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Readings (click here for full text of the readings): Today’s readings are pretty well-known. From Isaiah we heard about the Suffering Servant, whose “punishment … made us whole, and by [whose] bruises we are healed.” The Gospel starts with James and John asking to sit on either side of Jesus in glory, and it ends with the famous phrase: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” The unifying theme is clear: Jesus is the servant who suffers, the Messiah who was promised, the savior of the world. But the familiarity of the readings can make them seem conventional, even expected, which is as far from the truth as you can get. The risk, then, is that the gospel slides off us as easily as the proverbial rain off a duck’s back. The danger is that we hear in the gospel only support and validation, not scandal and a call to renewed conversion. If the word of God really is “sharper than any two-edged sword,” then when the Gospel comes into the midst of us, when we make the sign of the cross over our brows and mouths and chests, when we visually promise to love the Lord our God with our minds and words and hearts, if we truly hear the gospel, then we must be shocked, startled, convicted, emboldened. Especially with such a familiar reading, we have to dig deeper into the Gospel; let it rummage about in the dark, uncoverted places within each of us; allow it to pierce us “until it divides soul from spirit.” And when we do, the words we thought we knew so well take on a whole new meaning. Just as T.S. Eliot once wrote, We shall not cease from exploration I was acutely reminded of this a few years ago when I took my comprehensive theological exams, the last leg on the long road to ordination. There were eleven questions touching on all areas of theology and ministry: the Bible, historical theology, ethics, pastoral care, and so on. The judging committee required everyone to revise at least one of their answers, some as many as five or six. I was happy to learn that I had to re-write only one question, but I was more concerned when I found out that the one I had “failed” was: “Why did Jesus die?” When it comes to embarking upon one’s priestly life, misunderstanding the central tenet of the Christian faith doesn’t do much for your confidence. Now, granted, it’s a challenge to answer that question in four pages or less, “with reference to Biblical, theological, apologetic, and pastoral concerns,” as was required. Nevertheless, the committee seemed concerned about my answer, which, they said, “veered dangerously close to an almost-Lutheran kenotic patripassianism.” I have to say that I’d never been accused of such a thing before. And back then, “almost-Lutheran” wasn’t nearly as politically correct as it is today. Truth be told, at the time I had absolutely no idea what “kenotic patripassianism” was. So I called my mentor, an older priest who’s the rector of a small parish in northern Connecticut. He has a deceptively wise way of answering tough questions: he scrunches up his face and says something like, “You know, I don’t have any idea,” but almost always follows that up with a pithy and incisive take on things. This time, though, all he could say was the he’d never heard of “kenotic patripassianism,” but it sure didn’t sound like a good thing to be accused of. (For anyone who’s curious, “patripassianism” refers to the heretical belief that the Father suffered on the Cross, as well as the Son.) So I read and pondered and prayed, trying to see what the committee was making such a fuss about. Ultimately I realized that they were describing in academic language a basic truth that I hadn’t seen for myself: that I wasn’t totally clear on why Jesus died. Now in my original answer I’d discussed the major theories of the Atonement – that Jesus suffered the punishment for sin that should have been ours; that He conquered the forces of evil by altering the cosmic order; that He was a perfect and inspiring example for us to follow; and so on. But in the end I was focusing on His death, as if His life was just a prelude to what His real mission was. As if the Crucifixion was all that mattered. As if the Cross meant anything apart from his words and his actions and his miracles. So I started my exploration at the beginning, not with Jesus, but with the prophecies about Him. Among the most profound are the four servant songs from Isaiah, the last of which we read today. These passages describe a servant who suffers on behalf of others, who “is wounded for [their] transgressions,” and whose life is “an offering for sin.” The themes certainly parallel the life and passion of Jesus – “by a perversion of justice he was taken away,” “they made his grave with the wicked,” and “he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” If we take that solely as a prediction of the future, then it certainly came true in the life of Jesus. But if it is only prediction, it threatens to define Jesus as sufferer only, as crucified only. Old Testament prophecy always has a present as well as a future component, for prophecy literally means “a divinely inspired utterance.” At its core, a prophetic statement is