By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
Sunday May 17th, 2020 (3/10. How Jesus Saves.)
Please pardon my French as I share about the 1938 French novel, La Bête humaine, (The Beast Within). It is a very a dark story expressing the mood among many in France in that time. The plot focus on a mentally disturbed train engineer who falls in love with a troubled woman who has just helped her husband commit a murder (I told you it was dark). As the story develops, the train engineer is trying to convince his new lover to kill her husband and come away with him.
In one line of the book, the author Emile Zola, compares life in this world to riding on a train, plunging at full speed through the night, with a slain engineer in the cab. He complains: “The train is the world; we are the freight; fate is the track; death is the darkness; God is the engineer—WHO IS DEAD.” (As quoted in James Leo Green, God Reigns, Broadman, 1968, p. 147).
Cynical, dark, negative feelings like this appear to be popping up more often these days, but now the mad, mentally disturbed, and emotionally depressed have automatic weapons. As I write this on November 14th, 2019, a California Asian kid, on his 16th birthday, around 7:30 AM, arrives at his High School before class began, unpacks an automatic weapon from his backpack and then open fires, kills two, wounds three others, then shoots himself. The incident took just 16 seconds, but the grief will impact those families forever. First reports said he was suffering emotional anguish because last year, his Father died of a heart-attack. In pain, without hope, with some kind of death wish, perhaps disturbed like Zola’s character, he also felt like his life is a ‘train going nowhere’ headed ‘off a cliff’, without a conductor. So, in utter disregard for anyone or anything, suffering more than he thought he should have to bear, he pulled out a gun and shoots.
How do you face pain, struggle, difficulty and suffering in life? There isn’t a simple answer. But this is what the prophet Isaiah is dealing with in what is deemed the most important passage in the Old Testament. It’s known to Bible Scholars as ‘The Song of The Suffering Servant’. Strangely, if this is a song of redemption and hope, who wants to ‘ride’ on a ‘dark’ train like this, especially having to go through suffering, rejection and despair? Don’t we have someone to blame? Don’t we have Jesus to take the blame and bear the load? Yes. No. Perhaps. Of course, but how? How does text answer the darkest feelings humans have in the darkness that can come in our lives?
The true story of human redemption must come through the pain, through the grief, bearing load which maybe unfair and unjust, but somehow this servant keeps going on, pulling through anyway, waiting for the moment when deliverance and vindication finally comes. Instead of responding in rage or defeat, this servant suffers like a ‘lamb being lead to the slaughter’ and doesn’t even say a word (v. 7), making himself a sacrifice and an‘offering’. And this is not just any kind of offering, but he accepts this hurt as ‘an offering’, not just because of sin, but ‘for sin’.
This might sound like something only a ‘god’ can do, but that’s NOT what this story implies. Both this ‘servant’ and Jesus too, did not suffer like a god, but they suffered as people do, in complete disgust and terrible humiliation.
Who needs to understand a story like this? Our culture certainly does. Of course, we in the church may immediately compare the prophet’s words to their ultimate and mysterious ‘fulfillment’ in the suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, Jesus our Christ ultimately fulfills these words in a way no one else has or ever will, but we must also understand that, while Jesus has ‘suffered unjustly,’ he’s not the only one.
As an inventive kid, I once took a GI Joe (toy action figure) and transformed it into Jesus; stripping it almost naked, painting it with red for blood, and hung it on a handmade cross up on a wall. When my Father saw it, he commented somewhat skeptically that Jesus was no longer suffering on a cross. He was right, of course, because I was an awkward boy and almost a teenager. There was something about seeing Jesus up there that related to in my own fears and hurts more than a ‘risen Lord’ of glory. Of course, I needed that hope too, but it was the suffering Jesus I better understood.
HE SHALL BE EXALTED, LIFTED UP (52: 13)
When this ‘Song’ was written, it became the supreme ‘vision’ of the hope for this little, beaten-down, struggling nation. Carried away in exile, Israel was the one who was suffering. Israel was despised by the world. The faithful believed their hope was for nothing, and it was as if they were riding off a cliff with their chariot driver dead.
