I understand that
in this passage scholars portray Jesus as the incarnation of Lady Wisdom who
stands on the street corner and calls any ready person to come into her camp. While
that may be so, I conjure up an image of Jesus as a very relaxed man filled
with bubbling-over delight. I can picture him sitting on a rock under the shade
of a tree - just feeling happy. I like paying attention to the human emotions
of Jesus.
If Jesus
represents the mind, heart, and attitude of God, then I want to know and acknowledge
how he feels. I don't think we do that enough. If we were to read the Gospels
with an eye toward understanding what Jesus and the main characters feel, our
intimacy with him would grow much deeper. We would understand his life better
as an historic man. After all, our faith is based on knowing the person of
Jesus of Nazareth as a 100% fully human person. Sadly, our religious education
conflates stories of the four Gospels into one cohesive portrait. It distorts
the way we think of Jesus - because most Christians see him as an omniscient,
all-powerful God stuffed into a human body. Our faith is based on the reality
that he is not a mixture of God and human, but completely, irreducibly human -
just like you and me.
Jesus pauses in
the midst of his public ministry. He takes a break from the most meaningful
work there is on earth. (Therefore we can take a break once in a while.) He
give thanks to his Creating God for what God is actively doing in his life. He
cherishes those who have been given to him and acknowledges that everything is
handed over to him by God. It is a mutual delighting in one another. It is a
passage I like to linger over.
However, I do not
like to linger over Isaiah's passage. I don't like hearing about the Lord's
anger and destruction towards other nations. Arrogant Assyria is judged harshly
for she has oppressed her people and is a godless nation. Assyria is held up as
a warning to Israel. God will punish whole nations for their disobedience for a
covenantal break. Ouch! ~ However, the Psalmist reassures us that the Lord will
not abandon his people, but I can't help but remember that God permits
suffering.
Can you imagine the
countless cries of suffering the walls of this room have absorbed over the
years? Some of the tragedies of life seem senseless and purposeless. We've been
victims of other peoples' malice that springs from their unmet needs. Formation
within our families has produced indelible reservoirs of toxic shame. Abuse
from trusted people and institutions have taught us to withhold our generosity
and trust. We learn to protect our true selves so much that we no longer
recognize our real identity. Year after year, deaths and losses mount and weigh
us down. Each of us fragilely suffer - mostly silently. When we speak of it, we
delicately bring it before one another on a superficial level.
When I hear Jesus
speaking about the revealing to those who are childlike, I almost always think
of my older sister, the first-born of seven. In an adult body, her mind and
soul were innocent and simple. My sister was born with profound mental
retardation through negligence of a doctor in 1956 who filled in for my
mother's regular obstetrician. Her life was dotted with many happy moments, but
the last years of life were marked by suffering in a most excruciating way
possible with no relief except death.
My sister's illness taught me to look squarely into the face of suffering long
and hard. The last seven years of her life found her muscles atrophied and
constricted where she could no longer swallow or be fed, where pain wouldn't
let her sleep, when her voice could not express meaningful words, and with eyes
catatonic. Her pain was so great nurses and doctors wanted her discharged because
her moaning frightened them and other patients. All we could do was to hold her
and caress her to let her know we were around and to stare into those eyes that
infrequently recognized us. I was free enough to get angry with God in prayer
and scream because no god ought to allow this sort of suffering. Seven long years
of suffering after a harsh life and Jesus only spent 3 hours on the cross. I
pleaded until I was spent. I let God know of many strong feelings.
Astonishingly, it was by peering into her suffering eyes that I found Jesus
hanging on the Cross broken-hearted, sobbing, weeping for my sister. His
outstretched arms and broken body were much like hers, except that they could
hold her soul in ways no human could. By gazing into this void of silence and
aloneness, I met a vulnerable Christ whose compassion places himself at risk. Jesus
becomes vulnerable because both suffering and love fundamentally changes a
person. Love and suffering are twins. They turn us very intimately toward the
other. I met a God who hurts when we suffer and whose paradoxical greatest
moment of love, that is, the Cross, gives meaning to life and suffering.
Suffering, with its tendency to isolate, can also heighten our sensitivity to
others' suffering.
We have a fundamental decision to make about our suffering. Jesus cannot avoid
the Cross; we can't look away from it. We can try to avoid it and think of our
pain as distractions in prayer or we can figure out how to accept it and enter
into it. We just can't escape it. It is painful and unpleasant and we do not
want to recall awful memories because their sting is too great, but accepting
the cross means that we have to do just that. Memories are to be transformed.
It is the reason we prayer the Suscipe: Take Lord, Receive...
Jesus sits under that tree and tells us of his great desire to reveal God's
love to us. We want that and yet we know love and suffering cannot be
separated. He wants to hold our suffering in his heart. He is reaching out to
us to give us God's promise to be with us - even in our worst suffering. He
knows it is awful to look at our suffering alone; He does not advise it because
he had to go it alone. He went to his death, according to Mark and Paul,
believing that his Abba Father failed to show up. Because
Jesus is alive to us, we can look at our suffering with him who is bringing it
forward in our consciousness. He is asking us to look at our memories with him with
his characteristic compassion because he wants to reveal to us something new.
God knows it will hurt us, but Jesus is doing it so we can have relief. He
wants to bring meaning to our suffering and to give us new freedom. Jesus will
reveal his cross to you. You must decide how you will respond to it.
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