Can You Drink of the Cup I Will Drink?

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

Sister Marianne Cope was born in Germany in 1838 and immigrated to the Syracuse, NY area with her family the next year.  At the age of twenty-four she entered the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis at Syracuse, New York.  Later on as Superior General of her congregation, Mother Marianne willingly embraced a call to care for the lepers of Hawaii after fifty other congregations had refused.  She went personally, with six of her fellow sisters, to manage a hospital and later to open a home for girls whose parents were lepers.  Five years later she opened a home for women and girls on Molokai itself, and bravely ended any more contact with the outside world.  There she looked after Father Damien, already famous for his work with lepers, nursed him as he died and took over his work among the male lepers.  At a time when little could be done for those suffering from this disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage and enthusiasm.  Her nuns are still ministering there today, showing the spirit of Saint Francis to many.

Truly Mother Marianne is a figure of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) who was carrying the sins of many and taking the guilt on himself.  Jesus Christ is the only one who did this, and the saints help us to see a reflection of this.  He is able to sympathize with our weaknesses since he experienced all of them.  The verb for temptation in Greek means that it is ongoing, that it was not just during his time in the desert, but throughout his life.

He knew the depths, the tension, and the assaults of temptation much greater than you.  Why is this?  Man normally gives in often and easily so he or she does not feel the temptation in the way that Jesus did.  He was tempted far beyond us and longer than us.  It is similar to pain which a person may endure up to a point and then faints.  Christ did not faint, and so the depth of his suffering is more profound than ours.

When James and John asked Jesus to sit at his right and his left, he responded, ‘You do not know what you are asking.  Can you drink the cup that I shall drink?’  Meaning can you suffer what I will suffer, can you be immersed/baptized into the passion that is coming to me?  Jesus says that they will drink of it, and they did.

John was the only apostle to witness Jesus drinking the cup of the Passion.  Perhaps for this reason only he of the apostles died a natural death.  James son of Zebedee was put to death by Herod Agrippa about the year 44; the first to be martyred.  So even though they did not understand much of what they were asking, and many human motives were at play, they both drank of the cup which Jesus drank.  Through our Baptism we are invited to do the same.  I would say in small ways for most of us.  To eat what we may not like, to be kind to those we find boring or tactless, to leave the office earlier are all ways to drink of the cup that Christ drank.  How could we do this?  Only if Christ is alive in us, which in the end is the only thing that matters.

Heaven is high, St. Augustine says, but the way to it is lowly.  The way is suffering and the goal is to abide with Him forever.  Why do you and I seek heaven and not the way to it?

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