From the Daily Lectionary for Wednesday in Holy Week
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens–
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting.
The Lord God helps me;
therefore I have not been disgraced;
therefore I have set my face like flint,
and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
he who vindicates me is near.
Who will contend with me?
Let us stand up together.
Who are my adversaries?
Let them confront me.
It is the Lord God who helps me;
who will declare me guilty?
This reading is from “third Isaiah,” written during the latter years of the exile of the Judean people in Babylon. The word is out among the exiles that there is a real possibility of repatriation; that the years of exile will soon come to an end and God’s people will return home. Third Isaiah is characterized by optimism and joy. Persia has just conquered Babylon, and Cyrus, its king, has discerned that it would be far more expedient for the Judean leadership and military to manage affairs in Palestine than to export lieutenants who don’t know the lay of the land. So the exiles will return under the auspices of the conquering Persians. This is not the ideal, far from it. The sovereignty of Judea, always so terribly fragile, is a thing of the past… but they will return nonetheless… they will return to the land promised them by their God, just not in the manner they had planned. But as we are learning, God is the consummate improviser; making life out of death when all hope is lost.
G.W.F. Hegel, the eighteenth-century German philosopher, described the intellectual and social movement known as The Enlightenment this way: It was “the rise of the autonomous self.” That is, human reason during this period was extolled as God-like. With a renaissance of innovation in the sciences and economic theory during this era, there was much less a need for the anachronistic God of the Bible, aloof in the heavens. The result for western culture was the emergence of a fierce individualism. American “Manifest Destiny” is a cardinal example of the unfettered boundaries of the ‘autonomous self’. And in the world of religion, salvation, following this powerful cultural influence, became intensely personal… an individual, privatized relationship with God.
So it follows that when we, Post Enlightenment people, read passages of scripture that say things like, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the captives.” Or… from Isaiah: “He made my mouth like a sharp sword, he hid me in the shadow of his hand. He made me into a sharpened arrow and concealed me in his quiver.” Or, “I knew you when you were in your mother’s womb.” And from our reading today, “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens- wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.” When we hear readings like these we are programmed to think “me.” But this is the collective voice of a people… A collective expression of a shared faith. Faith is public, communal, shared, not a private possession.
In scripture it is Israel who is called to teach; to give a word to the weary; it is Israel who is God’s beloved chosen for God’s saving work in the world. My point is this: We fall together and we rise together. New life is engendered among a people. Our faith is about people, not a person. Even the figure of Jesus is a composite representation of the call of the community of faith. Our very immune systems have more to do with the whole of us than with each individual among us. That is why the poor, and the outcasts, and the disenfranchised, and the sick, and the imprisoned matter so much to us, because they are us. God is interested in the health of a people, much more than the health of a person. Again, salvation is the collective well-being and dignity of a people… one body in sacred solidarity.
That is why I can say that the sacrifice we make during this time of quarantine is Gospel work, sacramental, no less, because we are tending to the health of the body, which is to say, all of us in solidarity for the good of the whole. Perhaps, out of this chaos, we will learn the art of sacrifice, the high art of improvisation, and the healing and life giving embrace of solidarity. We will not ever thrive alone, but in the solidarity of community, God’s life and God’s Love will ramify.
Collect for Wednesday in Holy Week
Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
