To Heal a Broken World (proper 24b)

To Heal a Broken World

Homily delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, Ph.D., SCP

8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 24B

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (OR)

October 18, 2015

Isaiah 53:4-12 Psalm 91:9-16 Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45 

God, Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

I have noticed in the Parish in recent weeks a pain, a dullness, an exhaustion at the larger world we live in.  Where once there was hope and passion for living into our baptismal covenants in seeing Christ in all people and working to heal the world about us and restore the creation of God, many now fear the way things are going in the country and world.  We are still busy and active in works of compassion and service, and seeking social justice, but a gloom seems to have settled upon once joyful efforts, at least for some.  We are afraid perhaps that no matter how hard we try, things may not get better: oppression of women, minorities, and foreigners will only increase; the poor and homeless will continue to suffer and their numbers will grow; the forces of fascism, racism, homophobia, violence, and militarism will go on from strength to strength; and people who wear their “Christianity” on their sleeves will angrily go on supporting such wickedness, all in the name of Jesus and the Good.  

We are, in a word, world weary, worn out by our cares and worries.  A common ailment in ancient Palestine under the Romans, it drove much of the craziness of the Messianic cults and revolts in the first centuries before and of the Common Era.

World weariness then often expressed itself in fantastic and apocalyptic hopes for a world to come, a complete turning over of this system of things, and yearning for the arrival of God’s Kingship or Reign.  Many people began to follow Jesus because he announced the arrival of God’s Reign.  But when he explained what this means, their world weariness kicked in again. 

A few weeks ago we read that when Peter confessed Jesus as Messiah, Jesus replied by saying he was going to be abused and killed, but still hoped that God would raise him up regardless.  Peter answered, “NO! Messiah means victor, not victim!”  Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan!  Your heart is set on the things of this world.”    A couple of weeks ago, when Jesus was asked what the Law of Moses says about divorce, he replied with a great strike against male privilege: God’s intention in creation precludes patriarchy’s easy practice of a husband abandoning wife and children on a whim, despite Moses’s process for a writ of divorce.  His disciples replied, “Then it’s better to never get married.”  Last week, Jesus told the Rich Young Man to detach from his possessions, and they replied “How then can anybody make it into the Reign of God?” 

Jesus’s parables see a humble kingship of God, not a triumphant one: it is not an army of conquering heroes, but a little seed that sprouts and grows all on its own.  It is not a great temple or palace, but a small measure of yeast that leavens enough flour to fill a bakery.  It is not a towering cedar, but a small mustard weed gone crazy in the summer’s heat.  It is the joy of finding a lost penny, a wandering sheep, a pearl of great price, or even a lost child.

In today’s Gospel, James and John ask Jesus for places beside him when he sits in glory in that Kingship of God.  Their vision clearly has not caught up with what Jesus has been teaching. They think Jesus is going to march into Jerusalem, conquer the Romans, and sit on a throne, and they are calling shotgun on the prime seats with the most face time with the ruler to be. 

Jesus replies, “You have no idea what you’re asking.  Are you able to drink the bitter cup I will have to drink, or be baptized—held under water—along with me?”    For Jesus, being God’s chosen one is not about being boss or ruler.  It is about being a suffering servant, about going to Jerusalem faithful, even if it gets him killed:  “You want to be near me, but that means you’ll have to suffer like me.  Can you take it?”  “Oh yes, Jesus, it’s just what we want!” they reply innocently, unaware of the irony their words will bear once Holy Week and its sufferings arrive.

The other disciples at this point get angry at James and John for monopolizing the boss’s time.  They too want to be at his side.  Petty bickering erupts, which Jesus breaks up with his pronouncement: those very gentiles whom you want to defeat like to lord it over each other, but my disciples must be servants and not masters.  The Kingdom will come not by mimicking the Romans and beating them at their own game: it will come when we refuse to be taken into their rat race of envy, power, exclusion, violence, and prestige.  As Jimi Hendrix said, peace will come when the power of love overcomes the love of power.

Become a servant.  Become a domestic drudge, a slave.  Endure suffering.  Do this with faith and trust, and God’s Reign will thrive.    

Jesus was the first to combine this idea of the ideal king of the future, the Messiah, with the image of the Suffering Servant found in the Second half of the Book of Isaiah.  The novelty and counter-intuitive nature of the joining of these two contrary images flummoxed Jesus’ disciples. 

