In Helen Waddell’s novel Peter Abelard, Peter and a friend are walking through the forest and discussing the world’s pain. Peter’s friend notices a fallen log on the ground, a log that has been sawed in two, exposing the inner rings. He points to a dark ring in the wood. He explains that the dark streak goes up and down the length of the whole tree, but you only see it where it cuts across. The friend adds, “That’s what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw.” Abelard then asks, "You think that all ... the pain of the world, was Christ's cross?" The friend replies, "God's cross ... And it goes on [and on, throughout all that is.]"[1]
The Cross of Christ that we venerate today is the tree suddenly broken open, God’s suffering dramatically exposed to view. In choosing to bring life to the world--not from outside the world, but from within the depths of the world--God shares in the world’s pain.
To trace the dark ring of God’s suffering deeper through the wood, let's turn to the prophet Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Often, we Christians make Isaiah’s poem simply into an allegory for Jesus—Jesus punished by God “for our iniquity.” Isaiah, however, writing to the exiled Jews in Babylon, wasn’t specifically writing about Jesus. 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 isn’t just a nice prophecy about Jesus that we can drag out on Good Friday, admire, and then put away again. It’s not a logical explanation of the mechanics of redemption, either. It’s a poem that leads us deep into the heart of our compassionate God.
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 don’t recognize that he’s human. This creature is like all of the parts of ourselves that we hate. He’s the ugliness that war and human greed wreak upon God’s amazing creation: clear streams turned neon green, cities gashed by bombs, forests mowed down like wheat, mountains blown open and left to bleed, majestic species gone missing. God suffers deformity along with his servant.
We reject God’s Servant in this poem; indeed, we despise him. We hold him of no account. He is like all of the peoples who have ever been enslaved, like the lost ones who crouch under freeway overpasses and cry behind walls. He is like the foreigner, the prisoner, the outcast, like all those who are pushed away because they are different. God suffers rejection along with his servant.
The Servant suffers from pain and illness in this poem, too. 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. 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. He’s like children mowed down by guns at school, like people in hospital beds that no one bothers to visit. God suffers physical pain along with his servant.
The servant suffers unjustly. Like Job, he never does anything to merit his grief. It all happens 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, but justice completely passes him by. He is like the children of poverty, like the low caste and the homeless, the victims of abuse, the millions who never get a chance. God suffers persecution along with his servant.
Oh, how we would like to take the Suffering Servant, the Suffering God, the Suffering Christ, the Suffering neighbor, the Suffering land, the Suffering heart, and put them all 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. And so, our loving God joins us, remaking our decaying world and our decomposing souls by his constant healing presence within them, lifting up, exalting, loving, transforming, turning inside out.
Far outside of the realm of our categories and understandings, the true power of God works with a strange, compassionate grace—a grace that can bring a broken people back from exile, a grace that can rebuild out of crushed dreams, a grace that can make the Crucified One our Risen Lord and Savior, a grace that can heal and transform our lives. Not just on Good Friday, but every day, we live and move and have our being within the embrace of a God who has always known the shadows. Hold tight, today and every day, to the hand of the one who walks with us through the shadows, the hand of the one who created the Light.
[1] Shared in a lecture by the Rev. Martin Smith, The School of Theology of the University of the South, July 2017, and found in his article found at https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-2622999731/god-s-cross-to-bear.
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