Isaiah 53.4-12
Hebrews 5.1-10
Mark 10.35-45
The three
readings we have heard today are like a curtain rising to disclose the
mysterious symbol at the heart of our faith: the cross.
We are so used to
the cross that it has perhaps lost its power to shock. It is in every church,
it stands over every altar, we have it in our homes, we wear it round our
necks. Yet what is it? It is the image of a means of cruel and shameful death,
and on it a man dying nailed to a piece of wood.
This is a most
unlikely image for anything, let alone for a world religion. Who would choose
that as their corporate logo? And yet, gazing on it, we see more than meets the
eye. The cross shows us God for us, God on our side, God present in the worst
that can happen, God present to save us. The cross draws us to the one who is
shown on it. “When I am lifted up from the earth”, said Jesus, “I will draw all
people to myself”.
The cross is so
unexpected that it has to be of God. Only God could make suffering into peace,
defeat into victory, death into life. The transformative power of God breaks
into the deadlock of human sin and suffering and death, and against all our
expectations does something new.
This is
foreshadowed in the hauntingly beautiful passage from Isaiah we heard this
morning. Most of the time the Old Testament prophets addressed themselves to
the needs of the people at the time. If people were acting unjustly or not
following God’s ways the prophets would pronounce judgement against them, so
that they might repent. If the people were suffering or threatened the Prophets
would speak of God’s care for them and his promise of deliverance.
The book of
Isaiah is like that, mostly addressed to the needs of the people at the time it
was written, and in this section of the book the people were in exile in
Babylon.
But in the midst
of the words addressed to their present need there comes a series of poems
about the “Servant of the Lord”. This is a mysterious figure who suffers and is
rejected and yet it is discovered in the end that God was on his side, and
working through him. More mysteriously still, it is through his sufferings that
many will become righteous, it is through him that sin will be taken away.
Who is this
person? The Servant of the Lord doesn’t correspond to anyone in Israel’s
history at the time that Isaiah was writing. And yet this poem discloses
something of the heart of God. Even if the identity of the Servant was not
clear, the poems did assure God’s people that God was with them in their exile,
and that God could be trusted to work his purpose out even in the midst of
affliction and rejection. God was not absent, even when he seemed to be silent.
The idea that God
can work through suffering and rejection was there in the Jewish tradition and
in the scriptures. But it was there in a veiled way. For the disciples, it was
not until after the resurrection that it all fell into place, and they were
able to see how exactly Isaiah’s “Servant of the Lord” described Jesus. Until
that happened, they simply couldn’t understand that the Messiah had to suffer,
however often Jesus tried to tell them.
And so James and
John, in today’s gospel reading, are still getting it wrong. They think that
the Kingdom of God will happen when Jesus drives suffering and oppression away.
His glory, they think, is suffering avoided. His victory will come about in the
normal human way, by Jesus rising to the top of the heap and crushing everyone
else beneath him. And they want to be there with him.
How little they
understand. Jesus warns them of the cup and baptism of suffering that he must
drink. “To sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is
for those for whom it has been prepared.” Who are those for whom it has been
prepared? Mark tells us in chapter 15 of his gospel: “And with him they
crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left.” These are the
places that James and John think they want to occupy!
The Son of Man,
says Jesus, came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many. And as the letter to the Hebrews says, Jesus was made perfect
through suffering and so became the source of eternal salvation.
Now the rational
part of us might want to ask, “How?” How does the death of Jesus bring our
peace? How does his suffering earn our salvation? What’s the deal?
The New Testament
is full of many images that show us facets of Christ’s saving death. He was paying
a ransom, a price to free us from being held captive by death. He was fighting
with the powers of evil and defeating them. He was the new Adam, the human race
restarted, sharing everything that it is to be human including our suffering
and death, so that all humanity might be raised to new life in him. He was
showing what the love of God is like, so that we might learn to love. By his
voluntary giving of his life he was paying the debt that sinners owe to God.
All of these
images are there in scripture, but they are facets of a mystery. And, in the
end, the cross itself defeats our attempts at analysis. It shows us a love and
mercy beyond anything we can comprehend or define, because it is of God.
Julian of Norwich,
the mediaeval mystic, wrote a great deal about the cross in her book
“Revelations of Divine Love”. The book, the first written by a woman in
English, tells us all that we know about her. It seems that she had been
married, but her husband and children had died. Then she herself fell gravely
ill and for a week hovered on the brink of death. Then she had a series of
visions of Jesus on the cross. She recovered, and spent the rest of her life
meditating on what she had seen. This is part of what she wrote:
From the time that [the vision] was
shown, I desired often to know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years
and more afterward I was answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: 'Would
you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning.
Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For
love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same.
But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.'
The Cross does
not take away suffering. It is not death avoided. It is not a sticking plaster
on our wound. The cross shows us the heart of God’s love, imprinted with the
wounds of our own suffering and sin. And it shows us love victorious, love in
the midst of suffering opening the way to the resurrection and the Kingdom of
Heaven.
The cross stands
at the heart of our faith. We need to forget our familiarity and just stand and
gaze as the cross opens to us depths of love that we could never have imagined
and can never put into words. The cross silences our theories and questions and
explanations and holds us until we know that it reflects back to us both the
truth about ourselves and the greater truth, the mercy, love and hope that God
has made known.
“'Would you know
your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning.”
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