As Isaiah sings this strange, counter-intuitive song, he expresses his hope that his suffering people, personified as one suffering servant, might endure the shame until the day when they “will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted (Isa. 52:13 NIV). And How will this suffering people be lifted up? Isaiah envisioned that even when the unjust, unfair most tragic happens,”my servant will act wisely’.. In the gospels Jesus fulfilled this ‘wisdom’ in multiply ways, but what did it for them, and what might it still mean for us, who still must face the unfairness and hurts of life?
It’s does seem these days, that more people are knowing less about how to deal with their suffering. Instead of bearing the pain, the grief, and the humiliation that comes with life, some feel the necessity to turn on others and make them bear their own pain too. Is this only mental illness or are people losing lost the ability carry the weight of life? Is bearing the burden something only Jesus does, or is this something required of us all? It just isn’t realistic to think we’ll get out of this world alive and without some pain or injustice. In some way, we all will get hurt.
Could there a kind of call, a mission, and maybe even some kind of strange purpose in human suffering that asks us, both to sometimes be humiliated in it, but also to be lifted up and ‘exalted’ through it? Life seldom takes us around all the pain, but somehow we must all go through it. Winston Churchill once said, ‘When you’re going through Hell, Keep Going!” But how can we, or should we do that?
Can anyone, not just Israel, and not just Jesus, but also people like us, you and me, learn be ‘wise’ even in the worst that can happen to us? Could this servant’s despicable and deplorable ‘suffering’ have something instructive to say when the dark and difficult is laid upon us? Might we constructively carry and share our hurts without turning on everyone else?
No one likes pain and suffering. The biggest question in all human thoughts of God, must echo Jesus own great cry from the cross: ‘My God, why, why have your forsaken me!” Bearing the ‘curse’ with us and for us, Jesus felt the full weight of the dark side of life. This was not just the physical beatings and torture, but Jesus felt like God had left him all alone. That’s what Isaiah’s Suffering Servant felt too. Although the text says, ‘The Lord went before Him’ and, ‘The LORD will be your rear guard’, you certainly can’t prove it, then or now. The song promises that the suffering servant ‘will be highly exalted’, but how does one ‘act wisely’ and wait to be ‘exalted’ when the unspeakable comes?
HE BORE THE INIQUITY OF US ALL (53: 6)
Remember that ole Mac Davis country song, ‘O Lord it’s hard to be humble, when your perfect in every way? It’s certainly hard to focus on being ‘exalted’ when you think you’ve already arrived. But when the dark and the difficult comes, it’s hard to be humble then too. It’s not only hard, it can seem useless and hopeless too. That’s the depth of human anguish we may feel in life—Christian or not. Life often feels it shouldn’t be this way. Life can be unfair, unjust, and unusually cruel too.
The pain described in this passage is not only physical but it’s also also personal, emotional and immoral. Do you see it? This is not only his own personal pain, but its also social and political and these hurts shouldn’t be his. This weight of shame and wrong he bears is no fault of his own. His suffering could simply be from living in broken world.
It’s could be like going to the hospital to get well and, because of the lack of treatment, someone’s mistake or incompetence, getting sicker rather than better.
It’s could be like going into business on your own and having people steal from you, criticize you and then turn against you too.
It’s could be like going to school to learn something and having people call you names, making sport or bully you..
Or It could be like just driving home from work, minding your own business and then, wham! The next thing you know is your in an ambulance headed to the hospital,, or even worse, you may never fully recover.
This unfairness in life is not just something that happened on a cross, but this unfairness and injustice can happen to anyone anywhere. And it does. It’s happening somewhere all the time. We don’t chose to suffer, suffering seems to have chosen us. So, how do we deal with it? Some say , “When life gets tough, the tough get going,” or others might say, “That’s life! Get over it?” This is flippantly said, but it’s different when the hurt comes home. When your time comes, and the full weight of it hits is you hard and the hammer comes down and you are the one being nailed.