It’s sometimes hard for us Christians to see how revolutionary this joining was, since we tend to read those Isaiah passages in retrospect, assuming that they contain the link. But they don’t.  Because Jesus modeled such suffering servanthood so well, we Christians can barely hear today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson without thinking that it is a fore-telling of our Lord’s suffering on the cross.  But this misses many details in the Isaiah text, and relies on many mis-translations of its phrases and Christian insertions of ideas.  Sadly, these often serve as proof-texts for the discredited, non-Biblical understanding of the atonement worked by Jesus as one of transferred punishment for sin.     

This is Second Isaiah’s fourth song about a servant who suffers abuse but whose faithfulness to God ultimately brings about the conversion and healing of the abusers.  The servant is an image for the people of Israel, abused and oppressed by the gentile nations about them.  This is how I, aiming to avoid such insertions or mistranslations,  translate this chapter, a song on the lips of the gentile abusers who look on the servant, the Jews they have persecuted:  

Who can believe what we have heard?

To whom has YHWH’s vindication been revealed?

For he has sprouted, by His favor, like a sapling.

As from a tree root in arid ground.

He had no form or beauty

That we should look at him:

No charm, that we should find him pleasing. 

He was despised, shunned by others

A person of suffering, well acquainted with illness.

As [a leper] who had to hide his face from us,

He was despised.  We held him of no account. 

Yet the sickness that afflicted him turned out to be our own,

The suffering he endured, ours as well.

We thought he was plagued,

Smitten and punished by God:

But his wounds were from among our own faults,

His being crushed from our own wrongdoings.  

The chastisement he suffered actually made us whole,

His bruises brought healing to us. 

We may have all gone astray like wandering sheep,

Each on a separate way,

But it was our shared wrongdoing

That YHWH allowed to overcome him…

Behold—from the land of the living was he cut off,

From the sin of my people [the gentiles] was this wound his.   

His grave was set among the wicked

And his tomb with evildoers,

Though he had done no harm

And spoken no lie. 

YHWH may have

Allowed disease to crush him,

But if willing to give his life as if making an offering to drive away guilt, 

He may yet see offspring and a long life.

Since through him YHWH’s purpose prospers. 

From out of his mortal anguish,

He will enjoy eat and drink to the full an offering expressing thanksgiving. 

One righteous person, once known,

Will make the many also righteous. 

Thus bearing away their wrongdoing. 

These many will count as his heritage

And he will receive this multitude as his gain. 

Because he was willing to die

And be counted among the wicked

When in reality he was removing their evildoing

And ridding them of wrong.    (Isa. 53:1-12)

Second Isaiah looks at the suffering of the Jewish people and says it is not senseless, but has meaning.  It touches the heart of the gentile abusers, and thus serves a redemptive purpose. 

This idea is an important part of a later rabbinic and Kabbalistic teaching of tiqqun ha-olam: the healing of the world.  By faithfulness in serving others, our perseverance in suffering, we help drive away the darkness, and make more and more present the light of God hiding in all creation. 

For Jesus, suffering servanthood unleashes a power that calls the abusers to account and changes their hearts.  This power was called satyagraha, or truth force, by Ghandi and practiced by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  It is the way the world can be healed, that the kingdom can come.  To reduce Gethsemane and Calvary to some mechanistic and mathematical way to even scores and satisfy some supposed blood-thirsty wrath of God is a terrible reduction and perversion of the Cross.  For Jesus, its redemptive suffering is where the Reign of God is revealed, where the healing of the world occurs, not where a wrathful deity is placated and bribed with borrowed blood.

For Jesus, trusting God and keeping faith in the servant path given us by God is the way to bring about the healing of the world, especially when this means risking suffering and death.   So he says: don’t be like the persecutors, who love to lord it over everybody.  Be a servant, suffer, help bring those abusers find healing.  Take up your cross and follow me. I bid you, come and die so that all may live. 

Following Jesus means sharing Jesus’ sufferings.  It means not given up, or caving in to world-weariness.  Keep the faith.  Having died with Jesus in baptism, we need not fear death any longer.  Even as we drink the cup of bitterness, we see it as a cup of blessing.  Having been raised to life with him, we must give life and love to all. 

It is thus that we can heal the broken world. 

Amen