(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on April 9, 2017, Palm Sunday)
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Words Have Great Power
I may have mentioned before that my family loves Mexican food. As a kid, I always looked forward to Friday evenings, because that’s when we’d go out to eat at one of our many favorite Mexican restaurants. El Chapala, Casa Grande, El Paso, Don Pedro III. When my parents moved last year to Powhatan, the first restaurant we dined at together was their fine local Mexican joint, El Cerro Azul.
No one in my family knows a lick of Spanish. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. We’re pretty good now with the conversational Spanish that you’d expect to hear at a restaurant: gracias, de nada, salsa verde, mas agua por favor. We learn these words by experience. For example, when our waiter or waitress would bring out our meal, he or she would always say, “Caliente, caliente—careful, it’s hot!”
My mom, who not long ago taught first grade at Carver Elementary, would occasionally try out her newfound language skills with the students in her class for whom Spanish was their first language. When she said something like gracias or por favor, their ears would perk up and they would smile. Well, one day they were all out on the blacktop for recess. It was late in the school year, the sun was out, and the heat was nearly unbearable. Standing next to one of the Hispanic girls in her class, my mom fanned herself and said, “Soy caliente.”
The look my mom received told her immediately that caliente had connotations that she did not know. Needless to say, she was quick to clarify that the weather was hot.
Words have great power—whether you get them right or wrong. As a teacher, my mom already knew that well. This experience taught her nothing new; it simply confirmed a deep truth.
A Suffering Savior—Who Talks
We see the same truth on display in today’s scripture. Today’s passage comes from a special collection of prophecies in the book of Isaiah. Scholars today often call these prophecies the Suffering Servant songs. They all describe a mysterious character who is simultaneously a sufferer and a savior. According to Isaiah, this suffering servant will save the world: he will be “a light to the nations, so that…salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (49:6).
But just how he will save the world remains a mystery. In the Suffering Servant songs, including today’s passage, this peculiar character only ever suffers. He’s not an underdog character like those wrestlers who get beaten to a pulp only to somehow summon the strength to emerge triumphant. His suffering is not a trick. There’s no card up his sleeve. He suffers to the very end (cf. Isa 53, the final song).
But all the while, he talks. And as we already know, words have great power. In the passage that precedes today’s scripture, the suffering servant proclaims, “[God] made my mouth like a sharp sword” (49:2). And in today’s scripture, he declares, “God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word” (50:4). A mouth like a sharp sword, and tongue that sustains the weary with a word. Words have great power: in the case of this mysterious figure, words are sometimes a “sword” that stings and sometimes a support that “sustains.” One might say that his words afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
How Does a Savior That Suffers Save?
Perhaps by now you have your suspicions about who this mysterious suffering servant is. If so, you’re in good company. Christ-followers have long observed a certain resemblance between this servant and Jesus. Isaiah himself may not have known whom he was prophesying about. But at the very least, he had a holy hunch that salvation would come about in a rather upside-down or backwards manner: not by the power of the hand but by the power of a loving, long-suffering heart. While most of the Israelites saw the world as a playground for foreign empires, with little Israel caught up unhappily in a game of power, Isaiah saw something startlingly different. A world needful not of an all-action hero, but rather quite the opposite.
But even if we identify Isaiah’s mysterious servant with Jesus, the question lingers: how does a servant who only ever suffers save the world? For some folks, it’s all too simple. We are sinful and God demands a payment to counterbalance our sin. Jesus saves us by suffering in our place, by giving this God the only appropriate recompense.
But as we approach the cross this week, I would invite us to reconsider such a belief. Did Jesus come to save us from God? Or did Jesus come to reveal God as a loving, long-suffering savior?
If we affirm that Jesus comes to reveal God as a loving, long-suffering savior, the question still remains: how does a savior that suffers save?
Suffering Because Jesus Said To
I heard about an exchange that took place once between a chaplain and a woman who was concerned for her friend. The woman’s friend was a victim of abuse. Rather than tell you all the details, I’ll let you listen in on their conversation.