an eternal truth that holds in the present as well as the future. The eternal truth of the servant songs is God’s faithfulness, especially during pain and suffering. All the servant songs appear in the second half of Isaiah. The first part of Isaiah was a bold call to repentance, written before the Babylonians captured Jerusalem. But the second part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian exile, and instead of harsh rebuke and criticism, we read of God’s enduring faithfulness and companionship. It speaks of liberation, where suffering becomes salvation. It says that no matter what mess you’re in and why you’re in it, you are not alone. The present reality of Second Isaiah is that the servant is the enslaved nation of Israel. Through their righteous, undeserved suffering comes redemption, not only for the people of Israel but for all the nations. As God speaks through the prophet, “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” What this means is that the prophecies of suffering aren’t arbitrary. It’s not as if God said, “Look, I want to come up with some predictions about the Messiah so that when He comes people will know it. So why don’t I pick suffering – that’ll be distinctive and easily recognized. And it’ll be unique and difficult, because not many people would want to imitate that. So let the mark of the Christ be suffering.” Anything but arbitrary, the prediction of suffering, even the requirement of suffering, is an observation of the eternal truth – that when good comes into the world, it will pay a price. Like the old saying goes, “If people are attacking you, you must be doing something right.” Jesus certainly lived the eternal truth of the servant songs, for he served and suffered on behalf of others. He was the light that shone on the hypocrisy of the self-righteous, proclaiming the good news to the poor, inverting the world order, changing the meaning of first and last, greatest and least. Jesus commands us to follow Him on that path, to drink of His cup, to be baptized with His baptism. He says, “Whoever wishes to become great … must be [a] servant, and who wishes to be first … must be slave of all.” James and John, in their quest for status, don’t even stop to think about what that means. Without hesitation they answer Jesus: “Yes, we’re able [to drink of your cup].” Less than a week later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, they would abandon Jesus in His hour of need. If we take a good, hard look at our lives, all of us can point to experiences like that. Times when our words outpace our actions. When we’re called to suffer alongside the people we say we love, and we can’t, or we don’t. When we realize that even though we strive to be like Jesus, a fair amount of the time we’re more like James and John. And, conversely, there are moments when we’re falling, and we reach out to anyone who might be there to help us, and no one is. Particularly in those moments, we can turn to Jesus, and be certain that He knows how we feel. For as the writer to the Hebrews says, “We don’t have a high priest who’s unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” Our high priest did what all those Atonement theories talk about – He paid the price for our sins, He conquered evil, He was the perfect example. But right here and right now, we don’t find comfort in theories; we find it in the knowledge that we’re not alone in our suffering. The world tells us that suffering is a sign of God’s rejection. Like Job’s counselors, conventional wisdom says that suffering is punishment from God. But the Gospel, the Good News, the living, piercing sword that shines here in our midst – it tells us the opposite. It tells us that when we suffer, we walk in the footsteps of the Christ, who suffered for us.
It’s funny – the places where revelation strikes. The Bible talks about whirlwinds and burning bushes, but for me, more often than not, discovery comes in more ordinary settings. When all the talk of “kenotic patripassianism” had died down, I met with my mentor at the general store across the street from his stone church. We sipped iced tea and watched the shadows lengthen over the town green, and I asked him, all theories aside, why he thought Jesus died. At first he said, “You know, I’m not really sure.” But after a minute or two, and with that puzzled look on his face, he said something like this: “It doesn’t seem to me that His purpose was to die. His purpose was to live, but the world couldn’t tolerate the way He lived. The evil in the world couldn’t stand His presence, so it tried to get to rid of Him. It wasn’t so much that He had to die; but based on how He lived, His death was inevitable.” On that lazy springtime afternoon, I felt like I had a glimpse of the glory that today’s gospel talks about. It isn’t a state of ethereal bliss, with angelic choirs and streets of gold. It’s a place where goodness isn’t punished. Where you don’t have to die if you speak the truth. Where status means nothing. Where no one suffers alone. After much exploring, I felt like I was back where I started, but I was seeing things as if for the first time. Amen. |
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