Redemptive suffering
Commentary
Passion Sunday. Try explaining that word to the teenagers in a congregation and they will understandably get the wrong idea. Or maybe the right idea, especially in a place where they have suffered 51 passionless Sundays.
Here and now passion refers to suffering. This is the classic theme of Christian faith. Historian Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century said, "Christianity is suffering." Certainly it is an address to suffering, as is Buddhism in its context.
Leszek Kolakowski mourns that in a world that needs an interpretation of suffering, Jews and Christians, who have as meaningful an address to the subject as can be conceived, tend to be losing faith in it, and tend to muffle comment on it.
Why? For one thing, the market. T. S. Eliot's famed line about the fact that humankind cannot bear much reality applies to this theme. Circuses, including happy times in the sanctuary, sell better in our normal days. Take a poll and you will not find people wanting to gather to contemplate the wounds of Christ or the meaning of suffering. They want that when suffering comes.
Or there is a sense of spiritual entitlement. If God is good, we are entitled to go through life not seeing or experiencing suffering. Why read and talk about it? Or evasion. Or denial. Some feminists say we should stop talking about suffering, because women do most of the suffering. Some masculinists say stop it because it is grim and they need uplift. But those close to life and its processes and problems experience a reversal of their expectations. Telling and reflecting on the sufferings of Jesus, the humbled servant, shows us a God identifying with us in our own suffering ways.
Grist For The Mill
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The preacher has to make a decision right off: either get into the endless arguments about how to relate the Suffering Servant and the Servant Songs of Isaiah to the gospel portraits of Jesus or not. I'd advise not, lest the precious minutes of the homily become a seminary class that cannot hope to settle in moments in a sanctuary what has remained unresolved in centuries of scholastic endeavor.
There, that settles it. Now: what do we draw from this Third Servant Song for the living of life today? Comfort. The divine persistence in the face of human wandering. The unmerited solace that comes to the people of God and their successors even when they are unheeding. New life to the weary.
Clearly, the one who sings this song has been given a bad time by the ones he has come to help. They have set out to disgrace him: maybe his prophecy was too telling for them to endure it. They tried to put him to shame, but he was vindicated. They wanted to be his enemies, but he asked them to stand up and be counted.
In all this we see the divine action that will not give up when humans turn their backs or sneer their sneers -- and grow weary in doing so. Those unworthy of comfort get comforted. Suffering is redemptive.
Philippians 2:5-11
A month or two ago we heard and preached on the second verse of this two-verse little hymn from the early church. Back then we were singing epiphany songs about the one God highly exalted. Now we are back to basics: Why did he need exalting?
James D. G. Dunn, in a book on unity and disunity in the New Testament, went looking for things on which all the New Testament churches agreed. Did they all have the same policy, same forms of administration, same forms of proclamation and hence of theology, same liturgy and sacramental practices? No, no, no-no, and no-no. What did they have in common?
So far as Dunn could discern from a careful reading of the gospels, Acts, and the letters and prophecies, they all could have said: "The human Jesus is the exalted Lord." Were he not exalted, we would not be bothering with this human aspect of the Philippians hymn. There are plenty of other humble ancient heroes.
What is different in the claims of this hymn is the fact that God was active in Jesus in a special way. Preachers find what artists often do: It is not hard or offensive to say anything, anything one wants to, about the exalted Jesus: he is "in the form of God," experiencing "equality with God." Fine. But portray Jesus "emptied," in "the form of a slave," being "born in human likeness," obedient even to "death on a cross," and you have to watch your step, your brush, your paragraphs.
Yet Jesus is among us as one with armpits odorous, feet dusty, brow bloodied, lungs gasping. Life going, gone. Only those who follow his story to its depths will realize the exuberance to follow in his New Creation.
Matthew 26:14--27:66
Give J. S. Bach three hours or G. F. Handel two and they can spin out the plot of Jesus' suffering from beginning to end. Give worshippers one hour to do all that the act of worship implies. Then tuck in a few minutes of scripture reading and a few more of preaching. How, in such circumstances, can one hold attention; how focus in a packed two-chapter reading?
There is no choice but to take one element or another. Since the Suffering Servant has brought in the theme of suffering and Paul's "emptied" slave has introduced that of humility, I would concentrate on the nature of communication during the suffering by the emptied one. What gets said in the prayer during suffering, in the coping with humiliation?
For that, these two chapters bring their own focus to the Garden of Gethsemane scene. There, with the disciples asleep and Suffering Servant II, Jesus of Nazareth, sweating, we find a curtain pulled back, a gate opened, a glimpse into the garden, and get to overhear the prayer and watch the pray-er.
Here there is an astonishment. He prays: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." That's usually our own final throw-in-the-towel prayer. "God, we had a good contest between your will and mine, but you're bigger, so have it your way." For Jesus, it is to be prayed the second time. Again, the disciples leave Jesus alone. "So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words." So: he is not resigned to the will of the Father but instead is at the same time desperately and serenely eager to keep the communication going. Had the disbelief of ordinary humans conquered, he would have stopped praying. He found reason to keep conversing in prayer.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Isaiah 50:4-9a
What is the connection between the Palm Sunday parade and the dereliction of Good Friday? In one dimension, the linkage is the ordinary stuff of human tragedy, another local hero biting the dust. But in the afterglow of Easter, the church heard these words from Isaiah in another perspective, one suggesting an altogether different connection.
Stories of fallen greats have their own form, evident in the newspapers. You can imagine, for example, that an upscale, national publication would have probably begun by relegating the Palm Sunday festival to the metro section under a headline something like, "Streets Blocked By Traveling Rabbi's Faithful." A more middle-of-the-road publication might have had it like this: "Galilean Prophet Provokes Crowd." One of the checkout stand rags would have had something more lurid, "Wonder Worker Arrives," with a story detailing some of the more spectacular miracles and a promise of revealing photos of some of the women accompanying them.
Later in the week, the stories would have turned. The prestigious paper would still be distant. "Teacher Sought After Confrontation," while the sensationalist daily would run a banner, "Showdown At Temple." An investigative report would follow: "Zealot And Known Tax Cheat Found With Supposed Messiah."
By Thursday and Friday, every one of the Jerusalem papers would have been carrying the story of Holy Week on the front pages: "Teacher Implies Messianic Claim," "Prophet Arrested, Faces Pilate," "Cross Next Step."
After Easter, reviewing a chain of events that still didn't quite make sense, the church saw a different thread binding Palm Sunday and Good Friday. They heard the echoes of Isaiah's servant songs in the events of that last week, seeing a pattern of
prophecy and fulfillment in the way that Jesus went toward his death.
Isaiah's songs are disputed exegetical territory. Sometimes it seems he is referring to Israel in the exile, sometimes perhaps even himself. But in the church's interpretation, set forth in the Gospels, there is no question who is meant. Christ was given "the tongue of a teacher," sustaining "the weary with a word" (v. 4), winning the loyalties of the crowd that assembled. When his very goodness became an offense of the system, sedition against the human project, Jesus gave his "back to those who struck," refusing to duck "insult and spitting" (v. 6). From the day of Peter's confession (Mark 8), he "set [his] face like flint" moving toward Jerusalem with inexorable power in the faith that "it is the Lord God who helps ..." (v. 9).
Hidden under the tragic form, Isaiah, and with him the church, tells another story, of a relentless love which forsakes adulation for fidelity, the fleeting moment for an eternal love.
