'And yet' - April 7, 2023
Daily Office Readings: AM Psalm 95 & 22; PM Psalm 40:1-14(15-19), 54 ; Wisdom 1:16-2:1,12-22 or Gen. 22:1-14; 1 Peter 1:10-20; John 13:36-38 or John 19:38-42
Good Friday Service Readings: Psalm 22; Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42
Today’s Reflection
Our Holy Scriptures are full paradox and incongruities. Jesus, the Incarnation of God as a human, is the ultimate study in incongruity. It just doesn’t make sense that the divine would take on human form. To simultaneously be both God and man may even seem, at first thought, ludicrous. And that initial response, that divine and human don’t belong together, that they don’t match up, that it doesn’t make sense, is what should cue us to the fact that the life of Jesus—fully divine and fully human—is significant. The paradox of God deciding to come down and live and die as one of us is a paradox worth noticing and reflecting on. And it is this paradox that we commemorate today, on Good Friday.
When we look back at the Hebrew scriptures, they are full of expectation—they were looking for a Messiah, a Savior. The prophetic literature, most especially, is full of mysterious allusions to an incongruous, paradoxical Messiah. This is what stood out to me as I’ve pondered Isaiah 52 and 53.
At the very beginning of the passage, God, speaking through his prophet Isaiah, declares, “See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.” Servants, then and now, are people who are either of low status or people who are choosing to lower themselves for the sake of placing others’ needs higher than their own. So, it doesn’t make sense that the servant, someone who is lowly, is “exalted and lifted up.” And so that paradox signals us that something important is going on here with someone lowly who “shall be very high.” Sometimes this pattern of paradox or incongruity is signaled by even the smallest of words. And that is the case in this passage from Isaiah. What stands out most clearly to me, as someone who admittedly is drawn to paradox, is a three-letter word that recurs four times in this passage: and that is the word “yet.”
Listen for the “yet” in these verses: “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.” If we read this passage from Isaiah as one that paints a prophetic picture of the Messiah yet to come, we can understand this “yet” passage to be telling us about the paradoxical Messiah we know as Jesus. On the one hand, he is a healer—he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. And yet he was stricken, struck down, and afflicted. The power of the healing we receive through Jesus comes from the “yet” and also in the word “but”: “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.” Jesus is, as Henri Nouwen called him, “the wounded healer.” We are healed by Jesus because he was wounded for us: “By his bruises we are healed.”
Listen for the second “yet” in the next set of verses from Isaiah: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” Here’s the paradox: In Jesus, the all-powerful, God of all creation allowed himself to be oppressed and afflicted; he did not use his divine power to stop this from happening: “he did not open his mouth.” And not only that, but he didn’t open his mouth even though this oppression and affliction was totally without cause. Another word, “although” stands out as important here, too: “They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.” Jesus would be wrongly accused, oppressed all the way to the grave. He was without fault—“yet he did not open his mouth.”
But for what purpose? The third “yet” passage offers us another paradox that answers this question of divine purpose in the suffering and sacrifice of Christ: “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the LORD shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light.” Again, we are presented with another passage that, on surface, does not make sense. Here we see the LORD’s servant crushed with pain and his life made an offering for sin. So how does it make sense that through this “he shall see his offspring, shall prolong his days… and shall prosper”? He’s crushed and sacrificed. So how can he live on into future generations, how can his life and his lineage continue? Through all of his anguish, he shall see not the darkness one would expect—instead “out of his anguish he shall see light.”
The fourth and final “yet” of this prophetic passage offers us still further insight as we continue to wrestle with the stunning paradox of the Messiah whom Isaiah is expecting: “Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered among the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
A couple of paradoxes float up to the surface here. First, he has been allotted a portion with the great because he poured out himself to death. Pouring oneself out means that one is giving up all that one has—pouring everything out of himself to the point of death. Nothing is left, everything has been poured out. And yet, “I will allot him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.” He gave up everything, and so should have no portion or spoil—and yet, God has not left him with nothing.
Second, “he was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” On Good Friday, we remember how Jesus was wrongly accused and then sent to be punished to death by crucifixion—crucified at Golgotha, the place of the skull, alongside two rightly accused transgressors. He was sentenced to death as a transgressor—though he himself had not transgressed or sinned. And what was Christ’s response to that? To intercede for us sinners—he even interceded for one of the transgressors being crucified alongside him that day.
As John records in the Passion narrative we hear today, on Good Friday, “When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” In this lies the most astonishing paradox of all: How was it possible that Jesus, the Son of God, the creator of all life, could give up his spirit? And, not only do we wonder how it was possible, but you may even be apt to wonder, especially on Good Friday, why was it necessary? C.S. Lewis helps us work through these questions in an essay called “The Perfect Penitent,” in his book Mere Christianity:
But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can only do it if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we [humans] share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all" (58).
Dear friends in Christ, when we put our faith in the saving sacrifice of Jesus, we are putting our faith in the most astonishing paradox of all time. What we are remembering on this Good Friday, the Son of God being crucified for our sake, does not make sense—at least not to our human understanding. But therein lies the beauty of Christ’s sacrifice. It doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t fair. Jesus shouldn’t have suffered for us. And we aren’t deserving of such infinite love and sacrifice.
And yet, “upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”
Becky+
Moment for Reflection
Take a few minutes to engage with this online exhibition of art and commentary, “Stricken, Smitten, Bruised, and Afflicted,” curated by the Visual Commentary on Scripture in response to Isaiah 53.
Today’s reflection was originally given as a Good Friday sermon in 2021. You can listen to it here.