Something
to Hold Onto
Isaiah 50:4-9a
© copyright 2013 Robert J. Elder
Sunday, March 24, 2013
It is the Lord GOD who helps me;
who will declare me guilty?
Every
time I hear this line from Isaiah, I think of several things. The first, of
course, is that these are words of an innocent man. Secondly, I also see Jesus,
having recently made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, hanging on the cross,
also an innocent man, holding onto the Lord God with an innocence that no one
in the mob that day seemed to recognize. And then I hear in my mind the words
of Paul in Romans 8, uttered at so many services held at the time of death:
“Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.”[1]
Palm Sunday and Easter are so very different,
separated by a wide week of suffering and death. The difference between Palm
Sunday and Easter is something like the little boy who had a ticket to the
circus, who went into town and saw the great parade of wagons, clowns and
exotic animals, and then went home because he thought that having seen the
parade, he had seen the circus. We know this isn’t so. And if we think about it
at all, we know Palm Sunday is not a little Easter. In some churches where folks
receive palms to wave, they fold them into litte crosses. This is where Palm
Sunday is headed, toward the cross.
The justification of God, given to us, free of charge
in Christ, that is something we can hold onto.
Why is this so? The apostle Paul had an answer to
that question. He said that though Jesus was in the form of God, he set that
aside in order to empty himself, take the form of a slave, and be born as a
human being. He said Jesus became the sort of servant for whom a call to face
death was not regarded as too great a task for one seeking to be faithful.
What does it mean to be a slave or a servant – they
are the same word in the original language – what does it mean to be a slave or
servant who is willing to be obedient even to death? Few of us would have any
idea. The “Suffering Servant”[2]
depicted bythe prophet Isaiah is the prime Old Testament witness to a calling
to pursue freedom through servanthood. And as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, he was preparing to perform the greatest service ever done for
humanity.
Hearing the
Word of God
Speaking the words of God’s suffering servant, Isaiah
said, “Morning by morning he wakens – wakens my ear to listen as those who are
taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious...” Have you
ever thought about the need for our ears to be “wakened”? I have often been
asked by friends and family, on workcamps, retreats, and vacations, how I can
sleep through my own snoring. It’s easy for me, I say, my ears are asleep along
with the rest of me! What a great image Isaiah uses for preparing to hear the
Word God has to say to us: that God wakens our ears to hear. Before telling,
God makes us ready to hear. We may think our ears work fine already, but reflect
on how often our pre-set opinions can block out a new thing, especially a new
thing God would have us hear. We are so accustomed to listening for what we
already think that a new word might well pass us by, it’s just not familiar
enough.
Remember the old story about the man with beans in
his ears. His friend tells him, “You’ve got beans in your ears,” but he
responds, “What?” So his friend repeats his words a little more loudly, “I
said, you’ve got beans in your ears.” But the man responds again, “What?” So
the friends shouts now, “YOU’VE GOT BEANS
IN YOUR EARS!” and the man responds, “Sorry, I can’t hear you, you see,
I’ve got these beans in my ears...” It’s a silly story that points out two
things: our need to hear, but also that often the very thing we need to hear is
something we already know. Like an old commercial for corn flakes that urged us
to taste them again for the first time, many times the words of our faith are
something we need to hear again for the first time.
I once got a letter from a young friend of mine who
is a pastor. He was preaching his way through the lectionary, the three year
cycle of scripture that many of us use to organize our preaching. By the time
he reached his seventh year of ministry, he had been through the readings twice
before. He wrote to ask what I thought he should do. This was going to be his
third time through the same readings. His question made me think, “How many
times have I heard the parable of the prodigal Son? How often have I been
instructed by the incomparable words of the Sermon on the Mount? How important
is it to remind ourselves of the truth of John 3:16, that God loved the world
enough to send a savior to us?” I think I remember writing to him something
like, “The difference between hearing and hearing again is not as great as you might think. Those very same
worshipers have heard most of those Bible passages many times, long before you
began reading them with them.” When God opens our ears, as Isaiah said, it may
not be something entirely new that we are to hear, but something familiar that
strikes us in a new way this time around.
One of the significant aspects of discipleship
involves hearing the Word of God, even if, as in the traumatic events of Holy
Week, that Word seems destined to shake us up.
Doing the
Word of God
You may recall that the letter of James is the one
that declares that “faith without works” is just about as good as no faith at
all. One of the jokes that perpetually makes the rounds in churches depicts a
person dying and finding himself in hell. He looks around and sees Martin
Luther and John Calvin standing nearby. He is deeply troubled. His own life was
not that exemplary, but how can these two great figures of the Protestant
Reformation have found themselves on the wrong side of the Pearly Gates? So he
asks them. Calvin responds, “I’m afraid it’s some bad news, really. Apparently
works do matter.”
That story may seriously overstate the case for the
importance of the doing of the Word
of God, but it highlights the fact that coming to church, hearing about the
content of our faith is only part of the disciple’s task. It is good to know
the content of the truth about salvation. But knowing the work of salvation rightly leads to doing the work of salvation. Isaiah wrote words concerning the work
of discipleship which line up so readily with our anticipation of the events of
Holy Week: “I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put
to shame.” Jesus set his face like flint – to give his life away.” Jesus has
been described in many ways, but one appealing way is as “a man for others.”
How does that square up with a descriptive phrase like, “I have set my face
like flint”? It means that his course to the cross, though made in humility,
was undeterred. He was a self-emptying servant who taught and lived the truth
that greatness comes only in service, that true greatness resides in those who
give of themselves without thought of return.
In one of his books, concentration-camp survivor Elie
Wiesel recalled the day when he, still merely a teenager, along with his fellow
inmates, was finally liberated from the Auschwitz death camp by allied
soldiers. On that day, powerful, strong men broke down the hated fences of the
camp, and released the emaciated prisoners. Wiesel remembers being struck by
the reaction of one African-American soldier who, upon seeing Wiesel and his
fellow prisoners, was overcome with grief. He fell to his knees, sobbing at the
sight of them. At this, the newly-released prisoners walked to him, put their
thin, starved arms around his burly shoulders, and comforted him.
I have seen people have such reactions to Michaelangelo’s
statue of the Pietá in Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome, the statue of Mary,
holding her dead son in her arms. They weep at the sight of the dead Jesus, and
yet, at the end of the long, horror-filled week, it is Jesus who puts his
bloodied arms around us, to comfort and restore us.
Doing the Word of God involves an attitude of
self-giving service which itself is an unequaled gift of God to those who would
follow Christ.
This
coming week represents the church’s annual celebration of the greatness of the
gift of Christ to the world. The tragedy of it is that many will not hear. On
Good Friday evening, when we worship here together and recall the cost of the
servanthood of Jesus, there will be but a handful of us present compared to
those on the bandwagon on Easter morning. It is so hard to fully comprehend and
live the life of resurrection – to receive the embrace of the crucified and
resurrected Christ – unless we have first heard the truth about the cost of
salvation.
If
you are planning to come to only one service this coming week, I would pray it
would be on Friday, and if you can come to but two, make it Maundy Thursday and
Good Friday. I will pray for you in your knowing
and doing God’s Word this week, as I
hope you will pray for me, so that we may come to know that the faith we hold
onto, in reality holds onto us.
Copyright © 2013 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserve
