<p>20:22 <em>But Jesus answered and said: You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink</em>- The statement that men 'know not' is usually and extensively on the Lord's lips in a negative sense. We can therefore read Him here as deeply disappointed in her. Note how the Lord uses the plural 'you'; He clearly saw that the question was being asked by the sons through their mother, and the parallel records show Him asking them directly what&nbsp;<em>they</em>&nbsp;really wanted. &quot;We know not what we should pray for as we ought&quot; (Rom. 8:26) seems to be some kind of allusion back to the mother of Zebedee's children asking Christ to get her two sons the best places in the Kingdom (Mt. 20:22). He basically replied 'You know not what you pray for', in the sense of 'you don't appreciate'. It may be that Paul in Rom. 8 is saying that in our desire for the Kingdom, in our groaning for it, we don't appreciate what we ask for as we ought, yet Christ nonetheless makes powerful intercession for us to this end.</p><p><em>The cup that I am about to drink?-&nbsp;</em>The Lord's death was therefore His cup, and also His 'baptism'. He asks us to be baptized with His baptism and to regularly drink His cup in the memorial meeting. These things are easily performed, and yet they are an agreement to die His death. We too can far too easily say &quot;I am able...&quot;, when like the disciples, we fail to perceive the horror of the cross and what is being asked of us. We therefore participate in these symbols, these metaphors, with bowed head, deeply aware of our likely failure to carry the cross to the end, but grateful for our participation in&nbsp;<em>His</em>&nbsp;cup and baptism, the One who did in fact die the death of the cross.</p><p><em>And to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?</em>- AV. Note the present tense compared to the future tense of &quot;the cup that I shall drink of&quot;. And yet in Lk. 12:50 He speaks of the baptism that He must still be baptized with in crucifixion. His death on the cross was in essence lived and died by Him throughout His life. This is why the prophecy of His death in Isaiah 53 is also quoted about experiences during His life. And there is an ongoing element to baptism, just as Israel were baptized &quot;in the cloud and in the sea&quot; as they passed through the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10:1), and yet lived beneath the cloud throughout their wilderness journey- as if their baptism was ongoing. We likewise die and resurrect with Christ in an ongoing sense as we die to the flesh and progressively experience His new life breaking through into our mortal experience (2 Cor. 4:11). Note too how Paul speaks of baptism in the present tense in Rom. 6:4- we&nbsp;<em>are</em>&nbsp;buried with Him by baptism, although Paul has just said in Rom. 6:3 that we&nbsp;<em>were</em>&nbsp;baptized as a one-time past even. If Paul were simply referencing the point of their baptism in Rom. 6:4, he would have said 'We&nbsp;<em>were</em>&nbsp;buried with Him'. The sense of Col. 2:12 and 1 Cor. 12:13 may be similar- &quot;By one Spirit we are all present tense baptized into one body&quot;. The whole language of baptism by the Spirit surely suggests a process rather than a one time event of immersion in water.</p><p>The Lord spoke with arresting continuous tenses of how &lsquo;The good shepherd&nbsp;<em>is laying&nbsp;</em>down his life for the sheep... I&nbsp;<em>am laying down&nbsp;</em>my life of myself&rsquo; (Jn. 10:11,18). He&nbsp;<em>would be</em>&nbsp;delivered up, but in principle He went through it in His daily life beforehand. He speaks of &ldquo;the cup that I&nbsp;<em>shall</em>&nbsp;drink of, and.. . the baptism that&nbsp;<em>I am</em>&nbsp;baptized with&quot; (Mt. 20:22). This sheds light on four occasions in John&rsquo;s gospel when the Lord appears to use tenses in a confusing way. He speaks of how He&nbsp;<em>will</em>&nbsp;go to die on the cross, but that in a sense &ldquo;I am&quot; there already.</p><p><em>They said to him: We are able-&nbsp;</em>The Lord surely remembered their childlike over confidence when He Himself prayed for that cup to be &quot;able&quot; (AV &quot;may&quot; s.w.) to pass from Him so that He didn't have to drink it (Mt. 26:42). Yet the Lord is so generous spirited to them. He says that they will indeed be &quot;able&quot; to drink His cup (:23)- but the places of honour in the Kingdom were solely for the Father to give. He alludes to this in telling Peter that he was not &quot;able&quot; (s.w.) to follow Him to death on the cross at that time, &quot;but you shall follow Me afterwards&quot; (Jn. 13:36). We would likely have told them to take more seriously the Lord's predictions of His death by crucifixion which He had just uttered, and be more realistic about their own failure to suffer and die like that. But He is so more positive and gracious.</p><p>The Lord Jesus Christ's sensitivity to our thinking that we really have borne His cross comes out here. Those men, with all their unspirituality, could quite coolly state that they wanted the highest place in the Kingdom, and could say with confidence that they could shoulder the cross of Christ. The Lord's reply was gracious and generous spirited indeed: &quot;Ye shall indeed drink of my cup&quot; - 'when you're a lot more spiritually mature', He could have added. We&nbsp;<em>sense</em>&nbsp;rather than are explicitly told His sensitivity to men thinking they can shoulder His cross; for He alone knows what the cross of Christ entailed and entails. And in speaking of our own sufferings, we too need to learn these lessons, and compare our sufferings against Christ's with the utmost caution, with the sensitivity to&nbsp;<em>His</em>&nbsp;feelings, recognizing that we must act as men and women who have been&nbsp;<em>counted as if</em>&nbsp;we shared His death, and not as those who have actually &quot;resisted unto blood (in our) striving against sin&quot;. To confidently identify some of our brethren as tares is only one example of the way in which we can hurt our Lord's feelings, by acting and thinking in ways which are only appropriate for He who did actually carry the cross.</p>