We Still Live in the Era of the Suffering Servant Messiah

 17 Pentecost Proper 19   September 15, 2024
Isaiah 50: 4-9a. Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12    Mark 8:27-38

Lectionary Link

What are some of our misreading habits of the Gospels?  We commit chronology mistakes.  We assume that because Jesus lived before Paul was converted to the Risen Christ, that the Gospel stories were written before the writings of Paul. To correct this misreading we need to appreciate that the theological themes of Paul and others are hidden in the narrative presentations of the life of Jesus as they are found in the Gospels.

Another mistake is that we can think that the Gospel writers wrote with the full knowledge that their writings would be eventually included in a book called the Bible.  We falsely assume that the writings had the respect of infallible authority and finality for the people to whom they were writing.  Because of this misreading, some people get all worried at contradictions between the presentations found in the various Gospels.  It is more accurate to read the Gospels as the developing practices and understandings of the growing Jesus Movement in different locations with people who had access to different strains of oral tradition.  While some people try to elevate the presence of Holy Scripture above community traditions, such a view misses the obvious point that there had to be people in community in a tradition to generate the holy writings which later become definitive of the beliefs and teaching of the future community.

Another misreading of the Gospel is to assume that the Gospels are the source of invention of the topics and traditions which are found within the Gospels.

Today's appointed Gospel topic is one such topic.  And the topic is the Messiah.  The traditions of Messiah predated the Gospel writings.  They are found within Hebrew Scripture and derive from the language used to speak about how God's will is specifically manifest, anointed, within human experience.

In the witness of Hebrew Scriptures, God is known through chosen agents and the results of the contract between the One God and the human community. This  special contract is designated as a covenant because of the attributed character of God as the originator of that covenant.  The covenant came through designated people like the Patriarchs, Moses, and his brother Aaron the first High Priest, and it reached a particular climax in the revealing of the Law. The Law or Torah includes specific recommended behaviors and community ritual practice for the perpetuation and inculcations of those divinely recommended behaviors, or best practices for human living for the time.

Before Israel had kings, the Torah, the law was the anointed, the God's designated will of God in community and the law was taught and mediated through Moses, Joshua, the priests and judges.

In Saul and David, the practice of the divine right of kings came to Israel and in the divine right ritual, the chosen king was anointed as God's chosen.  The very name Messiah derives from the investiture ritual of the pouring of oil on the head of the chosen one.

The kingly lineage or messiahs of Israel did not last that long, and certainly not with the perpetuity of the promise to David regarding future off-spring.  The kings of Israel had various success and they often did not model Torah living in their lives.  A crucial failure of the kings of Israel and the divided kingdom of Judah was their inability to defend their country from more powerful kingdoms.  In succession, the kingdoms were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greek Empires deriving from Alexander and his Generals, and the Roman Empire.  The history of the kings of Israel is over-shadowed by the powerful kings whose armies overran Israel and carried the people of Israel into the lands of their captors. 

In the lands of the captors, a poignant factor to retain the identity of the people of Israel was to use writings, teaching, ritual practice, and gatherings to retain and perpetuate the unique identity of the people to resist assimilation into the cultures of their captors.  Part of the literature which grew was fueled by the nostalgia of being in their homeland with a king who was expressive of what the divine right of kingship could mean.  Out of this profound nostalgia and a strong belief in the One and greatest God, there arose the projection of a future anointed one like King David who was the most successful king of Israel.

The aspirations for superheroes is a very human aspiration, especially for peoples who are long suffering.  One can say that the topic of the messiah as the aspiration of the Jewish people was one that had a currency during the first century and the many, many, years before.  It was born out of reflections in the Hebrew Scriptures but also in many extra-Scriptural writings which the learned teachers had access to.

The Gospels are proof that the discussions about the meaning of the Messiah was still a fluid topic within the people who were likely participants in the Jesus Movement.  The fluidity regarding the topic of the Messiah is seen in the disagreements and and such disagreement is instantiated in the Messianic confession of Peter followed by a severe rebuke by Jesus regarding his misunderstanding about the one whom he confessed.  So severe was his misunderstanding that we have the words, "Get behind me Satan!"  These words indicate that the teachers in early Jesus Movement were trying assert that the limitation of the notion of the Messiah to a military conquering king was not adequate.  The Messiah for the Jesus Movement was to be understood to also be a suffering servant Messiah such as was written about in the Prophet Isaiah.

But that then raises the issue, how then is Jesus a Messiah like King David?  And this is where we must appreciate the fluidity in the understanding of Jesus as the Messiah.  How is Jesus a Messiah like David?  First, his post resurrection appearances are indications of a kingly uniqueness in a way that David could not match so that Jesus had a spiritual origin quite different from David.  But what about being a Messiah who can restore the territorial integrity of the promises to the Patriarchs and Israel?  How is Jesus is that kind of Messiah when it is so obvious that the Roman Empire dominated the world?

The answer lies in the continuing notion of the apocalyptic and future Messiah.  The Second Coming of the Messiah becomes the words about the future being a hopeful one.  At anytime all things could be harmonized and reconciled by a future Messianic manifestation.

We today still live in this fluid and developing notion of Jesus as the Messiah.  Like people of old we still aspire, dream, and imagine about cosmic harmony and reconciliation in a way perceived as being completely human community friendly in giving us the sense of belonging in a promised homeland.

We need to realize that we still are in the suffering servant phase of Jesus as the Messiah.  We are still as it were, "filling up what is lacking in the afflictions" of Christ.  We are caught in the tangle of the probabilities of everything that can happen, and it is not all favorable to us in our lives and in the life of our world.

Today, we need to receive the rebuke of Jesus to Peter if we are denying the validity of the predominance of the suffering servant Messiah in our world today.  And while we accept that the freedom of life often finds us in harms ways, we don't succumb to a passive fatalism about the victory of pain and suffering; rather we accept and invite hope and goodness to help us weave a contrasting healing of the sickness in our world.  We accept that true freedom validates the worth of morality and spirituality.

We have Jesus as the suffering servant and the one risen beyond death to inspire us with the kind of hope which we need to live realistically with how human experience actually is.

May the Risen Christ help us to live as suffering servant agents of the suffering servant Messiah, but not for the exaltation of suffering, but for constant and hopeful work of healing.  From our many woundings, let us arise as healers.  Amen.