Drinking our cup

This is my homily for today, Good Friday.  Pre-COVID-19, I was scheduled to preach today at the parish's normal Good Friday service.  As everything is now disrupted, our pastor asked our other deacon and me to collaborate on some sort of a service for Good Friday which could be recorded and put on our parish website.  According to liturgical law, deacons really should not lead the regular Triduum Good Friday service (although many are assigned to do it anyway, and I've done it in the past; pastors ask deacons to do this because there is no confection of the Eucharistic species on Good Friday, and this is a very intensive time of the year for pastors, especially those who don't have priests to help them).  So after kicking around a few ideas (Stations of the Cross, Evening Prayer), we decided to simply cobble together a Word Service: essentially, the Liturgy of the Word portion of the regular Good Friday service.  If you are sufficiently curious, you could watch it at the website link a few sentences above - I'm told that it will be available as of noon Central Time today.

If you do decide to watch it, I should explain something: I have a beard in the video.  I've spent most of my adult life without a beard.  When the stay-at-home order went into effect, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to let the beard grow out - it wasn't as though I had many public appearances upcoming.  (This was before our pastor decided to start recording the weekly masses.)  Besides, my wife likes me with a beard, although she may be the only one - I don't actually care for it that much, and mostly-friendly remarks from others indicate that they don't especially care for it, either.  Then, the day after we recorded the service, I heard a doctor on the radio state that beards and moustaches can be havens for the virus.  So I shaved off the beard that day, and I'm back to my clean-shaven self again.  The photo at the top of this post is pretty much what I look like now (although I may have needed a shave in the photo; I'm one of those guys who has a perpetual 5 o'clock shadow, even when my cheeks and chin feel smooth, so it's hard to tell).  At any rate, here is the text of the homily.

“Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?”   Jesus spoke these words to Simon Peter after the latter had tried to resist Jesus’s arrest. 

“Shall I not drink the cup?”  It is as much as to say, ‘Peter, don’t try to stop what is about to happen.  Instead, accept it, because this is how God is now calling me to live – and to die.  It will be more than unpleasant.  It will be very hard and involve much suffering.  But I am willing to drink the cup – I am willing to die, because I am dying that you might live.  All the indignities and suffering I am about to endure are an act of love for you.’

Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest and spiritual writer who did much good work with people with disabilities, wrote a small but wonderful book called Can You Drink the Cup?  Reading that book is like drinking from a cup that is filled with little droplets of spiritual wisdom.  Nouwen noted that many of us spend a great deal of our lives trying not to drink the cup that has been poured out for us.  We try to live some other life than the life we’ve been given, with all our limitations and the wounds we’ve incurred over the course of our lives.  He wrote, “Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and internalizing our own unique existence, with all its sorrows and joys.”  Nouwen continued, “It is not easy to do this. For a long time we may not feel capable of accepting our own life; we might keep fighting for a better or at least a different life.”  But Nouwen also wrote, “We have to live our life, not someone else’s.  We have to hold our own cup.” 

I thought of that passage recently when I saw a news item.  Naturally, it was a COVID-19 news item; that is the only news story that is reported anymore.  You may know that, as bad as the infection and death rates have been here in Cook County, in New York City it’s much worse.  The public health authorities in New York have come to realize that they don’t have enough doctors, nurses and health care workers to tend to the sick and dying.  So they put out a call for help: they asked any retired nurses who would be willing to come out of retirement, to please come and help.  The news item I read stated that 30,000 retired nurses responded to the call.  30,000!  Just think about that for a moment: most of these retirees are elderly themselves.  Two of the categories of people who are considered most vulnerable to the virus are health care workers and the elderly.  And these nurses check off both of those boxes.  Yet they have responded to the call for help.  They haven’t refused to drink the cup that has been set before them.

Closer to home, here at St. Edna we’ve been making a concerted effort to keep our Outreach ministry going, during this time that the parish is shut down.  It wasn’t an easy decision.  Many of the clients we serve are homeless, and that population also is considered to be among the most vulnerable to the virus.  What’s more, many of our Outreach volunteers are elderly retirees, some of whom have health risks of their own.  But our Outreach team also has said that it will drink the cup that these circumstances have set before us.  Those who are willing are continuing to assist our neighbors in need, one day per week.

During this holiest time of the year, Jesus invites us to drink the same cup he drinks.  You see, this is what it means to be a follower of Jesus – it means that the same cup of suffering and sacrifice and love which he drank, which he drained, is offered to us, too.  Nouwen wrote, “Drinking the cup that Jesus drank is living a life in and with the spirit of Jesus, which is the spirit of unconditional love … it is only love – pure, unrestrained, and unlimited love.”  It is love so deep that it ended in his hanging on the cross and giving his very life – for us. This is the cup from which Jesus drank – for us. And it is from that same cup that we are invited to drink.

Even during this time when we aren’t able to receive the Eucharist, when we’re not able to come together as God’s people, when we’re locked out of churches, offices and schools and virtually locked up in our homes, we can still partake of the cup which Jesus offers us.  This is, in fact, the cup we’re now asked to drink: a cup of separation from many whom we love, while we’re cloistered together with our own families; or perhaps even living alone like a hermit in a cell.  This strange and unnatural way of living is now the cup we’re being asked to drink.  Let us set aside our unhappiness and impatience and drink deeply of the sacrifice we’re being asked to make.  In drinking of this cup of separation and isolation, we are keeping others healthy – we may even be saving the lives of others. 

And even though we may feel separated from the world, we’re not separated from God.  There is no wall so thick, no door so strong, no window lock so fast, that it can keep God out of our lives.  To be sure, we may be encountering him now in different ways: on an electronic screen, or in prayer alone.  We may find new ways and old ways to fill our cups now – some of us are learning about electronic tools like Zoom and Teams, and we’re digging old rosaries and prayer books out of the backs of our drawers and shelves. 

Jesus drank deeply of the cup his Father had poured out for him – a cup of pain and humiliation, a cup of suffering and death.  Let our own cups this holy day be cups filled with gratitude, that God has such love for us.  Let us drink deeply of it.