“You Don’t Know What You Are Asking, the senior sermon of Bonnie Edwards, from the Diocese of Texas, given on March 3, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Mark 20:17-28
Feast of Perpetua and Her Companions, Martyrs at Carthage , 202

“You don’t know what you are asking.”

Jesus responds to James and John, sons of Zebedee. Their mother asks that her sons would sit as his left and at his right in his new kingdom.

“Can you drink of the cup that I am about to drink from?”

He had just told them of his impending torture and death. They say that they are willing to go to that extreme to be next in line to the new throne of Israel .

Jesus teaches them – again – about the order of his new kingdom. He had instructed them with a parable just prior to this that “The first will be last and the last will be first.”

Here again he instructs them. “Whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

This word ransom, in Greek l u, tron, is from the root l u, w , which means to loose, to unbind, to set free. Jesus came to serve and to set the world free from the binding of selfishness, self-promotion, and self-servitude.

As a gardener, I tried really hard to figure out a gardening analogy for this. But, try as I might, I kept coming up with the same conclusion. Plants just don’t take to illustrations of servitude. They are pretty much first-grow, first-serve.

Outside of the symbiotic relations some plants and animals have, and outside of pollination, each plant takes what it can get. The first one to sprout from a seed takes all the nutrients and water from the soil, even at the expense of neighboring, developing seeds.

The first plant up will hog all the sun and the plants who weren’t first don’t do well without the benefit of the sun.

Come to think of it, maybe there is an analogy in gardening to this statement by Jesus.

 We don’t know what we are asking when we decide to follow Jesus’ way.

In my own experience, I have vowed and returned and repented and been captive and returned many times. For me, Christian conversion wasn’t a one-time experience; it is ongoing, new skin being peeled off, new layers surfacing and being rendered new again.

It has been my faith in Christ, the choice that I have made to place my life with God that has changed me. My life would have no meaning, no center, no fullness without this faith.

But there are challenges. Every day.

The cup indeed that James and John decide they can withstand, can we withstand? Can we die to ourselves, and rise new in Christ, as we have vowed to do through our baptisms?

I ask myself, did I know what I was asking for when I asked Christ to take my life?

Today is the feast day of someone who asked that question, and her cup was one of leaving all things behind.

Perpetua was a young Roman woman living in Carthage , in North Africa . Her story is recorded in the Passion of Perpetua, and the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions is noted by Tertullian.

Her father, in order to pass along the Peace of Rome, the Pax Romana, a civic religion and culture complete with its own pantheon, has raised Perpetua carefully.

The head of the culture, of the civic religion, who demands sacrifice and obedience, is the ruler, Septimius Severus, living up to his name, persecuting and killing by beasts or by beheading anyone who was a threat to his power and to the culture.

Christians had begun to receive full-scale persecution a few decades before Perpetua’s birth. To become Christian meant that she had to decide whom to worship and to whom she would pledge her allegiance. She could not serve two masters. She chose Christianity. Along with Perpetua, her slave Felicitas, two other catechumens Revocatus and Saturnius, and their catechist Saturus were converted. They were arrested in 202, and placed in prison because they would not sacrifice to the emperor. The punishment if they are convicted: violent death by beasts in the Carthaginian arena.

Sacrificing to the emperor would bind her to the civic religion. Giving the gift of a sacrifice implies an obligation between the two. For Perpetua and her fellow Christians, this would mean that they would be bound to the emperor, and not to Christ.

The procurator hears their statements. “We will not sacrifice to the emperor” they all state, and that seals their death sentence with the beasts. Their execution is scheduled for the birthday of Geta, son of emperor Septimius Severus, as a birthday gift to him.

Perpetua’s young son, just a few months old, is separated from her, then gets to stay with her for awhile until she finally resolves to give him up to her family. Felicitas, who is pregnant, is distraught at the thought of dying separately from her fellow catechumens, with common criminals.

