Tag Archives: discipleship

Dwelling in the Land of the Suffering Servant

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The passage from Isaiah known as the Song of the Suffering Servant (Is. 53: 4–12) takes us to a foreign country where we have difficulty finding our way and understanding the language. The itinerary is too long and complicated to attempt a thorough tour, but the overall ambience is one of crushing suffering. The Servant is “struck down,” “wounded,” and “afflicted.” But not just struck down and wounded and afflicted as, say, a person dying of cancer might be, but somebody “wounded for our transgressions.” Perhaps one could say that there are a few familiar sights that remind us of normal life. We know that people sometimes suffer for the wrong-doing of others, and perhaps we feel we have ourselves suffered on account of others, but we don’t normally encounter the suffering inflicted on a person in so concentrated a form. But what is particularly foreign and strange is that the afflicted one “did not open his mouth,” but rather was “like a lamb led to the slaughter.” (Is. 53: 7) Some people can be resigned and dignified when suffering, but it is difficult not to protest when one is so seriously wronged. And this isn’t just somebody being blamed for what somebody else did. This is somebody stricken for the transgressions of a whole people. And yet, “he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.” Such willingness to suffer for the wrongs of others without protest is more than most of us can comprehend. The whole notion that such a thing could happen so intensively is as easy to comprehend as a totally unintelligible language. But there is another strangeness as well. The speaker, one we could call our guide, expresses remorse for the suffering of this innocent person. Our guide admits to being guilty of the sort of transgression that resulted in the suffering. Moreover, the guide admits to guilt over allowing the suffering and thinking the suffering was justified, was God’s will. This guide now sees the suffering as “a perversion of justice.” (Is. 53: 8) Sometimes we feel guilt over small matters such as putting ourselves before others and not stepping up in times of need. But such a fundamental move of repentance is rare in so serious a matter. Again, the language is virtually unintelligible.

But just as a foreign land can take on some familiarity for a frequent visitor, so visiting the foreign land of this text can take on the beginnings of familiarity the more we visit it. If we follow the Church calendar, we have at least a yearly visit. And now, outside of the usual time, we have another visit to the text we normally come across on Good Friday. If we gain the beginnings of familiarity, we can begin to ask ourselves if we have, in our own ways, added to the sufferings of this innocent servant, and whether or not we should repent of the burdens we have laid on other people. Perhaps we can begin to learn the language of this land and take the language to heart.

The Epistle to the Hebrews is not the same land as that of the Suffering Servant. It is not as drawn out and intense in the suffering as in Isaiah, but the language is a close variant of that of the Suffering Servant. First, we have a normal high priest who offers sacrifices for sins on behalf of the people. (Heb. 5: 1) It looks like a routine job, though one requiring penance on the part of the priest who sins like all of the other people. (Heb. 5: 2–3) But then suddenly, we have a High Priest who does not make an offering of a lamb led to the slaughter, but makes an offering of himself. This Priest is the lamb led to the slaughter, as was the Suffering Servant. Like the Suffering Servant, this Priest did not protest, but he did make his self-offering with “loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” (Heb. 5: 7) Again, we see a radical self-giving that is hard to understand, but the more we visit this land and learn the dialect, the more our hearts move in this direction, leading us to trust the One who heard the cries of the Priest who offered himself.

In Mark’s Gospel, we find ourselves in a much more familiar world where it is much easier to understand the language and customs. Two followers of a charismatic religious leader ask their leader if they can be given the best places at the right and left hands of the leader. (Mk. 10: 35–37) Not surprisingly, the other followers are incensed at this initiative, presumably because these are the places they would rather have for themselves. This kind of jockeying for position is much more like normal life than like visiting a foreign land. The odd thing, though, is that the charismatic leader in question, Jesus, isn’t in their territory at all. Perhaps his body is there with them, but his mind is thoroughly ensconced in the Land of the Suffering Servant, a land where he speaks the language fluently. It is the world of his followers and of ourselves that is unintelligible to him. In fact, when Jesus does speak, he speaks in the language of the Suffering Servant, a foreign tongue to the disciples and to us. Fortunately, Jesus’ teaching is relatively simple, like using a primer for beginners. In this regard, this Gospel fits in well during ordinary time, when we are following Jesus and his disciples and learning for ourselves how to be disciples. Rather than talking about bearing the burdens of other peoples’ transgressions, Jesus simply tells us that the leader must be a servant of all. (Mk. 10: 43) This is the first baby step for learning the language of the Suffering Servant. One can go from there to the more advanced matters of the Suffering Servant’s world, which is Jesus’ world.

