Contrasts, paradoxes, contradictions, juxtapositions. Do they not offer us insights, make us scratch our heads, appreciate situations from a different perspective, and awaken within us hidden meanings and implications that otherwise would remain concealed?
Today we are offered such an opportunity. Two Passions accounts laid alongside each other; a Passion of Isaiah and the Passion according to John.
Who was this Servant of God that Isaiah portrays who endured such suffering and humiliation? Who is this Jesus of Nazareth who identifies himself as I AM, the name God gave to Moses from a burning yet unconsumed bush? They can only be laid next to each other, these Passions. For they seem to have little in common. Truth, insight, clarity will only lie somewhere in the dialogue between them.
Who is it that Isaiah reveals? Humanity, or is it divinity, in all of its powerlessness and humility? But divinity is usually not conceived as being powerless, is it? Recall that since the garden when we arrogantly grasped for power because we had a passion to become God, God’s passion was to become a human being.
The Servant. “[M]arred was his look…no stately bearing…no appearance that would attract us to him…avoided by people…from whom people hide their faces.” Jesus. “I will draw all people to myself.” Are you and I drawn toward Jesus? And are we drawn to Jesus through the people we avoid; in whom we do not perceive the marred face of God?
The crushing weight of suffering, rejection, and affliction, mark the Isaian Passion. But for Jesus there is no suffering. There is no agony in the garden, no questioning of God’s will but rather a clear assertion and acceptance: “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?” Jesus thus carries the weight of the cross himself, there is no need of a Simon from Cyrene to help him. There is no abject cry of rejection, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Rather we are presented with a Jesus who is in absolute control of the situation. From the cross, he directs the future care of his widowed mother into the hands of the apostle, John, who, is he an orphan and motherless? With whom do we identity, the Jesus who is seemingly above the human experience or the Servant who is led to slaughter, taken away, no one giving him a second thought?
Jesus does not nobly submit himself and remain silent as Isaiah’s Servant but speaks up for himself before the chief priest and Pilate: “I have spoken publicly…in secret I have said nothing…you have no power over me…” Jesus does not go quietly to slaughter like a sacrificial lamb. He steps forward, “Whom are you looking for? – My kingdom does not belong to this world. – I came to testify to the truth”. Suddenly Pilate’s query, “What is truth?” falls flat.
What does this juxtaposition of Passions reveal?
What is the truth between avoidance and being drawn toward, submissive silence and spoken truth, suffering and self-assurance, the named and the anonymous? How many people in our society; people you and I know that live in the shadows of avoidance or the popularity of the center, live in silence or proclaim uncomfortable truths, are suffering and those that are self-assured, the named and the hidden anonymous?
In a garden past, humanity and God bypassed each other in our respective passions for divinity and humanity. In another garden these passions are bound to each other within Jesus of Nazareth. For are not the two Passions accounts really one?
By God clothing himself in all our suffering, loneliness, misunderstandings, rejections, injustices and even, death, God reveals to us a life beyond, no, a life despite suffering and death. And though this Friday marks the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth; John reveals a cross from which reigns a resurrected Christ who comes on the scene like a triumphant warrior king crying out, “It is finished…accomplished…I am victorious!”
His death is not a life taken from him but a handing over. A handing over not of “his” spirit but “the spirit.” On this Friday which we call “good” Jesus descends into the realm of the dead to grasp humanity and raise us up with him in the power of the Holy Spirit. The eternal dance of the Life-Giving Trinity takes us as an often reluctant partner in the movement of salvation and victory.
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