Bottom of the Cup

Mark 10:35-45

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you
• are you able to drink the cup that I drink
• we are able
• whoever would be great among you must be your servant

Applying the Word to My Life:
James and John knew they were asking something big — so big that they couldn't name it right from the start. When they finally ask for it — the seats at His right and left hand — He asks something else instead: can they drink the cup He's about to drink, be baptized with the baptism He's about to undergo.

Jesus asks the question, but no one can see all the way to the bottom of a cup like that. Whatever's actually waiting in it doesn't show itself until it's been drunk all the way down, to the last drop. He doesn't spell any of that out for them.

They answer yes immediately. He simply confirms the cup is coming, then turns the whole conversation away from status and toward service — whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant.

They both drank the cup, but it looked different for each of them. Within about a decade, James becomes the first apostle put to death for his faith, killed by Herod's sword — his cup emptied fast. John's looks nothing like his brother's: exiled to a small island for his preaching, then living on for decades afterward, and tradition holds he's the only apostle who died of old age instead of execution — there was no shortage of hardship, but his cup takes most of a lifetime to reach its own bottom. Same yes, spoken the same moment, standing next to each other in front of Jesus. Neither of them could have known, standing there, which cup he was actually agreeing to drink.

I think the same holds true for all the major paths we take in our life — living our mission, our career, and even our vocation — there's always that same unseen bottom we can't know at the start. Stacey and I said yes to our marriage without being able to see all the way into the cup either — there's so much good that has come from our marriage, but it hasn't always been easy.

There is a real cost that comes from building one life out of two through health, career, and family. But there's been just as much joy in meeting each of those challenges and working through them together — the kind of closeness I never could have imagined until I lived it.

We took marriage prep classes, and I'm grateful for them, but every cup is different. They can't show you everything that's actually poured into it, good or hard. I've watched friends lose a spouse to illness within a couple of years of their wedding. I've watched others hold steady through decades of everything going right. I've watched some struggle only after many good years first. None of us could see the bottom on the day we said the vows.

It's the same with living as a disciple. Nothing handed to us at the beginning — no amount of preparation or catechesis — can show us the whole cup, the difficulty or the good waiting inside it. The commitment comes first. What's actually in it becomes visible later, on its own schedule.

If I'm honest, I think that's a mercy rather than a missing feature. If we could see all the way to the bottom before we ever said yes, most of us would talk ourselves out of drinking at all.

But the last drop cuts both ways. Whatever your particular cup turns out to hold, the cost was never the whole of it — poured out right alongside it, all along, was joy and good you couldn't have measured from the rim. Love always costs more than we expect. But it always gives back more than it costs.

My Response for Today:
Today I will look back on one commitment that has challenged me and thank God for the joy that has come with it.