Easter 3A, 2020 + Taking up the Cup of Salvation + 4.26.20 (ACL+)

("Cup of Salvation," Lisa Dubois, found at:
https://pixels.com/featured/1-cup-of-salvation-lisa-dubois.html)

The Rev. Alene Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

Psalm 116, Luke 24:13-35

It was all anyone could talk about.  Every news channel covered it non-stop.  As the couple walked along together that evening, it was hard for them to talk of anything else.  All their plans and hopes for the future had been upended.  Uncertainty and questions were the new norm.  So, who was this stranger who suddenly walked beside them (ignoring all the social distancing rules)?  How could he not know what everyone was talking about?  And furthermore, how dare he bring a discussion of God into a tragedy this enormous?

Where is God in the midst of suffering?  It’s one of the great mysteries of theology.  Is suffering God’s judgment?  Are those who are spared or healed somehow more righteous than those who are not?  How can suffering and God’s all-encompassing love be reconciled?  This is the Easter mystery, is it not?  Christ, crucified, apparently abandoned by God, yet completely innocent.  Does the resurrection erase the suffering of the crucifixion? Far from it!  The resurrected Jesus comes to his disciples with wounded hands, the bruises still visible on his body.  And so we are caught this Easter season in another mystery—the mystery of the eternal now.  Theologians talk of this eternal now as the already and not yet.  Jesus proclaims it over and over throughout his ministry, “The reign of God is at hand.”  Now and not yet.  

Patrick Reardon in his book entitled, Christ in the Psalms, describes how Psalm 116 is broken into two psalms in the Greek version.  The first part begins “I have loved” and the second “I have believed.”  What caught my attention was his statement that in both cases the form of the verb gives them “a more general tone….”[T]he ‘loving and believing’ spoken in these psalms point …to an abiding intention of soul.”  Caught between the reality of death and the hope of God’s healing, the believer sets their heart (with an “abiding intention”) to love and believe.  This intention of heart is made even more profound in the imagery of the cup.  For the ancient believer, the cup of salvation was most likely an act of thanksgiving.  The New Interpreter’s Bible likened it to “the toasting of an honored guest at a banquet.”  And yet, drinking the cup is also an allegory for following the path that God has set before us.  When James and John ask to share in Christ’s glory at the end of time, Jesus responds with the question, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” (Matthew 20:22, NRSV), a cup he later prays to have taken away “if it is possible” (Matthew 26:39, NRSV).  It is likely that this is one of the psalms sang by Jesus and his disciples at the last supper.  And so, it is this same cup transformed into blessing that Jesus promised to drink with us anew when God’s reign comes (Matthew 26:29).  The cup is both the loving vow that must be fulfilled just as it is the faith which celebrates and gives thanks for an end that is and will be.  Already and not yet.

All of which brings us back to the stranger walking beside us.  God’s abiding intention towards us is love.  God has determined that no tragedy, not the crucifixion or a pandemic, will have the last word.  And yet, we are called to follow.  We are called to lift up our own cups. I suspect that most, if not all of us, have a habit of giving thanks before we eat.  May I suggest that as we wait for the time when we will once again share bread and wine together in community, that we become conscious of God’s presence with us as we eat and drink. Can we lift our individual cups in commitment to be faithful to the baptismal vows we have made? And then, raise a toast to the honored guest at the table as we catch a glimpse of the coming of God’s reign when death itself will be swallowed up in victory.  

1 Patrick Reardon, Christ in the Psalms (Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, 2000), p. 229.

2 The New Interpreter’s Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), p. 862.