SUFFERING SERVANT

Herewith some rambling thinking about the “suffering servant.” This will be a mix of Biblical and unbiblical stuff.

To begin with, I don’t think Jesus saw himself that way. On the evidence, the writers of the Four Gospels thought to link Him up with Isaiah and others, the Judean, or Jewish continuum, if you will, but I think He was focused, as was everyone in those days in Jerusalem and out, on the corruption that took hold of Jewish community when the Romans took over the place.

An interesting piece of truth intrudes here: Jesus was from what used to be the Northern Kingdom, the Galilee; all the prophets of the Old Testament were from the Southern Kingdom. So here is Jesus trying to teach the dregs, the ordinary people of the Southern Kingdom who were virtual slaves to King Herod, about God’s love for them.

And this is to say nothing of His address to the corruption of the priests in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Sadduccees, high priests and Jewish puppets of Rome, as corrupt as they came in those days. Jesus and His followers tore up the place on what we now call Palm Sunday. Upended the Temple money changers’ tables in the Temple, with whips and lashes, in general creating havoc. I can hear the coins rattling away on the stones.

If the Sadducees didn't act the way the Romans thought they ought (which was to keep the populace quiet) they wouldn't release to the Sadducees their gowns and scarves and whatever dress for ceremonial rites, which they held in their own quarters as a kind of a cotton and linen leash, so to speak. In short, the Sadducees sold themselves out to the Romans for comfort, money, and social position. When the temple was destroyed by the Romans in the ‘70s A.D., there went the Sadducees, disappeared from history.

By attacking the foulness of the money nests in the Temple, Jesus shook the foundations of religious and political corruption of both the Romans and the official priests. His attack presaged the destruction of the Temple - by the Romans, no less - and in about three centuries later, the religion that He started with His concerns was named to be the official religion of what remained of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine, he who waited until his deathbed before he converted to Christianity. Go figure.

King Herod and his descendants certainly were in that category of corruption. He was Roman to the core, even while being nominally Jewish, building a number of cities in the names of Caesars of Rome, reflecting the decadence of Rome in his very person: the cruelty, the drunkenness, the pitiless exploitation of the peasantry in Israel, the preoccupation with power, and above all, the endless slaughter of those who disagreed with this portrait. The Jews were his slaves.

Enter a Jesus, a very small town product ( Nazareth, 250 people or so; they raised grapes and olives, and were illiterate) who apparently was also a genius. That is, able to see clearly the whole Roman/Herodian setup for what it really was, and determined to do what He could to change the whole societal order of things.

He was no fool, nor was He naïve. I have spent endless hours thinking about His relationship with God, and have long since concluded that His perception of the Presence of God was the source of His drive. In a classical sense, he prayed. But the prayer was not a package one gets from a priest. It was personal, of course, and from what I understand of the practice, it was soul-shaking, and transforming. I’ve been there many times myself, and think I understand something of what happens.

I refer you to His Transfiguration experience, which was badly reported in the Gospels. That is, they went ape with all the superstitious stuff; but I think this was Jesus' breakthrough within Himself, the realization of His own depths, His own potential, as well as the power contained within Himself to influence others in that direction. He was seeing the freedom of being that is the sine qua non of a sense of pilgrimage to God.

While the Judean prophets of the Old Testament were focused on the Kingdom of God, that is, the nation of Israel as obedient to God, and therefore worthy of being the showpiece of the Middle East, a righteous nation, Jesus was seeing something else altogether. He called it “God’s domain.” I am indebted to Robert Funk and the Westar Institute for this phrase, “God’s domain”, and their findings in their research.

“God’s domain” begins with the pilgrim, and rests on one’s perception of what life is from the perspective of seeing what others do not or cannot or will not see. That is, a vivid sense of the beauty of life; a precious sense of each breath, each heartbeat; qualities of the soul that are so overwhelmingly obvious to Him that He must have been profoundly and continually frustrated that others could not, or would not see what He could.

