Wounded Healers.

Isaiah 42:1–9.

I.

            Here in New Jersey we have no experience of thousands of organized and heavily armed young men from somewhere else coming here and exerting absolute, lawless power over us, killing, stealing, torturing, and raping practically at will.  We have never experienced mass murder, and we have never had the best and the brightest of us forcibly taken away to live as servants of our conquerors.  And we cannot imagine what it would be like, after watching the violent deaths of thousands of our own people, to be force-marched across a thousand miles of desert and settled in the ghetto of a strange city.  Human language has no words to evoke anything close to what this must be like.

            The exile of God’s people in Babylon was probably the most horrible catastrophe in the history of God’s people.  It was designed to eradicate all hope and poison every memory, the two things that make a nation a nation.  It was designed to assassinate a culture and destroy the identity and faith of a people.  It has happened to many nations, most of which are only remembered now by historians and archaeologists if they are remembered at all.  It happened to the other eleven tribes of Israel a century before.  And now, in the eighth century BC, it was happening to the last tribe, Judah.  It was for all intents and purposes the death of the nation and the end of God’s people.

            Over the next several decades, the Jews in Babylon would try to keep it together.  But it must have been easy to give up on their traditions and their religion.  It must have been very attractive and profitable to simply shrug and join the victorious Babylonians and become part of their bright world, their order, their future.  What was the point of maintaining faithfulness to a God who obviously abandoned and did not remain faithful to them?  Joining the winners had every up-side and few serious down-sides.

            Those who remained faithful had to listen to their own preachers tell them this was all their own fault, that they brought this catastrophe down on themselves, that this was all part of God’s plan.  And they had to learn on the fly how to live as God’s people in a strange land with no Temple, almost no institutions, and few rights.

            And they managed.  They served the Babylonian Empire and at the same time developed practices and traditions that enabled them to keep their faith, although in new and different ways than they were used to.  They were able, under huge stresses, to move from being a religion based on sacrifices, to being one based on Scripture and law, embodied in specific practices.

            They practically had to give up all reasonable hope of ever going home.  They had to be thoroughly settled in Babylon, with families and jobs and institutions.  Seventy years go by.  Only a few old people even remembered the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been demolished.  That life was over.  History.  I am simplifying here, but you get the idea.

II.

            Then, something happens that seems unbelievable, but is really the preordained destiny of all Empires: the Babylonian Empire falls.  The Babylonian armies are defeated and a new Emperor comes to power.  He is not a Babylonian, but from a nation to the east called Persia.  His name is Cyrus.  And he is not a pagan, but a Zoroastrian who, like the Jews, worships one God.  And Cyrus decrees that the Jews could go home.

            It is an astounding surprise, and the Jews understand it to be an act of God, a miracle, a stunning, breathtaking reversal.  The great prophet of this period is the one who wrote these chapters in Isaiah.  He is the one who proclaims what is happening.  And then he interprets for the people the meaning of it all.  He is the one who calls on the people to realize this new beginning.

            And speaking of the people, he writes: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
 my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
 I have put my Spirit upon him;
 he will bring forth justice to the nations. 
 He will not cry or lift up his voice,
 or make it heard in the street; 
a bruised reed he will not break,
 and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
 he will faithfully bring forth justice.  He will not grow faint or be crushed
 until he has established justice in the earth;
 and the coastlands wait for his teaching.”

            This suffering people remains loved and valued by God.  Indeed, their suffering has refined and purified them.  They have paid their dues, as we say.  They have learned in the crucible of horror and loss and by being systematic victims of violence and injustice the meaning of true justice.  And they are now equipped and trained and validated and ordained to preach and do justice. 

            They have had their arrogance and self-righteousness burned off of them, so that they are not just about talk, and they are certainly not about violence.  But they have become a steadfast yet gentle people, who cherish peace and deeply appreciate weak and vulnerable and fragile and broken things.  For they know what it is like to be weak, vulnerable, fragile, and broken themselves.

            And they have learned the hard way what “justice” is in God’s eyes.  Justice has to do not with the strong punishing wrongdoers, as we suppose.  Rather, it is about lifting up the weak and restoring those who have been brought down by the strong.  God’s justice is revealed in this kind of stupendous reversal in which the powerful come crashing down and the lowly get raised up.  Those who have been there and experienced the horror and pain and terror of oppression, conquest, and utter and comprehensive loss and defeat, are best equipped to have the integrity and authenticity to witness to this reality.  God sees things from the perspective of the losers.

III.

            And yet God is the supreme Creator, who made “the heavens and stretched them out,
 who spread out the earth and what comes from it, 
who gives breath to the people upon it
 and spirit to those who walk in it.”  How do we think of this powerful God as a loser?  But God’s creative activity is precisely that.  He does not hammer, and force, and will the divine shape upon things like a blacksmith beating and twisting metal.  God creates by the gentle outward movement of the Word, epitomized in the coming of the Son of God into the world, which Paul describes as a self-emptying of God.  Creation is the work of the overflowing love of the Trinity, as God’s Word and breath are poured into what God is making.  God doesn’t force things into being.  God calls them into being and they become what God calls them.

            The whole creation was called into life: “Let there be..!” light, and a dome, and land, and life forms, and humans.  The whole universe crystallizes around this Word, this call: “Let there be!”

            So it is as well with God’s people.  And after the horrors of their being conquered and deported, God reminds them of this.  “
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
 I have taken you by the hand and kept you; 
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
 a light to the nations.”  And then, based on their very suffering, based on the way their lives and blood were poured out, based on the way they can now identify with the broken and the needy and the
 captive, the prophet gives them the commission that goes with their calling.  They are “to open the eyes that are blind,
 to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
 from the prison those who sit in darkness.”

            In other places this prophet goes into more detail but the point is clear that the wounded are now to be the healers, the broken are now to be the restorers, the exiles are now to be coming home, the dead are now coming back to life.

            And there is a certain practical truth in this.  Can we really be healed by people who have never been sick?  Can we be truly set free by people who have never experienced slavery?  Can we even so much as learn a language, or a skill, or a musical instrument if not from someone who has already sacrificed to master it themselves?

            So when Jesus Christ comes into the world, the fulfillment of Israel, the true Servant of God that the people merely anticipated, he also flows out from God and emerges, called into human form, emptied into the form of a slave, obedient to the point of death.

IV.

            So the original Servant was the Jewish nation in exile, and that image was fulfilled in the Servant who is the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom God’s love and Word and Spirit is poured out for the life of the world.  Now by the Spirit the Servant finally is his holy community, his Body on the earth, gathered and called together from the world and sent out into the world with good news.  That is: us.  We are called to continue Christ’s mission in which God’s love is poured into the world in and through us, in which we empty ourselves as God’s healing, restoring, liberating power flows into the lives of others.

            Now we are the ones with the message: “
See, the former things have come to pass,
 and new things I now declare;
 before they spring forth,
 I tell you of them.”  We are the new people doing these new things.

            Have our former things come to pass?  That is, are the habits of our old lives over?  Have we paid our dues?  That is, have we accepted, lifted up, and realized our loser side?  Have we admitted failure, wrongdoing, messing up, and responsibility for ourselves and our world?  Have we recognized that the consequences we suffer were brought upon ourselves, by blocking the flow of God’s grace?

            And are we ready for the new things God is now declaring, calling into being in and through us?  I mean really ready for really new things that are about justice and righteousness, opening our eyes and liberating captives? 

            I hope we are, because God is, and Jesus Christ calls us to new things, and empowers us to accomplish new things by his Spirit.

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