Good Friday (
Isaiah 52:12 – 53:13
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church,
Pr. George L. Murphy
TAKING OUT THE TRASH
Is this a success story or a tale of utter failure? “See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.” It sounds like success. Whoever this “servant” is, he seems to have done quite well. He’s made it to the top.
But maybe the prophet started this way so we’d keep reading. We don’t like failures. As we go on, it doesn’t sound like success or prosperity. “So marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance.” “He had no form or majesty” - there was nothing desirable, nothing attractive, about him. We don’t want to want look. It’s like a person with some horrible disfigurement that we try to avoid. What would we say to him? It’s better to leave him alone.
The servant sounds like a loser, a failure. He’s been defeated. And usually in this world you get what deserve. If you fail it’s because you weren’t tough enough – didn’t have enough ambition, enough smarts, enough drive. Maybe he got what was coming, maybe not. But either way, he just failed. And it isn’t a pretty sight. No wonder he’s “despised and rejected.” Put him out of sight, the way we used to do with debtors or people with mental problems not so long ago. Then we won’t have to see him or deal with him.
I know what you’re all thinking now. “Of course he’s a success. We know how this turns out. It has a happy ending.” But not so fast. It is a story about failure, but it’s worse than you thought. The failure is ours. “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.” We’re the ones who have failed, and this servant has to take consequences.
“Me, a failure? How can you say that?” Well. you say it easily enough every Sunday: “We have not loved [God] with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” We admit our failure - if we say that seriously and don’t just rattle it off by rote. We have failed to stay where we belong, in touch with our creator. Instead, we wandered off. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Of course sheep aren’t too bright. They don’t know what’s good for them. And that’s part of the problem.
But why does Jesus – for he is the servant – need to suffer and die for that? Why can’t God just forgive our sin, our failure to love God and our neighbor? Maybe God could do that if it were just a matter of bookkeeping. We’d like that –“All have won and all shall have prizes.”
The shepherd can just forgive the wandering sheep but how will that bring them back to the fold? They’ll still be lost out in the woods and ravines with night coming on and the wolves howling. Forgiving students who’ve flunked algebra won’t help them to understand algebra. And if people live in filth and squalor and the place stinks, a bare declaration of forgiveness won’t clean them up. Somebody has to take out the garbage. Somebody has to take out our garbage.
“The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” That “iniquity” is not an abstraction. All the smelly garbage that you and I and the whole human race have piled up with our failures to love God and our unwillingness to love our neighbor has to be hauled away. And we are unable to shoulder load. St. Anselm said it a thousand years ago – “You have not yet considered the weight of sin.” You or I can’t bear that weight of sin. It’s more than our individual failings, serious as they are, but is the sum of all the willful ignorance, the idolatry, the petty hates and the atrocities of humanity. To remove it is a task for God Incarnate. God in human flesh can take out the human trash.
But why did Christ have to suffer and die? How does that solve the problem, forgive sins, reconcile us to God, bring about new creation? Those are legitimate questions and theologians have discussed and debated them. Several “theories of the atonement” have been proposed – and the church has never said definitively, “This is the right answer. Here’s how it works.” “How?” is a second order question. The first order claim is that “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate: he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again”.
You don’t have to answer the “How?” question to believe that it works. You may not know exactly how that hydraulic lift on the garbage truck works but it loads the garbage. And that kind of puzzling phrase in the Apostles’ Creed, “He descended into hell” – maybe that’s where he dumps the trash, in a place where no human being belongs.
We have trouble grasping this reality because we still have loads of trash in our lives. We still hold on to them, maybe thinking, “I can take care of it myself,” or “I’m not worthy of God’s care,” or “My sin is to great to be forgiven.” And that’s all part of the load of garbage, our refusal to trust God fully. Let go of it and let God’s servant take it away. He wasn’t wounded for eighty percent of our transgressions. It doesn’t say that by his bruises we are mostly healed. It’s a hundred percent. “The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Christ bears the load of our sins – bears it away and gets rid of it. That’s real forgiveness, and thus really new creation. As Luther says, “Where there is the forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.”
In this task of taking out the trash Jesus is a complete success. Becoming “the likeness of sinful flesh,” he takes on our failure and takes it away. We know that he succeeds in that cleansing task because of the closing verses of this song about the servant – verses that in one German lectionary are appointed for Easter. Good Friday and Easter are all one work. But we also heard at the very beginning, “See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up” - lifted on the cross, raised on Easter, exalted to the right hand of power. “And I,” he said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”