These are difficult texts. They are inextricably linked, both
by their history and in our culture. Do you recognize any of these words from
Handel’s Messiah? Studying these stories this week, my heart feels wrung out. There
are so many associations in these texts. A beaten, brutalized, crucified
savior. One who came and bore my shame (and the shame of the world), to set me
free. A king who became a willing servant. A Lord who gave up everything to be
crucified as a slave. A God who overcomes all the evil intentions the world
could design, through forgiveness, redemption, and life.
Let’s look first at the Servant Song from Isaiah. This is
the fourth such song in this book, a poem written some 500 years before Christ
was born. This song was written into the Judean community that had been exiled
by the Babylonians. In building an empire, the Babylonian army had come
through, crushing the Israelites and either killing or taking into exile the
political and religious elites. The ‘ordinary folks’ were left behind, living
as servants and slaves to Babylonians who had planted themselves in the
Israelite’s homes and taken over their lands. Some of these people became
refugees to Egypt because of the horrid conditions in Judah. The conditions for
those in exile, though, had not been quite so terrible – they were permitted to have
homes and lands, amass wealth and even worship their God. For generations, the
Israelite people lived this diasporic life, spread out all over the Mid-East;
and now, the exile had been ended. The new King of Babylon had permitted all of
the Jews to return “home” to Palestine. And this song of the suffering servant
was written into this community, seeking healing from division, oppression and
despair.
Listening to this prophecy, the Israelites would have remembered
Moses. They believed that he, as servant to God, had taken all of the sins of
the early Hebrews onto himself, dying with them – for their sins – in the
wilderness. At the time, the people wandering in the desert didn’t understand
his sacrifice, or God’s hope for their future. They considered him ‘struck down by God and afflicted.’ But
now in retrospect, the Israelites looked back and saw God’s saving act for
their people through Moses’ servant leadership. ‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are
healed.’
The author of this poem makes a similar claim about what has
happened in the exile. Although terrible things had befallen the ‘servant’ of
God in the exile, through Israel all the nations would come to know God. ‘The righteous one, my servant, shall make
many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.’ The Israelite nation
has become a servant to God, bearing the sins of the Babylonians. And now,
God’s redemption has come: ‘Therefore I
will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the
strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the
transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the
transgressors.’ During the generations of exile, the Israelites had lost
hope of salvation. Just as their ancestors in the wilderness forgot God and
God’s saving and redeeming hope, so their ancestors in these last times had
forgotten God. But now, God’s works were being revealed in the world; salvation
from oppression, healing in community, and hope for a better future. The
servant whose voice we hear in this poem knows much about affliction,
oppression, and wounded-ness. And now, that same servant speaks out in a voice
of hope.
As Christians, with the perspective on history that we now
have, we hear this servant song in Isaiah, and we recognize in it Jesus. Like
us, the early Christian community came to understand Jesus’ life and death
through the lens of this song. ‘He was
oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb
that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is
silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken
away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of
the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave
with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and
there was no deceit in his mouth.’
But Jesus’ disciples aren’t expecting this. When James and
John tell Jesus that they can drink his cup and be baptized with the same water
he is baptized with, they have no idea what that will mean. In all likelihood,
they still expect that Jesus has come to reign in some earthly kingdom, in some
way they can both fathom and understand. Thinking forward to the events leading
up to Jesus’ crucifixion, and then to the disciples’ fear that kept them locked
in that upper room in Jerusalem afterwards, we can see their confusion. Like
the Hebrews in the wilderness, like the Israelites in exile, the disciples experience
affliction and oppression and pain. Justice has been perverted. An innocent man
condemned to death. The only Son of God…
What must they have thought?: ‘Yet
it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain’?
And there it is. The hope for the future, crushed, smashed,
annihilated before them on the cross. And then, Confusion. Fear. Silence.
Despair.
But Jesus, Jesus had expected this. He had predicted this.
Not as one who was sent to die, not as one for whom the Lord’s will was to
crush with pain. But as one who knew the evil of the world and became flesh to
love it into redemption. And redeem it, he did:
On the third day, he rose
again.
On the third day, he overcame death and the devil.
On the third day, he
showed evil who’s boss.
On the third day, he still loved the world, enough to
come back into it.
On the third day, he resurrected hope that God’s future is
our future, and injustice doesn’t get the last word.
This is the servanthood to which Jesus calls his disciples. A
servanthood that leads us into the darkest, messiest corners of the world, and allows
us to proclaim hope. We do not presume to take this honor, or force it on one another, but take it
only when called by God. In becoming servants of one another and slaves to all,
we answer God’s call to be a part of the redemption of the world. As we freely
choose to walk into the world with a message of hope, we know that we too can
expect, even predict, experiences of affliction and oppression and pain.
Justice will be perverted. Innocent people will be murdered. And wherever this
is true, wherever hope has been crushed and smashed and annihilated, there we
stand, too, awaiting the hope of God’s redemption.
But just because God works hope into every story, and
redemption into every life, doesn’t mean that pain or affliction or injustice
or sorrow are the will of God. God desired that the Hebrew people would find
freedom from oppression, and God delivered them into the wilderness. God
desired that those wandering people would find homes and rest, and God led them
into the promised land. God desired that the Israelites in Diaspora might
experience healing and community, and God’s deliverance from exile came. God
desired that the world might come to know God’s love and grace, and Jesus
overcame all the evil and injustice the world and all its perverted social
structures could throw at him. And God desires still that all people would find
freedom from oppression, homes, rest, healing, community, love and grace.
And it is with that desire that God sends us into the world
with a message of hope. To those who are beaten by their loved ones, God
proclaims: you are worthy of safety and love. To those who are crippled by
depression, God proclaims: you are my child, whom I love. To those who find
warmth in a crack pipe, God proclaims: your pain need not consume you. To those
who have been raped, God proclaims: your body is precious and whole. To those
whose bodies hurt, God proclaims: your pain is my pain, and together we are
made whole. To each of us, God proclaims: I have named you and claimed you, and
you are mine.
Whatever happens in this world, whatever happens in our
lives, God’s hope remains. As we are servants to one another, and slaves to the
world, we bear that hope for a future that belongs not to us or the world, not
to structures of injustice or oppression, but to God.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
