Article
- Date:
- Wednesday 5th April 2023
Year A, Wednesday of Holy Week - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Isaiah 42.1-9
Isaiah 49.1-7
Isaiah 50.4-9
i. Isaiah 42.1-9
When we read the so-called 'Servant Songs' in 2nd Isaiah, particularly in Holy Week, we cannot help but concentrate on the idea that these poetic passages in some way foreshadow the suffering and death of Jesus; but one of the challenges of Isaiah is the way in which the narrator changes and the way in which the object of the narration changes. So just as it might be appropriate to think of the Servant as a foreshadowing of Jesus, there are passages where the "Servant" is specified as Israel and, by extension us and, in today's Reading, Isaiah is clearly talking of himself as the Servant to whom the Lord has been a steadfast protector.
For all its poetic excellence, this section of the Book is not thematically structured so that our three Holy Week Readings begin in despair and end in hope, for today we begin with hope, hope built on the necessary foundation of a Covenant partnership between God and Isaiah.
We have rather lost the language of Covenant. At one extreme, many Christians throughout the ages have tried to draft contracts with God: if we do this, God will do that. In the Middle Ages it was Chantry Masses and indulgences and after the Reformation it was adherence to this sect or that, all with the underlying idea that we could decide the terms of trade with the Almighty. This was part of an obsession in Western Christianity with personal Salvation, based on the question: Lord, what must I do to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the all-encompassing but too often abstract idea of the universality of Love: we all know how to say it but what is it? The answer to those at either end of this spectrum is that our purpose is to fulfil our side of the Covenant where a Covenant is an asymmetrical agreement between parties whereby each does what he is capable of doing: so we, as human beings, cannot in any way hope to love God in an equivalent manner to the way God loves us; we can only love as humans love. This total inequality naturally rules out any idea of a contract with God but it also takes the abstraction out of love. We are here, under the protection or, to put it another way, in the Grace of, God to do what we can.
This may seem like a relatively simple idea; and it is. But the trouble is, we often don't do what we can. We are not, as some moral authoritarians would have it, terrible sinners in the conventional use of the term; but we are chronic omitters, we just don't do what we know we can do and ought to do.
So there was Isaiah pledging himself to yet another Covenant on the eve of Judah's release from the captivity of Babylon; and in this week that we are here to remember, there was Jesus, after another handful of busted Covenants, getting ready to give his life to secure the eternal Covenant of Peace which will never break no matter how hard we try, usually through omission, to break it. He is the Servant with a capital S in this part of Isaiah because he is standing, and suffering, and dying for all the failed servants that have and will fall short of their Covenant obligations to do what they can, the Jesus who lived and suffered and died in solidarity with the broken and suffering that we are.
ii. Isaiah 49.1-7
Today's Reading from Isiah specifies Israel as God's servant and, therefore, by extension, specifies us. The trouble is, in an age of theoretical equality, "servant" isn't our kind of word. So on that basis I want to suggest a slightly different way of looking at the situation.
As I said yesterday, the word we respond to best, if only in an abstract way, is love. But there is one aspect of love, and to me by far the most important, which directly corresponds with the idea of Christian service. Our kind of love, as good, robust active Christians, is the sort where we do things to and for people. That is the easy bit because it expresses an unacknowledged power dynamic: the strong tower over the weak, the worthy minister to the unworthy, the rich dole out pittances to the poor and lovers give things and do things to the beloved. But my kind of love, the difficult sort, the sort that is the same as service, is the love which leaves the lover open to the beloved, in vulnerability and in willingness to adhere to what the beloved wants: no contracts, no conditionality, no judgment about whether what is asked is 'good for' the beloved. This kind of love takes further the aphorism that we should treat others the way we want to be treated ourselves to the idea that we should treat others the way they want to be treated which might not be the way we want to be treated.
This kind of love, what we might call sublimated vulnerability, goes right against our notions of what love is but it represents precisely the kind of love we see in Jesus as he goes to his death; and it is this kind of love that corresponds with Christian service. The thing about service which makes it distinct from the somewhat abstract concept of love is that as a servant you have to do things you don't necessarily want to do: fetch water; sing a song; listen to a monologue. And whereas in love there is an illusion of equality, even in our love relationship with God, there is no such illusion when we are servants. We know our place.
So there's Isaiah laying an obligation on his people to be servants of God and in this week that we are remembering, here is Jesus asking no questions, making no demands after a life characterised by a refusal to judge; here is Jesus laying himself open in ultimate vulnerability to the other, knowing that his unconditional love will be punished by death. That is why it is so difficult to be a servant in the Christian sense: when all the power of good works and wholesome prayer are taken away, the vulnerable servant may find that, for all his love, because of all his love, in terms of earthly regard he is nothing. And if there is a time to contemplate being nothing, that time is now.
iii. Isaiah 50.4-91
Today Isaiah is a teacher and so, by extension, are we which raises the question, as it must, of what are we teaching?
Echoing my remarks on Monday about Covenant behaviour, the situation in which we do our bit, we do what we can, in a practical way, as God's creatures, I think that our teaching is very good on abstract principles but not so good when it comes to practicalities. How do we build community? What does the world demand of us? Is there such a thing as Christian teaching on solidarity, tax and benefits policy and the way to resolve our twin traditions of pacifism and just war theory?
There was a time in the mid-1990s when politicians thought that if you could prevent a massive occurrence of minor social infractions it would have a long term effect on major crime, what was called "Zero Tolerance" policy. I was sceptical but I do now believe, at a Church community level, that the practise of virtue in an infinite number of small ways is a necessary precondition of sound community. And I also think that the way of virtue can be taught as an adjunct to action. This does not only involve some very simple precepts, it also involves learning to understand how we should face moral dilemmas and how we should handle suffering. We are far too apt to talk rather glibly about sin and to bottle up the suffering when they frequently amount to the same thing as we suffer for our wrong decisions, lost opportunities and want of courage.
And, at root, just as most of us have had to involve ourselves in some form of post school learning to do our jobs, we should ask ourselves how often have we involved ourselves in post school Christian learning? How often do we resort to cliches that we acquired at our mother's knee?
The answer, then, to the question of what we are supposed to teach, is that we should keep it simple, not easy but simple. We don't need technical theological language to bring the good news; we don't need fancy manuals to tell us how to be a blessing to our neighbour; and we don't need lengthy sermons to explain to us how we thank God for his goodness.
So here is Isaiah trying to be a teacher, trying to get his people to see that there is a way to live well in spite of earthly setbacks; and here is Jesus teaching us by his example on the final day of his life what he has taught all along, that the power is in the word and the act and not in the status of the teacher, that most teaching is simple if not easy and that, above all, success depends upon persistence not brilliance. We should never be frightened of making fools of ourselves by being active; we're fools anyway.
Overall, across our three Isaiah readings, we can see that practical, Covenant behaviour, based on the vulnerability of the self and on sound teaching, are the means to a life well lived, not that we might achieve salvation because that is entirely outside our competence and solely in the hands of a merciful God but because that was why we were made; Jesus came to save us by being what we should be, content to leave the final reckoning to the Father.