For the Roman rulers, it was apparently OK to kill the Christians, but in an odd sense of propriety, maybe because it was too tough even for the Romans in Carthage to bear, they would not execute a pregnant woman. Later, the companions pray for an early delivery. Felicitas’ baby is born early and her sister raises the baby as her own.

In a dialog with her father that Perpetua recorded, her father, out of love for her, pleads with her to change her mind.

Perpetua asks her father, “Do you see this vase here, or waterpot?”

“Yes, I do,” he says.

And Perpetua told him, “Could it be called by any other name than what it is?” He said no.

“Then neither can I be called by any other name than Christian.” She assures him that it will all be well, that all is in the power of God.

Her father did not know what he was asking of his daughter.

Another time, her father falls at her feet, begging her, in a gesture ironically reminiscent of Perpetua’s own birth. Baby girls were set at their father’s feet after birth. The Roman father had a choice to accept the child, or put her out for exposure, to be either taken as a slave or to die of the elements. Perpetua still refuses to turn her head. She refuses to let the love of the world push out the love of Christ.

During their incarceration, Perpetua and her companions are baptized. Early church catechists were not allowed to take Holy Communion until their baptisms, until after a lengthy time of training that took several years, so it was important that they be baptized prior to their deaths.

Perpetua asks for and receives encouragement in the form of visions, or dreams, which give her soul peace, and also ensure her death in martyrdom. In one dream, she sees a ladder stretching to heaven, with a great dragon guarding the foot. She knows that she is to pass the dragon.

In her dream, she steps on the head of the dragon to get to the first rung of the ladder. She interprets this as a sure sign of conquering evil. She did not know what she was asking, but she had faith.

The day of their martyrdom arrives. As they are led in to the arena, she and her companions transform their march as criminals to be sacrificed for the peace of Rome into a sacred Christian procession, singing psalms and preaching to the onlookers.

Her male companions are mauled by a bear and a leopard. For Felicitas and Perpetua, the Romans have prepared a violent heifer, perhaps to match the beast with their own gender. The attendants attempt to clothe them in robes of a pagan goddess, but Perpetua pleads for their dignity, saying that their deaths have earned them the honor of being martyred in their own clothes. They are sent back in their white robes. They are placed in a net in the arena for the crowd to watch and for the cow to mutilate.

The huge beast plows first into Perpetua, then Felicitas. Perpetua gathers her strength and in a spiritual state helps Felicitas up, in order to die with the dignity that Christ gave them. To die with humiliation and fear would have been to tell the crowd that they were indeed criminals.

Since they survived the beasts, the companions are brought back to the arena for beheading. All are killed with their heads held high, after sharing the kiss of peace. The executor of Perpetua, though, misses and hits her neckbone instead. As the finisher of her diary concludes, through Perpetua’s own strength of faith she guides the sword properly to her own neck for the final cut.

Did Perpetua, Felicitas, and their companions know what they were asking when they asked to become Christ’s own? They probably knew the risks involved, since Septimius Severus had outlawed Christian conversions. Were they ready to drink the cup. Yes. With great faith they were ready to die to themselves and rise new in Christ.

Jesus came to serve and to set the world free from the binding of selfishness, self-promotion, and self-servitude. Perpetua left a lesson to us of this in the gift of her story through her diary. As far as we know, she wrote the diary herself, until the day of her martyrdom. One of her fellow Christians witnessing her death finished the diary. When you read this story, and I hope you will, you will notice the change in voice at the end.

Matthew’s text differs from Mark’s story of the sons of Zebedee’s question. Mark remembers that it is the disciples themselves who ask Jesus this pointed question of who will sit next to him in this new kingdom. For Matthew, maybe it is too much for them to ask directly, so he remembers their mother asking the question. Either way, Jesus answers them directly.

Whether someone places us directly in a position of some form of martyrdom, as Perpetua and her companions, if we find ourselves in liminal situations or financial disasters, or betrayal, or a thousand other things—leaning on our faith in God will get us through. Once our hearts are set in the kingdom of God , the sorrows of the cup become the sustenance of Christ’s love for us. Our world is changed, and as Perpetua and her companions found even to the end, there is faith to show others.