+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I read a commentary on Isaiah that had the following to say about today’s Old Testament lesson: These verses have been the inspiration for some of the greatest sermons ever written. These are not comforting words for a preacher, and needless to say, this will not be one of the greatest sermons ever written.
It is exceedingly hard to know how to approach the prophet Isaiah’s words, as they summarize more poignantly the whole mystery of our redemption than perhaps any other passage in the Old Testament. Maybe these words benefit from Handel setting them to magnificent music, but it is hard to see how they would benefit from me opining about them for five to seven minutes.
Perhaps a little history will help, though, or I should say a little historiography, which is the history of how history itself has been interpreted.
Over the course of centuries, people have sometimes tended to hold what is called a “deuteronomic view of history”, so-called because the writer of Deuteronomy, who probably also wrote Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, seemed to hold something like this view. Such a view generally holds that there is a neat correlation between good and evil acts, and divine reward and punishment. Do nice things and God will be nice to you; do bad things and God will do bad things to you. This is a helpful way to interpret history if you’re doing well, but no so much if you yourself are suffering. Indeed, the assumption that this is how history unfolds has led far too many people to utter the popular lament “what have I done to deserve this?” and to really believe that they must have done something horrible, even if they didn’t.
By the time we get to the 6th Century before Christ, when today’s Old Testament lesson was written, such a view of history was found to be lacking. The Jews had been taken by King Nebuchadnezzar into exile in Babylon, leaving only the poorest to live in the wreckage of Jerusalem. Deporting and scattering the leading citizens of defeated nations was a standard tactic in those days, and usually the deportees didn’t have that hard a time of it in their new location. The people were not enslaved, nor were they subject to forced military conscription; they were simply removed to a more neutral location so as not to incite rebellion in their homeland. Thus, the tactic had not caused so much pain and grief to deportees from other peoples defeated by the Babylonians and Assyrians and other major empires of the day that they resorted to rebellion. The majority simply integrated into their new homeland under the Empire.
But this was not so for the Jews, for the land had not merely been a useful means of security and livelihood for them. The Jews believed that the land was a gift from God. So to have that gift revoked, would have made a number of people believe that they must have done something awful indeed to deserve it.
The God-given, inspired insight of the prophet was that this is not how the judgment of God works. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” he says, “we have turned everyone to his own way.” But God is not in the business of meting out particular punishments for particular sins in easily accountable ways. Rather it is “the man of sorrows” God-incarnate Christ himself, who was “despised and rejected of men” who “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”. Christ, we are told “bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
This does not mean that everything is peachy under the sun. Suffering is indeed ubiquitous because of our condition, because we still sadly live in a sin-sick world. It is not my particular sin which causes me to suffer, nor your particular trespass that causes you to experience a world of pain, but we encounter the dreadful reality nonetheless.
There is indeed much suffering in the world, and many have suffered in ways that I cannot imagine. Many suffer, not because they did anything to deserve it, not because God is punishing them, but because of the reality of original sin. Even so, there is exceedingly good news in the sacrifice of the suffering servant; there is remarkable hope thanks to our Lord, the man of sorrow. For we can be assured that the pain we may come to experience in this life is not a punishment, and that even the most intense sorrow is fleeting when seen in the context of eternity.
We are given the promise not only of eternal life, but of new life. “The righteous one,” Isaiah says, “my servant, shall make many righteous.” We are not only assured salvation, but given a means of achieving saintliness. We too may come to experience suffering, but thanks be to God, that we, like Christ, can offer up both our pain and our pleasure, both our sorrow and our joy, to become ourselves servants of the Gospel. As the hymnwriter, John Bowring put it, “Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, by the cross are sanctified; peace is there that knows no measure, joys that through all time abide.” May we then all come to appreciate our own lives, our own joys and sorrows, not as rewards and punishments, neither as meaningless phenomena, but as realities which can find purpose and meaning in the light of the cross.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.