Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases

Isaiah 53:4-12 (NRSV)
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Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
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But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
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All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
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He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
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Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days;
through him the will of the LORD shall prosper.
Out of his anguish he shall see light;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out himself to death,
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
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The Suffering Servant
A sermon preached at North Prospect Union UCC, Medford, MA
Date: October 18, 2009 Rev. Dudley C. Rose
Scripture: Isaiah 53:4–12
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They say that a little knowledge is
a dangerous thing, and they are right. Let me tell you a story.
Almost 30 years ago this fall, 29 to be exact, I entered divinity school to prepare for the
ministry. In my first term I took the Introduction to the Old Testament course. The pace was
breathtaking—three months from Genesis to Malachai, from Adam and Eve to the rise and fall of
David’s empire and more. When classes ended near Christmas time, visions of patriarchs,
matriarchs and prophets were dancing in my head, a grand array of sugarplums of information.
So, I was not in the least disappointed when my home church minister asked if I wanted
to preach the Sunday after Christmas. For her it was an opportunity to get out of town. For me it
was a chance show off my newly acquired Biblical knowledge. With a pace that made the
divinity school course seem leisurely, in 20 minutes we covered the whole swath of ancient
Israel’s history. We flew though Abraham and Sarah; Joseph, Moses and Pharaoh. Joshua,
Judges and the monarchs each got a few seconds, until we screeched across the finish line with
Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Nehemiah.
Though we had raced through a lot of material, I made sure to lay out the grand logic of
the story as we went along. Israel came into the Promised Land. They did well for awhile, but
then the kings and the people started to get corrupt. Israel once again fell for idols. She failed to
protect the orphan and the widow. She was just bad, bad, bad. And so God, who had given them
plenty of warning, finally lowered the boom. First came the armies of Assyria, which lopped off
the northern kingdom. Still the people did not change. A century and a quarter later Babylon
finished the job. They destroyed the sacred temple and carried the people of Judah off into
Exile. Ancient Israel’s enemies were God’s instruments to punish the rebellious chosen people.
I said, Amen. We sang the final hymn. Then came the greeting in the narthex. Old
friends and family were impressed with my newly acquired knowledge, and they said many kind
things. As I was basking in the warmth of it all, a man came through the line and approached
me. “That was very interesting,” he said. “It helps me make sense of the holocaust. I see what
God must have been up to.”
My jaw nearly dropped. Let me be clear. It didn’t drop because I thought this man was
an idiot or a bigot. I don’t even know if he said what he said to force me to realize the logical
extension of my own words. In either case, my jaw dropped because, based on what I had just
preached, his stated conclusion was completely warranted. If Assyria and Babylon were God’s
instruments to destroy the Jews in Biblical times, why could not Germany be God’s instrument
in the 20 th century The logic was unassailable, the conclusion unpalatable. Never had I so
poignantly experienced the danger of my own little knowledge. And never have I been more
aware of the responsibility entrusted to the preacher. I left the church scorched by the peril of
my first sermon at home. You recall that Jesus in Luke nearly gets run off the cliff because he
preached the truth in his first sermon at home. I was congratulated for preaching a lie, and I
wondered if maybe I should jump off a cliff.
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Well, many years and much study have passed since that tormenting moment, but it
continues to echo in my mind. I hope, and I think, that it echoes there not just because I am still
wounded by my early failure, though I admit that’s a possibility. But I think it echoes there still
because the message of that sermon, as horrifying as it was, was indeed possible to find in the
Biblical text. The story I told is the story Israel told herself to explain her crushing defeats and
deportations. And it is a story that seems natural for us human beings.
Frederick Buechner says in his little book Wishful Thinking that even our theology of
heaven and hell betray our hope that somewhere someone is keeping score, that the good and bad
things that happen happen because they make sense, because both the good and the bad things
are just and deserved.
The story of Job is a good example of the depth of the story’s roots in human thinking.
Job loses everything, ironically because of a bet between God and Satan. Job is flabbergasted.
He has been completely upright. Even God says so. But because he is suffering his friends
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are sure Job has done something to deserve it. The more Job
protests, the more certain they are. Over chapter upon chapter Job’s friends try to get him to
admit his wrongdoing and repent. Like Job’s friends I suppose that most of us would like the
cosmic arithmetic to add up. Much of our talk about God persists to insist that it does add up.
We want to believe that if you work hard, stay out of trouble and do unto others as you would
have them do unto you, everything will workout just fine. But we also cannot help but see the
danger in it. We know that Job did those things. We know that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar
were wrong. And surely we know that the Nazi Third Reich was, too. A reliable mathematics of
the causes of deserved suffering eludes us.
But, of course, once we lose the reliability of the math, we are plunged into one of the
most intractable of all theological conundrums. Why do bad things happen to good people If
the Jews didn’t deserve the holocaust, which they most surely didn’t, why did it happen Or as it
is sometimes stated, why did God let it happen
Let me be honest with you. At least phrased in the latter way, why does God allow
suffering, I don’t think there is a satisfactory answer. This was the question that Job posed, and
God answered, basically, “Hey Job, you weren’t here when I made creation. What do you
know” It’s not an answer, really, but it’s probably the best we can do. As frustrating as it is to
say it, we just don’t know.