He frequently chides His listeners with the familiar “ears and eyes” statements, which point to a totally radical way of being. For myself, I look on this as the beginnings of what Borden Parker Bowne, a philosopher who was one of the great teachers of Boston University in my day, came to label “personalism.”

That is, a person is no longer an unthinking lump who does what he/she is told by the rulers; rather, he/she becomes in the fullness of him/herself, his/her own decision maker about what he/she wants to do with life, and how one sees life. One becomes a full person, and knows it. Celebrates it. Bowne suggests that personal encounters with God inescapably produces the above kind of person.

Having been through something of that scenario myself, many times, I can appreciate the impact of the “becoming” that happens within oneself. No one could teach me that; but many, many people were involved in my perception of things in life by urging me to keep trying. It is not a gift that is all wrapped up in tinsel; it has to be earned, the hard way.

I learned to see “little things”, the sum of which made up, for me, the Universe in which I lived. In a way, it’s like conducting a symphony orchestra: disciplined certainly, but because of the discipline, a sense of freedom within oneself that is revolutionary within one’s own soul. I couldn’t share with my parents what was happening within myself because they couldn’t hear me. I was still “Frankie”, and would remain so until their deaths.

It is no accident that the organizing writing of our own United Methodist Church is known simply as “The Discipline.” That is, freedom requires discipline; “becoming” requires discipline; spiritual maturing requires discipline. It is also no accident that the word “discipline” has at its roots the word, “disciple.”

When that “seeing” happened for the first time, I saw things in a completely different light than I had known for almost all of my life up until then. Since then, it has become routine to the point where I almost take it for granted, and am continually being reminded of how many people cannot, or will not see the way I see.

One of the ways in which I keep my sanity is through writing poetry. Without that, I think I would have gone bananas long ago. Too, one accumulates a vivid sense of history because of all that happens without people understanding what they have within themselves.

Two millennia have passed since Jesus, and the world remains pretty much the same as ever. Even to the point where our own nation now carefully and deliberately engages in torture and murder of POWs, contrary to its own laws about the matter, let alone international laws about the matter to which we subscribed, then told the world to shove it.

+

But nothing of significance is going to change in one’s world until oneself is changed. And a Jesus sets out the criteria for that change: the word “re-pent”, which is overdone by the so-called conservative Christians. It is a Greek word, and simply means “to re-think.” In many instances, I would even say that ”thinking for the first time in one’s life” is in order.

The point is to break out of an inherited viewpoint that suffocates, or is inadequate to one’s dreams and hopes. From an uncaring family, for example, or, in the case of generations of adolescents, the whole package that passes for acceptance in the seamier expressions of that crowd: sterile sex, booze, drugs, stealing, lying, cheating in school work, the lot that ends in ruined lives via stagnation of one’s self.

When the moment arrives to question any or all of that, one is driven out of the unthinking herd by the force of the moment, and experiences the frightening yet heady awareness that one is alone in solitude, and in complete charge of one’s fate. See a Jesus on the mountaintop clearly understanding the powers within Himself: secular power, religious power, command of one’s circumstances, a new certainty that never goes away.

But He decided not to go the usual routes. Robert Funk sees this moment for what it really is, a basic, profound movement of the peoples of the earth from being nonentities to becoming aware of their own integrities, their own possibilities that they hold in their own hands.

So Jesus turned away from the standard usage of such awareness, that is, bowing to the powers-that be, and decides to go to the common masses. Those who, to this day, are known in India, for one example, as the “Untouchables”, or perhaps more accurately, the more repulsive folks with whom no one in the ruling classes wants any relationship, and teach of the love of God for them, regardless of who they are, or where they have come from, or what they’ve done with their lives out of their ignorance, or their desperation.

That was the teaching beginning of the Movement that Jesus loosed on the world. To teach. When one teaches, it is with the awareness that one is not going to see the outcomes of the efforts. Teaching is thus an act of sublime faith. Jesus calls it “seed sowing”, not knowing where the seeds are going to sprout, but is assured that they will sprout somewhere, somehow, and somewhen.

