Years ago, a parishioner confessed to
me what many of us feel but hesitate to admit: “I won’t be in church on Good
Friday. I just can’t take all the sadness. I have enough sadness and suffering
in my life without wallowing in it on Good Friday. I’ll come to church on
Easter, when everything is happy again.”
We do have enough sadness and
suffering in life. Why add any more? Perhaps because God refuses to avoid it.
Perhaps because God chooses to heal this world that God loves so much by
pouring Godself freely into all of its nooks and crannies, even into the dark
and frightening ones. God chooses to bring life to the world, not from outside
the world, but from within the depths of the world, from pouring the divine
being into frail and suffering human flesh and blood and dwelling there in the
darkness. God becomes one with us not just in Jesus’ birth, but also in Jesus’
death. Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich describes Christ’s suffering and death
on the Cross as “oneing,” as a making complete the oneness or unity of God with
us and with all creatures, as we suffer with the crucified Jesus, and he
suffers with us.[1]
I recently read a poem by Wendell Berry that has haunted me this Holy
Week. Berry writes:
“…These times we know much evil,
little good/ To steady us in faith/ And comfort when our losses press/ Hard on
us, and we choose,/ In panic or despair or both,/ To keep what we will lose./
For we are fallen like the trees, our peace/ broken, and so we must/ Love where
we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And must await the
wayward-coming grace/ That joins living and dead,/ Taking us where we would not
go--/ Into the boundless dark./ When what was made has been unmade/ The Maker
comes to His work.”[2]
Isn’t that what Isaiah is saying,
too, in his poem about the Suffering Servant? We tend to make Isaiah’s poem into
an allegory for Jesus—Jesus punished by God “for our iniquity.” Isaiah,
however, writing to the exiled Jews in Babylon, was not specifically writing
about Jesus of Nazareth. No one knows exactly “who” the Suffering Servant is,
and we can’t draw neat, clean lines that match him up with any historical
figure. Isaiah 53 is not a nice prophecy about Jesus that we can drag out on
Good Friday, admire, and then put away again. It is not a logical explanation
of the mechanics of redemption, either. It is a poem, like Berry’s, about
suffering—and salvation.
The first kind of suffering that God
dives into in this poem is deformity. Isaiah portrays the Servant as a hideous
creature. He seems to have a facial disfigurement so horrible that we almost
cannot recognize that he is human. There is nothing about his appearance to make
us want him around. He is one from whom we hide our faces in disgust, cringing
at the horror before our eyes. He is like all of the parts of ourselves that we
hate. He is like the ugliness that war and human greed wreak upon the natural
landscape. God suffers deformity with his servant. His
suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we
cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we
would not go—into the darkness.
We reject this Servant; indeed, we
despise him. We hold him of no account. He grew up in our midst, yet we didn’t
notice him as he emerged like a root out of hard, drought-tormented ground:
slowly, painfully, and half-withered. He is like all of the peoples who have
been enslaved, like the people who crouch under freeway overpasses. He is like
the foreigner, the outcast, like all those who are different. He has no place
with us. God suffers rejection with his servant, and his suffering presence leads
us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the
wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.
The Servant suffers from pain and
illness. The Hebrew says that he is “a man of pain;” defined by his physical
suffering. Moreover, he does not just bear his own sickness, but ours as well.
He carries our sickness and bears our pain; he is wounded, afflicted, struck
down by God, and crushed by our sins. Even though we can’t be bothered to look
at him, he is ground down by the sickness of the world. He is like all of those
suffering from illness in places where doctors fear to tread, like soldiers and
civilians wounded in war, like the teenagers bloody from gang violence in
no-man’s land, like people in hospital beds that no one bothers to visit. God suffers
pain with his servant. His suffering presence leads us to Love where we
cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming
grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.
The servant suffers unjustly. Like
Job, he never does anything to merit his grief. It all happens by a perversion
of justice, by life gone awry. He never even complains about his lot. He
remains as silent as a baby lamb who doesn’t know enough to cry out before his
throat is cut. He does violence to no one and speaks without deceit, but he is
still tossed outside of the city walls for burial, dishonored and cast out with
murderers, cheaters, and thieves. The world’s justice completely passes him by.
He is like the children of poverty, like the casteless and the homeless, the
victims of abuse, the millions who never get a chance. God suffers persecution with his servant. His suffering leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we
cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we
would not go—into the darkness.
The Servant’s world of deformity,
rejection, illness, and injustice remains in constant contrast with an ever-present
“we” throughout Isaiah 53: “we who like sheep have gone astray.” The “we” of
the text—that is all of us human beings—would like to take the Suffering Servant,
the Suffering God, the Suffering Christ, the Suffering neighbor, the Suffering
land, the Suffering self, and put them aside, where they don’t hurt our eyes
and cut into our hearts. But they are all a part of us, and we cannot let any
of them go. Not the deformity, not the rejection, not the illness, not the
injustice, not the transgression, not the part that we play in all of these
things. And so God joins us, remaking our decaying world and our decomposing
souls by his constant presence with them, lifting up, exalting, loving, transforming,
turning upside down. We participate in that presence on Good Friday. On the Cross, it is concentrated and revealed for all the world to see. Wendy Farley writes that Christ’s suffering is a surge of
powerful divine love upon “whatever thwarts, wounds, and incarcerates the
divine image” in God’s beloved creation.[3]
Shall we return that love and thereby restore the divine image? Far outside of the realm of our categories and understandings, the true power
of God works with a “wayward-coming grace,” a grace that can bring a broken
Israel back from exile, rebuild Jerusalem out of crushed dreams, or make the Crucified
One our Risen Lord and Savior. But the only way to get there is through the
darkness—holding the hand of the one who created the Light.
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