We are here presented with two worlds, two universes, even. Perhaps some of us have one foot in both worlds. Since the two worlds don’t mix very well, this would make us be what James, In his epistle, called “double minded.” (James 1: 8) The world of the Suffering Servant, is, however, what Paul called the “mind of Christ.” (1 Cor. 2: 16) The question is whether we will occasionally visit the world of the Suffering Servant as uncomprehending tourists, or make frequent visits and become fluent in the language where the words penetrate the heart. If we become attentive to serving others, there isn’t time to ask for the best places because we are entering the only place that matters.

Called to Repent

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The calling of Jesus’ first four apostles in Mark is inspiring but it doesn’t make a lot of sense when we think about it. A complete stranger calls four complete strangers and they drop everything and follow him. (Mk. 1: 16–20) We can soften the improbability by noting that it is possible, even likely, that Jesus and these four men had sone acquaintance beforehand. but–let’s face it—answering a call from someone like Jesus just doesn’t make sense except maybe to the person who actually receives the call, and even then, the call tends to be a lot more compelling than sensible. At l east that’s what I still how I feel about my call to the monastic life. After all, a call from God tends to be disruptive to the life one has been living such as being a fisher on the shores of Lake Galilee. Does this call have anything to do with us?

We might try to distance ourselves from this calling by thinking that the apostles were exceptional people, but Mark and the other evangelists stress the ordinariness of the people called by Jesus. It’s professional religious people like ministers and monastics who should feel out of place with those first called. This ordinariness raises the suspicion that God, as Creator, calls everybody whom God has made. Such a call, then, is the norm, not an exception. This supposition is confirmed when St. Paul designates those called by God as members of an ekklesia, a word that means: “Those called out.” So all of us are called and the call makes no sense unless we accept that we are grounded in God as our creator, in which case God’s calling makes perfect, divine, sense. What else is involved with God’s calling of us?.

Jesus’ call of the four fishers follows straight upon Jesus call for repentance because the kingdom of God has come near. (Mk. 1: 15) What do we repent from? From fishing? Nothing wrong with that. As one who loves fish and seafood, I wouldn’t want all fishers to stop their work. Mark says that Jesus’ preaching began right after John had been put into prison. So persecuting prophets like John the Baptist is something we might want to repent of. But what if we are peaceful people who don’t persecute prophets, or think we don’t? In the Book of Jonah, the prophet calls on the Ninevites to repent—and they do! Since they were a violent society, one that had attacked Israel and destroyed the Northern kingdom, they had a lot of violence to repent of. But what if we aren’t invading other peoples’ countries? Jonah’s call for the Ninevites’s repentance circles back to Israel and the rest of us in a couple of ways. If Nineveh can repent surely Israel can repent; we can repent. More to the point, since Ninevites were violent enemies to Israel, who wants them to repent and become God’s people like us? Jonah didn’t want them. The call to witness to and welcome such strangers gets to the nub of what repentance is all about. It can be pretty disruptive to what we’re used to.

In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul offers some cryptic directions for how we might repent: “those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them.” (1 Cor. 7: 29–31) Does this mean we should repent of marriage, shopping, mourning, or being happy? As Paul would say: “Me genoito!”—by no means! We can get some help with this passage by looking at the concept of mimetic desire on the part of the French thinker René Girard. Mimetic desire, as Girard conceives it, is the human tendency to want something, not because I want it but because somebody else wants it. This can lead to peaceful sharing but it can and does lead to violence. In this problematic passage in First Corinthians, Paul is showing his own profound insight into mimetic desire. It is bad enough to want what someone else has got just because that person has it and presumably wants to keep it. This scenario is greatly exacerbated when the person who has something purposely (though sometimes subconsciously) tries to inflame other peoples’ desire for what one has. Dostoevsky understood this problem profoundly. His intensely puzzling novel The Idiot becomes understandable when one realizes how Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin is stirring Prince Mjishkin’s desire for Natasha Philppovna in order to vindicate his own desire for her, and Aglaya Ivanova Epanchin, in turn, tries to intensify Natashya’s desire for the Prince, whom she had in hand until she played this game—all of this unfolds with tragic results. Paul would have us steer clear of this pitfall by being detached, not only from what we don’t have, but at least as much from what we do have. This misuse of mimetic desire is what Paul would have us repent of. This sort of detachment transforms the way we experience the world.

