Isaiah
52:13–53:12. 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.
The “Suffering Servant” passage (Isaiah 52:13 –
53:12) hammers the reader with a grueling series of passive verb forms
describing the affliction of God’s representative: marred … despised … rejected
… stricken … wounded … oppressed … crushed. Like Mel Gibson’s Passion of the
Christ, this text may strike us as excessively fascinated with the details of
brutality and violence, perhaps engendering an unhealthy attraction to
victimization. Is such imagery no more than a “sickening bloodbath,” as The New
Yorker labeled the Gibson film?
St. Anselm offered a more balanced response in the
12th century: “Turn your eyes away from his divinity for a little while and
consider him purely as a man. You will see a fine youth cruelly beaten and
covered with blood and wounds. Look at him diligently now, and be moved to pity
and compassion.” And when we hear the Isaiah passage every Good Friday we are
indeed moved to consider how much God’s Anointed suffered for the love of us.
But our contemplation of the Passion is not the
valorization of the machinery of victimization, but its condemnation. For both
the Suffering Servant of the Old Testament and the crucified Christ of the New
Testament subvert the structures of social violence, by conveying to us “the
intelligence of the victim.” By seeing the violence as Jesus sees it from the
cross, we can no longer deceive ourselves: we are liberated from ignorant
complicity with everything that wounds and oppresses the children of God, and
offered the chance to live in penitent solidarity with those who suffer. For
those of us blessed with comfortable lives in the heart of a powerful empire,
the intelligence of the victim can be a troubling revelation. But it is the
punishment that makes us whole.
For once we are freed, by Christ’s view from the
cross, from the mesmerizing cycle of reciprocal violence that undergirds human
culture, suffering is robbed of its inevitability, its finality, and it becomes
the passage to the kind of transformation described by feminist theologian
Marie Fortune: “the means by which, refusing to accept injustice and refusing
to assist its victims to endure suffering any longer, people act.”
— The Rev. Jim Friedrich
No comments:
Post a Comment