But we human beings don’t give up on the math that easily. And that leads us, to the
heart of this morning’s passage from Isaiah, a passage about the suffering servant. It would be
hard to miss the similarity between Isaiah’s suffering servant and Jesus. “He was wounded for
our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities,” Isaiah says. The suffering servant didn’t deserve
to suffer. On the other we are guilty of transgressions and iniquity. So, the logic goes, God
caused the suffering servant to suffer in our stead, to take on our sins. So, the logic further goes,
when there is transgression and iniquity, God demands that somebody pay up. Thank God, the
logic goes, God accepts a substitute for us, and we get off Scott-free. Grace, we call it. We get
better than we deserve. The suffering servant gets worse than he deserves. It all comes out in
the wash. As you know, such a theorem undergirds perhaps the most popular version of
Christian salvation. Jesus suffers on our behalf, and we are saved from our sins.
I’m not sure this is much of an advance. If we go back to the aftermath of my first
sermon at home, I might have said, “Well, no, the Jews in Germany and Poland didn’t deserve
the gas chambers, but somebody did (maybe it was even the Germans who deserved it), but God
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let the Jews pay the price in their place.” I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find that a very
satisfactory solution, either.
Every time we try to give an explanation to why God causes suffering we are going to
end up in just such a perverted place. And maybe that ought to convince us that we are asking
the wrong question, the wrong question of God, and the wrong question of the Bible. For, if we
look carefully, the Bible, as God’s revelation, often cuts against the grain of our knee-jerk
reading of it. Often we don’t see it because we read into the Bible what we expect to find.
We too readily assume that accounts of the suffering servant, or Jesus’ death are just
special cases of deserved suffering. Sometimes we assume it so much that those are the answers
we read the text to find, and we fail to see that this amazing piece of poetry is answering a
different question altogether. God simply doesn’t answer why he causes or allows suffering.
That may be pretty frustrating, but God just doesn’t answer those questions.
But God does answer the question of what he tries to make out of the suffering,
especially when it is we human beings who cause it. People caused the holocaust. People
crucified Jesus. And people struck and afflicted and bruised the suffering servant in this
morning’s passage. There was transgression to spare. That part we get right. But the
transgressions are to be found in these very actions against the innocents—the Jews, the
suffering servant, and Jesus himself. Human sinfulness, human fallenness is the human
condition, but it manifests itself very often in actions that cause suffering to those who are the
most innocent.
There are many reasons we do it. Sometimes it’s lust for power. Sometimes it’s fear.
Sometimes it’s insecurity. Sometimes it’s to distract us from our real problems. Sometimes it’s
to blame others for our problems. Interestingly, though, when we perpetrate suffering mostly our
truest reasons are hidden from our sight. Germany blamed the Jews, among others, for her post
World War I problems. Both Pilate and Caiaphas saw Jesus as a threat to peace and stability.
Neither Germany nor Jerusalem said, “Let’s kill some innocents.” That’s what they did. We can
argue that they should have seen it for what it was. But the fact is that they deluded themselves
into seeing a perversion as perfectly reasonable. And we should be cautious in saying how much
they missed the obvious, for we may well be missing such obvious things here and now. The
moral of this story may be how hidden from us are the obvious things we miss.
And that’s where God comes into the story. God’s heart is in a state of perpetual
brokenness for the anguish that we cause. God weeps day and night for the pain we suffer and
the pain we cause. And when God can, he takes that pain and suffering and tries to expose it to
us for what it is, tries to un-cloud our vision, tries to undermine our obscuring logic.
Isaiah’s suffering servant is one of the clearest examples of God’s attempt to illuminate
our situation. The fact that we most easily read the story as how God made the servant suffer in
our place shows just how persistent is the veil on our eyes. The suffering servant is not a story
about God punishing an innocent other in our stead. It is a story about how God shows us the
death and destruction we cause, and then it is a story about how God redeems it, turns it into life.
As a sidebar here let me be clear. Redemptive suffering has gotten a very bad reputation,
and it is absolutely well-deserved. The suffering we are talking about is not caused by God. It is
caused by people. And the redemption isn’t in saying that the suffering is something good to
have happened. The suffering we cause is bad, period. What good thing God does, the
redemption God works, if you will, is to shine a light on how we cause the suffering, to unveil of
deluded sight, and also to say that the suffering is not the end of the story. Out of death, God
will create life.
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In the Christian version of this story God redeems us sinners through a very interesting
means. We remember the unwarranted death of Jesus every time we celebrate communion. As
the theologian Mark Heim notes, in taking communion the earliest Christians remembered that at
Jesus’ death those closest to him played the roles of betrayer, deserter and denier. Communion,
then, serves a double purpose. It illumines our capacity for murdering the innocent, and at the
same time it replaces that very act in our history with a shared meal, an alternative way of being
together.
“When Christians gather at communion, they encounter the unequivocal reminder of
Christ’s bloody death. They are faced with the fact that victims have real flesh and blood. [But]
when we hear, ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ we should hear” 1 do this, this meal together,
instead of that bloody thing. Do this in remembrance of me. When we do this, we are freed tell
better and truer stories of God than the one I told my home church 29 years ago. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
1 Heim, 235
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