Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (proper 24) October 22, 2006.

Isaiah 53:4-12

Psalm 91:9-16

Hebrews 5:1-10

Mark 10:35-45

If you have ever been tempted to show up to preach in a bright orange clown wig and polka-dot shoes ten sizes too big, today would be a perfect Sunday to do it. Or maybe it would be good just to sell your car and walk to church or subvert the power structures by having children preside over communion. Sound crazy? This is nothing. Take a look at these readings.

Though they are familiar, the texts for today are simultaneously far outside the norm of our own ordering of both the world and our relationships. Despite all we do to fit Jesus into our hierarchies of power and domination, despite all we do to narrow him into our own boxes of understanding, Jesus bursts out of them as surely as he burst out of the tomb. Jesus opens up our expectations by offering a way of suffering as the way to life. We are dragged straight to the foot of the cross.

We follow Jesus almost like Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote: with trepidation and absolute awe in this person who refuses to live according to any way other than his own vision and authenticity. Today, we learn who our Christ is, particularly and uniquely, and how crazy this seems. These texts also tell us who we, too, may be as Jesus' people and the crazy ways we are called to live.

In the first reading, the poet of this servant song, Second Isaiah, wrote to a community in Babylonian captivity. The suffering servant could have been the writer him- or herself, a representative of Isaiah, or a servant sent for the redemption of Israel. The promise is that the people will most assuredly be released from captivity. In the meantime, the servant teaches how the people might live in relation to one another and depend on God.

The ways of transformation and saving in this text seem thoroughly disjointed from the contemporary ways of war, retribution, and power-over. Instead of responding to violence and condemnation with the same tools and destruction, the suffering servant remains faithful in service and love, even unto death. Through this sacrifice there is a complete reordering of power; the cycles of violence are ended through claiming vulnerability, humanity, and death. (1)

While such radical vulnerability shifts our understanding, this text also offers a critique to our contemporary understanding of salvation and our relationship to God. The poem is full of first-person plural pronouns: we, us, our. As Walter Brueggeman writes in his commentary of Isaiah, "The 'we' who speaks here is whoever voices the poem of bewilderment and gratitude ... [for] this gospel calculus that denies the world that wants to assign and pigeonhole and locate when it turns out that the glow of healing works by the suffering is embraced. The 'we' who speaks here knows that much, precisely because life can be transformed." (2)

With "bewilderment and gratitude" might be the only way we can enter into the readings for this week. The writer of Hebrews used familiar themes from the Old Testament to name and clarify the functioning and work of Jesus. We hear of the work of Jesus who transformed the world through his willingness to enter death and sacrifice.

Hebrews 5:8 shows us that Jesus is our Savior not only because he was God's own beloved child but also because of his obedience and faithfulness through his suffering. The persecuted community who heard these words must have experienced great hope that their suffering would be transformative also. In Hebrews as in Mark, Jesus and his death are likened to this suffering servant: a lamb led silently to slaughter, whose death will save and transform, whose suffering will be redeemed through his resurrection.

This counters the prevailing theme in contemporary North American Christianity that somehow our belovedness in God will prevent our suffering. We will suffer, and some will suffer greatly, but God promises us that this suffering is not the end. As theologian Johann Metz claimed, "What emerges from the memory of suffering is a knowledge of the future that does not point to empty anticipation, but looks actively for more human ways of life in the light of our experience of the new creation of [humanity] in Christ." (3)

With the disciples in Mark, we quickly claim our willingness to share in the cup of Jesus without knowing the cost and great gift of life that this will bring. Again, we are placed right at the foot of the cross and at the promise that in entering suffering, entering into our own pain and the pain of God's people throughout the world, we will encounter God and through this be transformed to life.

And so we again see the "right" order subverted; Jesus puts himself in direct opposition to the leaders of the time. The rulers of Jesus' day ruled by domination, oppression, and power. The ones who are named as "great" are tyrants. Jesus counters this way of greatness with the way of service. This way of domineering is not the way it is to be among Jesus' people. This is in the present tense. Jesus is saying, despite the force of the empire that surrounds them, "Now, already among us, is a different way of being."

I am a person of privilege, preaching mostly to people of privilege within the context of the United States. We must be careful how we preach about suffering, particularly to communities and individuals who suffer oppression and silencing because of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability, because it is counter to this gospel to claim this suffering to be redemptive. However, in places of privilege, the gospel calls us directly to the cross and to the suffering of this world. We are called to claim the power of vulnerability and the glory of service. The good news of this text is that in Christ we are given a whole different way to be, a whole new way to seek our lives with one another. Our greatness is not found in how we dominate another, or how successful we are, or what kind of power we can gain. Our greatness is found in Jesus, who offers another way, a way of suffering, redemption, wholeness and life. A different way of being is already happening, already among us, because of Christ's death and resurrection. Maybe it is a little crazy, but it is certainly good news. SKO 

1. Walter Brueggeman, Isaiah 40-66 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 147.

2. Brueggeman, Isaiah 40-66, 146.

3. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury, 1980), 112.