“Chaplain, I just don’t know what to tell her. When I ask her to get help, or even to leave her boyfriend, she says she can’t.”
“Why can’t she?” the chaplain asks.
“She says it’s because of Jesus. She forgives him every time because that’s what Jesus says to do. She says she turns the other cheek because that what Jesus says to do. She says that she’s denying herself because that’s what Jesus says to do.”
The chaplain listens with a pained look in his face. Finally he says, “Your friend has a good heart. But to deny yourself, you have to have a self.”
Is the Way of the Cross, the Way of the Doormat?
For a faith that proclaims the greatness of the cross, it is easy to identify the way of Jesus with suffering. It is easy for the way of the cross to become the way of the doormat. Isn’t that what Jesus is saying, when he blesses the downtrodden and preaches unconditional forgiveness and loving your enemies?
Let’s take a closer look at our suffering servant. As we’ve already observed, there is one thing he’s not afraid to use: his mouth. He doesn’t just spout off whatever he wants; he listens closely to God—“morning by morning,” he says, “[I] listen as those who are taught” (50:4)—and he shares what he hears. Whatever he says must be pretty upsetting to some people, because suffering follows. But notice who initiates the suffering: “I gave my back to those who struck me,” the servant says, “and my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard” (50:6).
This is no doormat. Doormats don’t speak out, don’t talk back. Our servant may be downtrodden, but only because he has spoken out, only because he’s actively welcomed the consequences of his word. Our servant has an unbreakable sense of mission; he is always an active agent; even when he suffers, it’s not because others oppress him but because he “sets [his] face like flint” and gives himself to their oppression (cf. 50:7).
The Word of God
For the suffering servant, it all begins when he opens his mouth. It all begins, as he himself says, “with a word” (50:4). We might say the same for Jesus. The gospel of John even goes so far as to call Jesus “the word,” as if to say that his entire life—his body and blood, all that he did and all that was done to him—centers on a word.
At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus comes to the people “with a word” that is as sharp as a sword, double-edged, lifting up the lowly and threatening the self-secure: “The Spirit of the Lord…has anointed me,” he says, “to bring good news to the poor,…release to the imprisoned and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18). Already we can see dark shadows in the distance. “With a word,” Jesus threatens the programs of power in Jerusalem and Rome both, which would prefer to keep its imprisoned in prison, and which relegates to the sidelines all who do not or cannot buy into its game, including the poor and the blind. “With a word,” Jesus welcomes all sorts of outsiders: women, Samaritans, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, prostitutes, little children. “With a word,” Jesus turns his world upside down.
Let it not be said that God or Jesus glorifies suffering. Jesus does not come to suffer. Jesus comes to us with a word. For that word, he will endure the wrath of the powers-that-be, Roman and Jewish alike. Suffering comes as a consequence of the love that he proclaims, a love that challenges the power and privilege that keep some up and others down. Power and privilege will do anything to cross out their enemies, to keep their place.
But rather than fighting back, which would be to abandon the word that he proclaims, the word of love, Jesus welcomes the suffering even at its most bitter. And he welcomes it “with a word”:
“Father, forgive them.”
Where Life Begins
Today, on Palm Sunday, we celebrate Jesus entering Jerusalem as a savior. What will follow this week will show us just how our savior saves. It may surprise us a little bit, even today, even knowing the story already as we do.
Jesus saves us with a word. A word of love. A word of forgiveness. Just simple words. But isn’t that where life begins? A body hears a word, and it trembles. (Or in the case of my mom’s student, a body hears a word, and it quivers with laughter and embarrassment.) That’s the thing about words. They take root in flesh. You might even say that words become flesh.
Jesus saves us with a word. A word that he will say, come what may. A word that he will stop at nothing—not even a cross—to say.
Prayer
Courageous Christ,
Who enters Jerusalem
As you enter
The stronghold of our lives,
With nothing but a word:
Morning by morning,
Waken us
To the beauty
Of your message.
Teach us to live,
To speak,
Like you.
Amen.
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