April 17/Holy Thursday
I will lift up the cup of salvation, and will call on the name of the LORD. ~ Ps 116.13
On the eve of Christ’s gruesome, terrible death upon the cross, we are invited, paradoxically, to lift up the cup of salvation. Given the events that will unfold this night — Christ’s final supper, with the disciples’ anxiety and suspicion swirling around the room, the protracted agony of Jesus in Gethsemane’s garden, his betrayal by Judas and death sentence that followed — the cup of bitterness or lament might be more appropriate. Indeed, throughout the prophets and the psalms, salvation was the last thing that the image of the cup brought to mind. Instead, the cup brimmed with the wrath of God and the bone-shattering pain of divine judgement. Ezekiel speaks of “the cup of horror and desolation,” Isaiah makes similar allusions, and Jeremiah sums it up: “For thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath.’” Indeed, for Jesus himself — a child of the Hebrew scriptures, let us remember — the cup was the cup of suffering. As he admonished a protesting Peter, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” It is the miracle of the Resurrection that this very cup — the cup of submission, of suffering, of death itself — becomes the vessel not of our punishment or of God’s wrath, but of our salvation. The chalices from which we will take the precious blood of God tonight — simple or ornate — are the very cups that deliver us from our sin through the self-giving sacrifice of Christ on the cross that we celebrate in the Eucharist. And renewed by that Eucharist, we should ourselves become vessels of the abundant love and abiding mercy of God in the world.
O God the father of our LORD Jesus Christ, On this holy night, I give you thanks for the sacrifice by which you forgave and redeemed your creatures.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/041725-Supper.cfm
To hear Archangel Voices sing “I Will Receive the Cup of Salvation” (an Orthodox hymn), click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8z0psEpscI
