Are You Able to Drink the Cup That I Drink?

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to Jesus and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
(Mark 10:35-40, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the early Quaker minister James Nayler and his journey to Bristol in 1656. He rode into town with a few Friends dancing ahead of him, an imitation of Jesus’ Palm Sunday arrival in Jerusalem—intended as a “sign,” a reminder of the living Christ—that scandalized the local Puritan authorities. 

They arrested Nayler and sent him on to Parliament, where he was convicted of blasphemy, publicly tortured, and thrown into prison. Meanwhile, the core leaders among the Quakers, aiming to protect themselves in the political and religious turmoil of post-Civil War England, basically threw Nayler to the Puritan wolves—and the Religious Society of Friends has spent the last three and a half centuries trying to justify that choice. 

Some people will tell you Nayler must have gone off the rails mentally or emotionally. Some people will acknowledge Nayler had a spiritual leading, but suggest he got too wrapped up in his own thoughts. If he had consulted with other Friends, the argument goes, they might have talked him down a little, convinced him to do something slightly less provocative, perhaps saved him from the whip upon his back and the brand upon his forehead and the hot iron needle through his tongue.

What did Nayler have to say for himself?

“I came clearly to see Christ Jesus set before me in all things that I was to go through, in that faith which I had first received,” he wrote while he was in prison.

“…And I clearly saw that… if I did not continue in faith to follow the same Spirit in obedience to all its leadings, hoping to attain Christ Jesus the end of that faith, and daily growing toward His stature and fullness, but instead turned aside, or sat down short of the leadings of that Spirit along the way, I would make void my hope of glory, and the work of my redemption.”

His words reminded me of a passage in Discipleship, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer cites a scene from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus calls upon a tax collector to abandon his post, “and he got up and followed him.”

“The disciple’s answer is not a spoken confession of faith in Jesus,” Bonhoeffer observes. “Instead, it is the obedient deed.”

Bonhoeffer saw that level of obedience as essential to discipleship. “It is a difficult path Jesus imposes on his disciples,” he acknowledges. “It includes much humiliation and dishonor for the disciples themselves. But it is the path to him, our crucified brother, and thus, it is a path full of grace.”

Nayler felt much the same way. Throughout his ministry, he spoke out against people who professed faith in Jesus but did not live according to Christian principles. He called that “a lying faith which persuades the soul of freedom from condemnation but gives it not freedom from sin, which is the cause of condemnation.”

Compare that to what Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace.

“…preaching forgiveness without repentance[;] baptism without the discipline of community[;] the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin[;] absolution without personal confession.”

Quakers don’t do formal sacraments, and we don’t have priests, so we don’t have baptism, nor holy communion, nor personal confession. But we do have the “discipline of community,” and we do have what Nayler called “the faithful witness of God in their own conscience,” which leads us to recognition of our sins and to repentance.

That repentance, I think Nayler and Bonhoeffer would agree, flourishes in our willingness to follow where Jesus leads us, on the path to true, “costly” grace, “the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which has to be asked for, the door at which one has to knock.”

(Nayler and Bonhoeffer both possessed a Christ-centered faith, and so they both used deeply Christ-centered language. If it makes you more comfortable to think of “Spirit” or something similar rather than Jesus, modern Quakerism will meet you where you stand.)

James and John came to Jesus looking for cheap grace, a VIP pass to the inner circle in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus wouldn’t cut them any deals, and Quakers don’t have any short cuts, either. Like the apostles, we have received an invitation: Can we bring ourselves to heed the call of Spirit—not just to do the work, but to bear the consequences?

Until recently, I would have said you might never have to deal with that question as starkly as Nayler or Bonhoeffer did. Such assurances no longer seem possible, not in this world. We already have to choose, every day, whether to drink from the cup of cheap grace and comfort or the cup of costly grace and endurance. For some people, that question has already become a matter of life and death. What would you or I do, should we face such circumstances?