Good Friday

Every year on Good Friday, we hear the fourth Servant Song of Isaiah (52:13-52:12) and the passion narrative from Saint John’s Gospel. In this “homily blog” I have chosen to reflect on Isaiah’s four servant songs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of Holy Week -- and today. It is impossible to say everything that should be said. As Saint John wrote,

There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written!

So we go to the spring of life giving water each day and drink our fill, confident the stream will flow as generously on the morrow.

Today’s Servant Song sounds like a eulogy. The fellow has died and the preacher realizes too late there was something mysteriously holy about him.

But he was a pariah, one who is despised and avoided. His appearance was marred. You might remember a few months ago when the media had a field day with a woman who had a face transplant after she was attacked by a dog. She was not the first to have this procedure but she was the first in America, and bold enough to make a public appearance.

It was hard to look at her. Perhaps you wondered as I did, “How would I cope with looking like that? Would I be willing to go out in public? Or be seen by friends? Would I even want to live?”

NPR ran an interview that week with a gentleman born with facial deformity. He has made it his mission to speak to groups of people, especially school children, encouraging them to be aware of strange looking people and treat them courteously. He said the children invariably get over their initial shock when he enters the classroom. They warm to him as he tells funny stories about himself, and they recognize the humanity they share with him.

But the servant in Isaiah’s eulogy apparently remained a despised outcast. Perhaps his people had religious beliefs about his condition they could not and would not set aside. They apparently treated him as a scapegoat who mysteriously bore their sins:

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,

our sufferings that he endured,

while we thought of him as stricken,

as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,

crushed for our sins;

Some anthropologists have remarked upon the similarities between human sacrifice and capital punishment. Although this American custom is practiced with little or no reference to God, many seem to believe the killing of criminals will deliver us from evil, as King David says in the 101^st psalm:

Morning by morning I will destroy
   all the wicked in the land,
cutting off all evildoers
   from the city of the Lord.

This purging from sin is a sacred act, carried out with solemn rituals. Members of the media and the victim’s family are invited to watch, hoping they will experience vindication for their grievances and closure to their ordeal. If the courts fail to convict the criminal, or if he is given a sentence lighter than death, we might feel responsible and guilty for allowing such wickedness to live among us. Or we might have to discover the familial, religious, economic and social roots of his malice. We might discover that he is not untypical of his nation. He is, in fact, one of our own children.
Because execution is a religious act, its failure to warn the wicked, purge the evil, vindicate our innocence or bring closure to our suffering is virtually ignored. As Mark Twain said of religion, “Faith is believing what you know ain't true.”

However, the eulogist in Isaiah 52 saw something unexpected in the pariah’s death:

Though he was harshly treated, he submitted

and opened not his mouth;

like a lamb led to the slaughter

or a sheep before the shearers,

he was silent and opened not his mouth.

And

a grave was assigned him among the wicked

and a burial place with evildoers,

though he had done no wrong

nor spoken any falsehood.

Finally he realizes something unexpected:

because he surrendered himself to death

and was counted among the wicked;

and he shall take away the sins of many,

and win pardon for their offenses.

The pariah has become a servant/messiah/savior not because of his guilt but because he was utterly innocent and went to death like a lamb led to slaughter. His death is not a human sacrifice offered by a vindictive society; but his willingness to surrender to God as a servant is an acceptable sacrifice. 

Jesus and his evangelists read and understood this mysterious song. Jesus knew it because he found his vocation in it; the evangelists, because it explained the horror of Good Friday and the victory of Easter Sunday. We hear it on this Good Friday with sadness, gratitude and hope. And we join with Jesus to offer his life to God, an acceptable sacrifice.