THE COST

It should come as no surprise that once one is caught up in the breathtaking magic of seeing life for what it could be for the first time, one immediately becomes a threat to the way things have always been. The status quo, as it is classically known.

The costs are high, and enduring. The Roman Catholic Church used to have a physical way of demonstrating this, although their main purpose was to keep everyone in line of the policies that emerged from the Vatican. A contradiction, in a way, of their very hope.

That is, when a young person was “confirmed” in a confirmation ritual, one of the things that the priest involved always did was slap the face of the youngster involved. That slap was no pitty-pat experience. It was a hard slap. The point was that from then on, the confirmee was exposed to the reactions of the world around that was not Roman Catholic. It was difficult to be a Christian in that sense, and the confirmee was early and often reminded that to be a Christian was no snap of the community fingers, part of a group that wandered mindlessly, without purpose or direction.

That practice was abandoned after the Vatican II meetings following WWII. In my own church, the practice of confirmation carries none of that original vividness. It was rather a matter of joining a community of people who say little or nothing about the radical images Jesus has left to us to transform the very society of which we are part.

A great difficulty in that radical heritage, one that is ignored far more than it is instituted, concerns such matters as war; or the brutal treatment of people who are not like whatever the norms are at the point of confrontation, people like the gay folks, to use but one inflammable place that the people who preach hatred for their own benefits consistently use to intimidate those Christians who take literally Jesus’ direction of embracing all the world in love regardless of who, where, what, or when.

So did Jesus suffer a continuous heckling in his time from the Romans as well as the entrenched priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. But He apparently never lost His cool, if the Gospels are at all accurate in what they present. One such scene was a confrontation between a few of the Temple Sadducean priests who were trying to trap Him into an awkward position where He would be compromised or silenced before a crowd of the very people to whom He was appealing to follow His teachings – the lower classes, the scum of that society.

The priests chose to drag a well-known prostitute from her work bed, and flung her at Jesus’ feet. The cultural drill about "adultery" (which should be re-labeled to read "immature childish behavior") is that one so caught - always the woman, never the man - should be stoned to death.

The priests thought they had Jesus in a bind, in that if He ignores the charge on the woman, He is defying religious and cultural standards, and the priests could raise a holler about that; and if he defends the woman, then He is consorting with whores, and that should ruin his reputation with the common folks.

The Gospels have nothing to say about the fact that the priests knew exactly where this lady lived, and what her practices were, and had done nothing about for how many years? Until the time came to squeeze Jesus. It may very well be the case that the priests had availed themselves of the lady's charms somewhere along the line. And the crowd would know that about the priests if that were the case.

So what did Jesus do? Since He is central to the drama, He had everyone's attention. I imagine He was "milking" the situation - letting the silence build, for example, even drawing aimless lines? In the sand? Kind of a doodling? Who knows, for no one knows what He wrote in the sand. And at an appropriate point, He then speaks: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

I can imagine the priests' reaction. The crowd knows all the priests too well, including their sexual adventures, so if they decide to pick up stones and start to stone the lady, the crowd reaction would be predictable. Since there is no love lost between the lower classes and the puppet priests of the Romans, charges of hypocrisy, or even physical violence could very easily break out. Jesus was much admired in those times by the lower classes.

My view is that Jesus shut the priests up with His tactic, His question, even as He erased His doodlings in the sand. Jesus' question must have calmed the crowd, and I'll bet all the tea in England or China that a profound silence hung over everyone there until the point when the priests realized they had lost this encounter, and left. Probably muttering to themselves. Gnashing their teeth. Already thinking ahead to some other trickery to try to bring Jesus to a halt.

It is well worth remembering that Jesus presented an extraordinary poise in that encounter, one that to me marks the depths of His understanding of Himself following the experience of the Transfiguration. Poise, aura, self-containment, self-assurance - all these and more apply to the mature Jesus. A servant to the souls of the human race, who suffered for what He discovered and shared openly with anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear. The Suffering Servant.

Frank A. Halse, Jr.
15 Kimberley Lane
Apt. A2D
Mexico, New York 13114
fhalse@twcny.rr.com
phone: 1-315-963-8401