, kind of like the way a Catholic might make the sign of the cross.  

It would have reminded some of the way the priests in the Day of Atonement ritual fall down and make a prostration when the Name is spoken.  And the reconciliation of the Day of Atonement ritual is what Jesus is in the process of fulfilling.  But whatever reverence they have for the Name of God, it does not spill over into reverence for Jesus.

III.

They are looking for some guy from Galilee for whom they have an arrest warrant; Jesus indicates that the One whom they have found is God.  But even hearing God’s Name and responding accordingly doesn’t change the trajectory of these events.  Jesus is in charge and this is all part of his plan.  He doesn’t say “I Am” because he thinks that might get them to back off.  He’s not trying to pull rank or invoke his connections.  He says it to make clear what is going on.  They are arresting, and are about to put to death, God.  Part of them even knows this; but mainly the authorities and their representatives are sleepwalking through these events, just doing what they are told, following orders, and doing what they have always done.

Having given himself up, Jesus then insists that they release his supporters.  But Peter, not understanding what is really going on here any more than the soldiers and police do, draws his sword and assaults, of all people, the slave of the High Priest.  Not Judas, not any of the armed men, but the High Priest’s slave, and perhaps personal representative.  His name is Malchus and he may have been the official responsible for overseeing the arrest.

Peter cuts off the man’s right ear!  All four gospels have this detail.  In Matthew it gives Jesus a chance to make his famous statement about everybody who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and in Luke Jesus reconnects Malchus’ ear to his head.  Here, Jesus just barks at Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath.  Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

Jesus realizes that these people are not to blame.  That have no idea what they are really doing.  Fighting them is pointless, as is all violence.  Falling into a sword-fight with these low-level lackeys would only play into the hands of the authorities.  They could then say that armed resistance to legitimate police only proves that Jesus really is a terrorist.  

Plus, Jesus knows there must be no doubt about what is happening.  Human beings are not in control of any part of this procedure; it is all about God’s will that the world be saved through Jesus.  Nobody else gets credit.  Nobody else gets blame.  The days of blaming and retribution are over.  When Peter imagines he is defending Jesus, he is really attacking him.  Which is why the Lord scolds Peter to lose the sword, perhaps reminding Peter than he is going to deny Jesus in just a couple of hours.

This is the only mention of a “cup” in this gospel.  “The cup” means Jesus has to do what he has to do.  For he is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, he gives his life for the life of the world.  He is the conflation and fulfillment of the Passover lamb whose blood saves the people from death, and the two goats of the Day of Atonement: one bears away the people’s sins and the other’s life becomes a blessing and a purification, restoring our relationship with the Creator.

IV.

During Passover the people of God would sing a set of Psalms, 113-118.  In the middle of that there is a line from Psalm 116, “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the Name of the Lord.  Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.”  This is the cup Jesus has to be talking about.  The cup of salvation, of healing, of redemption; this is the cup the Father has given him to drink.

The cup of salvation is never lifted and drunk from easily.  We know this.  No one experiences spiritual transformation without a struggle.  Indeed, from the perspective of our mortal, ego-centric, personality-driven, existence under the powers of this world, this cup is poison.  The cup of salvation can only be the cup of death to our former selves, our old selves.  

This is the Lord’s point which is so hard for us to hear.  We do not get to resurrection by means of a smooth cruise on calm water with the wind at our back.  In chapter 12, Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  

The sin of the world, and of each individual in the world, does not get taken away as easily as deciding to take off your coat.  It gets scrubbed, scraped, chipped, burned, dissolved, cut, and blasted off.  A caterpillar in metamorphosis does not settle down in a cozy spa for a nice warm makeover.  It goes into a chrysalis where its old form is disintegrated and broken down.  Only then can it be reassembled in its new, true form, as a butterfly.

The cup of salvation has to it a poisonous element.  We don’t think about that when we come to the Table and dip a piece of bread in it.  We don’t think this is going to harm us or inconvenience us, let alone kill us.  But if we’re going to realize within us Christ’s life, it means that our old manner of existence has to go.  If we’re going to be the butterflies God intends, we have to figure out how to release our caterpillar delusions.

Christ is the “pioneer of our salvation” in the sense that he goes ahead of us, blazing the trail, demonstrating what has to happen to us, as people encrusted and infected with sin, which is to say, with the illusion of our separation from and enmity towards God and everything else, manifested in our greed, envy, gluttony, deceit, lust, and other destructive thought and behavior patterns.  In short, these have to be removed from us.  They do not survive.

The cup of salvation then has two effects: First, it kills.  And then it gives new life.  The new life does not happen unless first we in some sense die.

V.

This week, Jesus will show that it is a collision with the world and its powers that reveal the true extent of what in us we need to let go of.  Our changes are never just individual and interior; our life is social, political, and economic.  To be grounded in Christ will necessarily attract the wrath of the authorities.  

Change in us is always a matter of courage and faith.  Courage is necessary to take on the humiliation, pain, horror, and rejection that are involved.  Because when we go through these things it is impossible to see the goal on the other side.  But we do see Jesus Christ.  This is where faith comes in.  We trust in Jesus Christ who goes before us, who has promised that no matter what happens in the meantime, the purpose and goal of God with and within us will not be denied.  

Our redemption is not in doubt, because when we look at him, the truly Human One, the revelation of the essential humanity in which we all share, we realize that our salvation also is already here.  It is already within us.  We are indeed, already home.

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