Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 24 - Sunday, October 21, 2018
Isaiah 53:4-12
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
The gospel passage is about the disciples James and John trying for a power grab at a time when Jesus has given clear warning of his fate and the only appropriate attitude for a disciple must be related to that described by the prophet Isaiah, the scenario to which Jesus alludes by saying “Among you, anyone who wants to be great must be your servant, and if anyone among you wishes to be first, they must be the slave of all. For the Human did not come to be served, but to serve and to give himself as a ransom for the community.” These words of Jesus tie him to the description of the Servant of God in the first reading, a description long revered by the community of faith: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases . . . He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole ... By his bruises, we are healed. . . The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all ...
CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD
He was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of the people ... It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain ... When God makes 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 ... The righteous one, God’s servant shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities ...
CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD
Adds the Letter to the Hebrews: Because he poured out himself to death, he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors, offering up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death ... Having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.
It would be appropriate here to cite the remarks of the Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias who calls our attention to the placard over Jesus’ head stating that Jesus was King of the Jews, but in fact describes our transgressions — so many that they must be written in letters so tiny that one must draw very, very close to making it out, so close that one begins to realize:
CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD
It would be important to dwell a bit on the opening sentence of Isaiah’s Servant Song on account of certain niceties in the Hebrew text, for whose understanding I’m indebted to Harvey Guthrie, professor of the Hebrew Bible at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To put it colloquially, the vocabulary and syntax of the verse “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases” gives the verse something like five Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval for verity and reliability. Professor Guthrie comments that even without the introductive affirmative Surely, the verse would be extremely strong in its expression of the unexpected new thing which has taken place.
This Servant Song occurs in the portion of the Book of Isaiah which describes God’s new thing and the role played in it by the conquests of the Persian king Cyrus, but the most exquisite newness of the new thing trumps conquering Cyrus and lies in the Servant’s suffering and death, bringing God’s new thing to its final completion. God’s new thing is finally not “victory” or “conquest,” but the outlasting of all victory and conquest and power by a powerless suffering and dying Servant.
The perennial struggle throughout the Bible between the description of the Servant’s fate and the desire of God’s devotees to use the imagery of kingship and victory and conquest has apparently contributed to a confusion in the text of the concluding two verses of the Song, evident in the footnotes to the Hebrew and in those of the New Revised Standard Version which comprises the lectionary. One can wonder if these final verses haven’t suffered at the hands of the happy-ending tendencies of those who transmitted the text, and of all of us, including James and John who, despite Jesus’ repeated warnings about his fate, clearly belong to the happy-ending segment of the Twelve.
CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD
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