The pain that comes can be too much and we all hope for some kind of happy ending, don’t we? Do you see where all this is going? We might all find something of our own hurts in Isaiah’s sufferer. It can startle us, and it be hard to believe, the prophet says. But something much more is being revealed here than just a fellow struggler who feels or shares our pain. This sufferer, he says ‘bears our disease’ and is ‘crushed by our sins’. He’s speaking to us now, daring us to believe that by his ‘bruises’ we too ‘can be healed’ and that these ‘wounds’ could ‘make us whole’. While we long and hope for some kind of happy ending to life’s darkness and disgust, how could the pain a servant who suffers hurt because of us be the one who suffers for us, to heal us?
In other words, how could the suffering of any servant, become a happy ending for us? Who can believed it or understand it? That’s a question this prophet asked long ago; before Jesus, and before any of us too? And this question becomes even sharper when he says that, ‘it was the Lord’s will to crush him with pain’(v. 10)! Like I heard a young preacher say recently who could ever trust in a God as a Father who killed his own Son (Tony Jones)?’
This preacher, like so many others, are asking today in light of the hurt and violence that can also be religiously motivated: ‘Who in their right mind would trust a God so stuck on himself that he wouldn’t love or forgive anyone until he murdered his own child?’ How could the unjust, disgusting, agony and suffering of an innocent victim, whether in Israel or anywhere, ever bring hope for healing, forgiveness or of any kind of happy ending for us now? ‘Who has believed what we’ve heard?’ Isaiah asked. We might ask this too?
MY SERVANT SHALL MAKE MANY RIGHTEOUS (53:11)
Sometimes truth makes no sense at all even when it’s true. And this song about the one who suffers unjustly to bring God’s justice, mercy and love into the world is one of those truths that makes absolutely no sense, unless of course, it is true. Isaiah the prophet believed it would be true for Israel. The first Christians, who were Jews came to understand how an unjustly crucified Christ fulfilled this hope and opened up healing for all who will believe. They saw in this suffering and dying Jesus someone who suffered and died for us because he came to heal us from our greatest hurt.
The biggest surprise in all this, both from Isaiah’s perspective, from the New Testament viewpoint, is who gets to have this healing and this happy ending. This is the truth we shouldn’t be able to believe is true, but it is. Do you see it? Do you dare look straight into what is true? This is a saving, healing, redeeming story that is also true ‘for us’? Can you believe what’s been heard?
Most all of us love stories with happy endings. Now, I’m not trying to get you to believe in fairytales. Don’t let my words trick you. This part is a fairytale. It’s the story of Cinderella, which is a favorite children’s story, and it’s a fairytale we might wish to be true. You might wish to be poor oppressed person who marries into big money. Cinderella stories, found around the world, are stories about people who were put down, forgotten, overlooked, until one day they finally arrive and are noticed. It’s a universal human story of pain and hurt for almost everyone who wishes life might turn out differently.
But imagine this story with another ending. Imagine that you aren’t Cinderella or the Handsome prince, but think of yourself as the one of the wicked stepsisters, or step-uncles causing the hurt and pain. And that’s exactly what Isaiah and the gospel says that we are. It says we invoke, invite and encourage the hurts in life, like sheep we go astray and it is our own fault this innocent man is suffering.
There shouldn’t be any happy ending for him, or for us either, but this suffering man is determined to give one to us, even those of us who put him down. And it was also the Father’s will for him to suffer, but the Father didn’t make him die. He didn’t force him into this situation. Nobody took His life from him, except his own willing obedience to show us that God’s love is also long-suffering love. Jesus is God’s Son because he is the servant of love. In suffering for us, because of us, he proves God’s love will be there for us, even in the worst of our lives. Because of this undying love we can rewrite the ending of our lives.
Interestingly, they’ve made another ending to Cinderella, but’s it’s not new, it’s the original one. Do you know it? It’s the one where the wicked stepsisters come begging Cinderella for mercy and forgiveness. They promise her that they are changed and will never hurt her ever again. She does show them mercy and forgiveness too.
Do you believe it? Love was always in control. Isn’t this how every love story should end? In faith, we trust that love will have the final word. For the Lord of love has laid on him the iniquity of us all, so that when he died sin died, but love lives on. And most strangely, and most thankfully too, love now lives forever through the suffering man. Amen.
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