As Jesus’ ministry progresses, the disciples don’t look good, and Mark’s portrayal of them is the most negative. Perhaps the most egregious example of the disciples’ obtuseness is the way the disciples fight over who is the greatest in the face of Jesus’ predictions of his upcoming death and resurrection. Such infighting imitates the Ninevites rather than the Lord they are ostensibly following. Constant repentance, then, is needed to help us clarify what following Jesus is all about, and we have to expect it to take time. So let’s not waste any time getting started.

On Following the God of All Victims

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WilliamGuestsChurch1In our readings for today, we celebrate the Week of Christian Unity with the short narrative of Jesus calling his first disciples (Mt. 4: 18–22) and Paul’s rebuke to the Corinthians for their discord and divisiveness (1 Cor. 1: 11–13). The light in the darkness proclaimed by Isaiah (Is. 9: 2) shines brightly on the first scenario but is much obscured in the second.

The situation in Corinth is aptly described by René Girard’s term “mimetic rivalry.” That is, the rivals are mirror images of each other. It is significant that Paul does not mention any issues of disagreement, even though we know from other sources that he had issues with Cephas (Peter.) Girard has taught us that when mimetic rivalry escalates, the issues fall away and we get the chaos of rivalry for the sake of rivalry. Girard goes on to suggest that in ancient societies this chaotic rivalry repeatedly resolved itself through suddenly focusing on one victim who was put to death. Peace, for a time, followed this atrocity. Girard goes on to aver that when this same scenario was committed against Jesus of Nazareth, the truth of this collective violence was unveiled to the extent that it could never again create peace, not even for a time, as it did before. Through Christ, God has presented us with the challenge of either renouncing our participation in chaotic mimetic rivalry or participating in the total destruction of civilization. [For an introduction to René Girard see Violence and the Kingdom of God.]

When we look at the scenario in Corinth denounced in Paul, a scenario we can all recognize in our families, social groups, work places, charity organizations, and even (sometimes especially!) in our parish churches, it appears that Christianity has failed. Actually, the situation is more complicated than that. A big part of the problem is that Christianity has succeeded too well. Or perhaps we should say Christianity has succeeded in a way that threatens to make the situation worse and more dangerous.

The unveiling of collective violence by the Cross has led to an ever-accelerating increase in sympathy for victims. We see this early in Christianity through the charitable work to relieve poverty and disease with hospitals being one of the great Christian inventions. We fret, quite rightly, about serious problems with racism in contemporary America but we do well to remember that racism has been practiced by all people of all times and places and it is only in places where the Gospel has had an influence that anybody has seen racism as a problem and acted on that perception.

While to be a victim was such an unmitigated disgrace in the ancient world that one would do anything to avoid that stigma, preferably by victimizing somebody else, to be a victim has become a badge of honor. This is indeed a badge of honor for people like those who generously risked their well-being and lives during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, but it looks like shameless exploitation of real victims by those who feel victimized when called to account for injustices and crimes inflicted on others.

This division between real victims and imposters, a division that is often far from clear, is not the problem of division that concerns me during the Week of Christian Unity. The deeper problem is what I am inclined to call a chaos of victims. We have today a plethora of real, legitimate victims, even if the plight of some might seem more urgent than others. Here is the rub. Not only do we have the social chaos of those who continue to victimize others through brute force such as rape or economic exploitation, and the social chaos of many who just don’t care, we have the social chaos of advocates for victims and victims trying to ameliorate their own circumstances. Put in a nutshell: we have a chaos of mimetic rivalry between the favorite victims of some advocates against the favorite victims of other advocates. Here is the heart of the most serious divisions within Christianity in our time. This is not a chaos of those wanting or willing to hurt others; this is a chaos among those who willingly sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others.

In such a situation, it is inevitable that those of us concerned with the vulnerable and the helpless will be more sensitive to some victims more than others. This increased sensitivity to some victims can look like indifference to others and can become downright hostile in situations where equal advocacy between causes is difficult and sometimes impossible.

I am not saying this from outside the fray. I am very much inside it, very much involved in all the mimetic issues I am describing. I know that I respond to the needs of some victims more than others. The complexity of this tension among those of us who wish to help others is enough to lead to despair but we have a light in the darkness in the calling of Jesus to follow Him. Jesus is not a Messiah divided among many victims and their advocates; Jesus is a Messiah for all victims and their advocates. It is surely this call and not any intellectual or moral perspicacity of my part that makes it possible for me to even define this problem as I have. The call to discipleship is a call for repentance on many levels, ranging from our moral own violence and lassitude to the rivalry for the sake of rivalry such as at Corinth, to our rivalry over the causes of real victims. It is this very complexity that requires us to seek a conversion of society and not just our individual selves. Here is where I see the biggest challenge to Christian unity.