What does Tribe teach about cup of suffering?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on the cup of suffering starts with a close reading of two moments in the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. Brian places them side by side: Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane, asking that the cup of suffering might pass from him, and then Jesus at Golgotha, being handed wine mixed with myrrh and refusing it. The point Brian keeps returning to is that the refusal is not incidental. In Gethsemane Jesus chose to drink the cup of suffering. At the cross, when he was offered a way to check out from it, he turned that down too.
The wine mixed with myrrh, Brian explains, was a narcotic, something that would dull the pain and allow a person to mentally escape what was happening to them. He notes that Roman historical sources outside the gospels connect this mixture to a sanitation practice at city gates, a detail that reframes what the cup of escape actually is. It looks like relief, but it is not what it promises. Brian says, "That cup of escape is really poo poo water." The teaching presses on the idea that the things we reach for to avoid suffering rarely deliver what they seem to offer, and that Jesus, knowing that, still chose to stay fully present in his pain.
Brian ties this to James's teaching that the testing of faith produces perseverance, and perseverance produces maturity. He draws on a Charles Spurgeon quote making the point that high character is rarely formed by continued prosperity, and that adversity, however it feels, is a true friend. The cup of suffering, in this teaching, is not God being cruel. Brian is clear that God is not sadistic and not vindictive. The cup is the path of trust, of staying the course without needing to know the next five steps, and of letting endurance do its full work.
Taught from Matthew 26:36-39 · Matthew 27:32-35 · James 1:2-4 · 1 Peter 5:10 · Mark 15:21-24
“That cup of escape is really poo poo water.”
From Choosing Endurance Over Escape
The passage taught · 1 Peter 5:10
10 But may the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 30, 2024 Choosing Endurance Over Escape Brian Hunter looks at two cups in the crucifixion story and asks which one we keep reaching for when life gets hard, and why it matters.