In the name of the One whose love is making all things well – Jesus Christ. Amen.
Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” So writes St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. That verse is guiding us through these three holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Last night, we considered how love bears all things and today we see how love endures all things.
The particular word that St. Paul chooses does, indeed, mean “endure” and has a strong connotation of resilience and steadfastness. It’s a word that conveys a sense of remaining and standing firm beyond what would usually be expected. We have all experienced that there are two types of endurance. There’s the sort that we’re forced into and in which we have no control – waiting to see if we will respond well to a medicine, waiting to hear back about how the interview went, waiting for civility to return to our political life. And then there’s the more active version of endurance, where we willingly choose to stay in a tough situation instead of walking away such as deciding to go to therapy to rebuild a relationship, deciding to continue pursuing your degree even though it’s a challenge, deciding to continue working the steps of recovery. As we know from that well-known “love passage” in First Corinthians, “Love never ends.” Love endures much on Good Friday, and this love that is making all things well does not stop.
It is this second sort of enduring love that we see on Good Friday – a love that is grander than evolution requires, a love that defies explanation, a love that is more beautiful than the cross is ugly. This enduring love is what the prophet Isaiah describes in what is often called a “Servant Song” – “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed… He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth… By a perversion of justice he was taken away… He was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.”
Particularly on Good Friday, we must be careful about how we read this text given our long and sad history of anti-Semitism. Isaiah was not writing a prediction of an event that would happen 500 years later. Such a reading is a misappropriation of the sacred urgency of God’s words to Isaiah. Instead of reading Isaiah as a prediction of the crucifixion, we can allow Isaiah to help us interpret the Cross. St. Paul refers to the cross a “foolishness.” And it is – having the cross as our central image and our sign of hope is preposterous and absurd. We need Isaiah’s help in understanding what it means to say that this gruesome and violent death is “for us and for our salvation.”
In this passage, notice the strength of the verbs: borne our infirmities, carried our diseases, stricken, struck down, afflicted, wounded, crushed, oppressed, afflicted, cut off. We can see why “love endures all things” is such a fitting description of this. These are heavy words, any one of which would break most of us. Isaiah’s image of the Servant though, which Jesus embodies on the Cross, withstands all of it.
Many scholars note that this is the sort of language used for the asham in Judaism – the reparation or guilt offering. While we are tempted by chronological snobbery to say, “They used to think justice was achieved through ritualistic sacrifices, but we’ve evolved to be more civilized” this is, demonstrably, not the case. At least their sense of justice had boundaries and limits. Our sense of justice, which more often than not resembles vengeance, is more incomplete and twisted than those we look down upon.
The people of Isaiah’s time had a very clear sense of justice and reparation, whereas even the word “reconciliation” or “reparation” ignites predictable and tired debates and accusations among us. At least the Jewish people of Isaiah’s time understood the very simple fact that when something is broken, it has to be named and addressed. And this is what the guilt offering was all about. In John, the connection of the Passover to the death of Jesus is clear, and this is why the Church has so often looked to Isaiah 53 as a way of understanding the death of Jesus.
Justice was conceived of in relational terms. If a wrong had been committed, a boundary transgressed, or a law broken, it needed more than a “don’t worry about it;” it needed to be set right. Just as the transgression is real and experienced in time, so does the restoration need to be defined and tangible. Perhaps because, as a culture, we’re so bad a ritualizing apologies and forgiveness, we’re so bad at reconciliation.
Understood through the Hebraic mind, sin had to be dealt with, not ignored. As a demonstration of God’s forgiveness and forbearance, a lamb, or other animal, could endure the consequences of that sin and be sacrificed. Again, lest we look down on this practice, the people were going to eat the meat from the animal anyway, so it’s not as if this is any more violent or bloodthirsty than most of the meals that we eat. They at least had a sense of the sacredness of all life.
Our propensity to sin though was not lessened and the nations of the earth were not walking in the ways of justice. And so, God communicated to Isaiah that a servant would, similar to a sacrificed animal, suffer for sake of the whole world to make it clear that God was choosing us, even if we do not choose God. This servant has generally been understood to be the nation of Israel itself.
This is why we heard Isaiah say, “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” A similar idea was heard in Psalm 22, “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall bow before him.” These are ways of saying that love is making all things well.
The final verse of the Psalm is “They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.” Even those who are unaware that all things are being made well will get to participate in this wellness that is won by the servant’s enduring love. The servant is willing to endure all things – pain, rejection, shame, and even death for the sake of making it clear and tangible that love never ends, that sin does not separate us from God, that death is not the end of our story. This love is even willing to endure our looking down on the method and meaning of sacrifice. This love endures all things and never ends. For us and for our salvation, Jesus willingly picked all of this up and endured it so that there could be no question as to God’s love for us.
St. Athanasius wrote in the 300s that Jesus did not merely remedy our sins and weaknesses, but he carried them, enduring the fullness of their weight. I don’t know what weighty things you bring with you today, but I know that we all are carrying a heavy load. We have made mistakes that we regret. We have fears that consume us. We have griefs that we hold. We have experiences that have wounded us. We have resentments that we are working through. We are surrounded by injustice and brokenness.
Jesus gathers all of these things up and carries them to the cross where they can be absorbed into and transformed by the reconciling love of God. This is love at its pinnacle. We do not carry our burdens alone. It is not our job to make right that which is out of our hands. We do not have to earn our forgiveness, only to accept and enjoy it. And to make this clear and evident for all the world to see, Jesus, the love of God in the flesh, endures all things.
