Suffering Servant.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

April 14, 2017 + Good Friday.

I.

Jesus Christ, as truly and fully God and truly and fully human, shows us the way we must go if we are to emerge into his light and life.  What must happen is the breakdown of our self-centered, self-righteous, selfish “old self.”  Our ego has to be overcome.  Our identity rooted in what Paul calls “the flesh” has to be dethroned in our hearts, so that our new identity in “the Spirit” may emerge in us.  Who we have made ourselves and who we think we are must be reduced to its basic elements, so that who we truly are may be revealed.

This is not an easy or pain-free process.  We do not shed our accumulated sinfulness, our habits of separation, violence, hubris, and blindness readily.  Jesus himself says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains just a single grain.  But if it dies it bears much fruit.”  

The Lord is continually telling his disciples to take up their own crosses, lose their own lives, give up all that they have, and follow him.  He does not say that he will do this for us so we don’t have to.  He says, I am going ahead of you so that “where I am you may be also.”  He does not exempt us from death; he assures us that he will be with us through it, to emerge with us on the other side.

Jesus’ Way is the way of the cross.  It is the way of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, who “bears all things.”  This chapter of Isaiah has always informed the church’s understanding of who Jesus is and what he does.

On this day of all days, we focus with great intensity on what he is doing, lifted up on the cross, and how his action saves us and the whole world.  It saves us to the extent that we participate in it, through the sacrament of baptism and through the sacrament of his Body and Blood.  We participate in his death and therefore in his life by our communion with and in him in the gathering of disciples under the Word in the Spirit.  We participate with him by means of the repentance which is the new way of thinking, the new mind we receive in Christ.

As with the Suffering Servant, this new mind embraces service and humility.  It puts others first so profoundly that we identify with them and lose ourselves in them.  Indeed, in him there are no others, just extensions and manifestations of the common humanity we share with Jesus; just one glorious creation of which we are each a particular manifestation and reflection.  

Having the mind of Christ means a conscious and categorical rejection of the standards for success which are rampant in our culture, our addiction to consumption, extraction, and acquisition; our invented scarcities and our willingness to murder others — usually out of our sight — to get what we want.  

And it means an acceptance of suffering and the necessary losses through which we grow into God.  The Suffering Servant passage reveals that we attain to true and eternal life more by what we lose than by what we grasp.  We lose our falseness, which falls from us, revealing who we always were, deep within: humans created in the Image of God.

II.       

Because this passage is about Jesus, it is also about us; for he embodies the true humanity we share with him.  It sets out the way of repentance and therefore salvation.  We are not spectators or impartial, objective observers of what Jesus is doing.  We are participants in and through him.  

The early church had a saying: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”  It was their way of saying that the church miraculously grows where disciples suffer the way Jesus does.  A martyr is a witness, but not a passive bystander.  We can’t witness from afar what Jesus does.  We can’t just watch it on TV or read about it on Facebook.  The witness goes with Jesus and testifies to the truth of what he does.  The witness experiences something like what Jesus goes through.

This does not mean we have the life literally crushed out of our physical bodies, although there are plenty of Christians for whom this is their witness.  Neither do we look for opportunities to harm ourselves; we are not a suicide cult.  

But it does mean that we face the disintegration and loss of our old selves by other means.  It does mean we walk a path of renunciation and loss.  It does mean we move into the turbulence of life, and enter places of deep discomfort.  It does mean we stay vulnerable and open, receptive to what life gives us.  It does mean emptying ourselves of ourselves.  And it does mean that our lifestyle goes against the grain of society and its authorities.    

We can never forget that Jesus Christ is also fully God.  In a sense the Suffering Servant is God, self-emptying for the life of the people and the whole world.  Is this not Paul’s point in his astonishing and powerful words from Philippians, where Christ Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… and became obedient to the point of death….”?  Does not creation itself begin with the offering up and out of the Word and Spirit of God, when God breathes the whole universe into being?

What is going on here in this Suffering Servant passage is not just something humans have to do to embrace the full truth of who they are, it is also what God does all the time!  God is not up there throwing punishing lightning bolts at us when we mess up.  God is always taking the lowest place, and allowing peace and blessing and goodness to well up and in and through everything.  God is always pouring love into the world and into our hearts.

God is down here, with the afflicted, with the oppressed, with the hungry and the broken and the lost, bearing our infirmities, carrying our diseases.  God cherishes and inhabits the ugly, undesirable, despised, and rejected ones.  Paradoxically and mysteriously, God is most with those abandoned by God.  God flows.  To receive God is at the same time to be abandoned by God in the same way that a garden hose receives water and simultaneously pours it out.

The Suffering Servant passage describes not someone under God’s condemnation, but someone participating in God’s flooding life of self-offering, self-emptying, self-giving, infinite love, filling everything.

III.

The worst thing we can do with a passage like this is to say, “Oh, that was all fulfilled by Jesus.  We thank him for doing that.  But it has nothing to do with us.”  Rather, the Suffering Servant passage shows us the life that Jesus liberates us to live in his name.  For Christians are called to lives of humility and service, even including suffering, as well.  We are called to set our own personal agendas aside, we are called even to let go of the habitual reactions of our own personalities, not out of any kind of self-hatred or masochism.  

Rather it is because of the way letting go of our self-importance, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness opens us up to receive real joy, peace, hope, faith, and love.    

The cross shows us that it is our losses that allow God’s life to emerge in us.  It is when we follow Jesus in willingly sharing and bearing, however unfairly, the pain, exclusion, disease, and despair of others, that we are set free to prosper in God’s will, obtain light and knowledge, and share in God’s righteousness.

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