He had sought to build the better world he believed in, a round table, not only for his knights but for the nations. Now at the end, as he surveys the wreckage of his hopes, he is near despair. ‘Justice had been his last attempt – to do nothing which was not just. But it had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too difficult. He was done himself.’
The mysterious central figure of the prophetic poems we call ‘the servant songs’ is overwhelmed by the same sense of failure. He laments that he has ‘laboured in vain’. Is he nearing the end of his life? Clearly he is at the end of his tether. The servant wonders what his life amounts to. He concludes that the sum of his efforts has been ‘for nothing and vanity’, an appraisal as bleak as that later written across all human endeavour, ‘All is vanity and a striving after wind’ (Ecclesiastes 1.14).
The broken king and the despairing servant are very close. Both sought justice and both refused to accept that justice can be secured only by beating your enemies in bloody combat. Justice is not justice if imposed forcibly by the victors on the vanquished. Neither Arthur nor the servant will break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick.
On the way of the cross you never seem to win. You never seem to win. Those who follow that path will often be tempted to suppose that how things look is how things are and how they always will be. Like the servant, like Arthur, like Christ at his darkest hour on his cross, they will feel themselves defeated. Many ministers, looking back across a lifetime’s labours, share Peter’s feelings: ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing’ (Luke 5.5).
The servant believes that he has failed in the mission to which he was called before he was born. The goal of that mission was to bring Israel back to God. God’s response to his servant’s confession of failure is not to condemn him, but neither is it to ask less of him. He does not reduce the servant’s role; he extends it. Bringing Israel home to God is too light a task. The servant must look beyond Israel. The servant’s mission must now be universal. He is to be ‘a light to the nations’.
Like the servant, Jesus accepts that he has a wider mission than to the house of Israel. According to John, confirmation comes to Jesus that he is to be ‘light to the nations’ and the bearer of God’s salvation ‘to the ends of the earth’, when he hears that ‘some Greeks’ are seeking to see him. The Gentiles’ wish to see him is the indication Jesus has been waiting for, the sign that his hour has come. This will not be the hour for Israel’s oppressors to be defeated in battle and for power and prosperity to be restored to God’s subjugated people. It will be the hour when the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies. It will be the hour when Jesus will perfectly fulfil the mission of the servant. Like the servant, he will be despised and rejected, afflicted and crushed. Like the servant, he will bear in his own body the infirmities and iniquities of humankind (Isaiah 52.13—53.12). Paradoxically, this will be the hour when he, the Son of Man, will be ‘glorified’.
But at this very moment, Jesus – like Arthur, like the suffering servant – wonders whether his mission has failed. At the moment when he embraces the servant’s role and all it will entail, his faith is overtaken by doubt. ‘What should I say,’ asks Jesus, ‘ “Father, save me from this hour?” ’ According to John, Gethsemane is still to come but already Jesus is suffering its anguish. Acute spiritual distress has physical symptoms. Luke famously refers to Jesus sweating great drops of blood (Luke 22.44). T. H. White’s description of Arthur’s anguish before his last battle could be read as a commentary on Jesus’s Gethsemane of spirit and body as he faces the cross: ‘He felt as if there were something atrophied between his eyes, where the base of the nose grew into the skull.’
Jesus found himself in a dark place as he contemplated what faced him. I must register what he says about that place, if I dare. ‘Where I am, there will my servant be also.’ I shall find myself in that place too, it seems, if I am a Christian – and if I never find myself there it may be because I am something else.
Wednesday of Holy Week
Isaiah 50.4–9a; Hebrews 12.1–3; John 13.21–32
WHERE THE BUCK STOPS
Once more we look to ‘the servant’, to the one who – so said the prophet-poet – would suffer to set God’s people free. The prophet hears the servant speak: ‘I gave my back to those who struck me.’ The servant lets them do their worst to him. So does Jesus. He absorbs all that shames us – not least our anger, the anger that one social commentator tells us is ‘the defining characteristic of our times’.
I think of Michael. Michael was a huge small child, a morbidly obese ten-year-old, in a children’s club I ran when I was a curate. Michael was desperate for love but he didn’t get much, because he didn’t smell nice. One winter’s evening, as the kids were going home, Michael was in a terrible state, in floods of tears, shuddering with grief. He’d lost a coin, presumably fallen from his pocket. I see Michael now at the door of the church hall. There was bicycle there, leaning against the wall. Michael noticed it. Suddenly he stopped sobbing. He reached out and wrenched the front lamp from the bike. He switched the lamp on and shone its beam into the night sky. Then he shouted angrily up into the darkness: ‘It’s all your fault! You up there! It’s all your bloody fault!’
Michael knew where the buck must stop. He turned to the crucified God to absorb and quench his anger. As we all must, unless we want those bush fires in our belly to burn for ever.
The servant continues, ‘I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ We are invited in our second reading to ‘consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners’. The writers use past tenses, talking as if the suffering is done with. But today we ask whether Christ’s face is still exposed to our insults, whether to this day he endures our enmity and anger.
Peter Abelard was one of the great Christian theologians of the middle-ages. He held the world in his hands. But because of his love for Heloise and what that had led to, he was a broken man. The novelist Helen Waddell tells a story about him. Abelard was surviving in the forest with his one servant, Thibault. One day they hear a terrible screaming. At first they fear it is a child. They rush to where the screams are coming from – and find that it is a rabbit caught in a trap. Abelard releases the rabbit and it dies in his arms. It’s all too much for him. ‘I’ve deserved all I’ve suffered. But what did this one do? Is there a God at all?’
Thibault notices nearby a tree that has been felled. Its trunk has been sawn through, exposing all the growth rings. ‘Look,’ says Thibault, ‘that dark ring there. It runs the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. Perhaps Calvary is like that. It is the bit of God we see. But it goes on.’
It goes on. There is a cross – present tense – in the heart of God.
In our Gospel, we hear how Judas Iscariot left the upper room, intent on betraying Jesus. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Perhaps there was anger there, anger that Jesus had not proved the kind of Messiah that Judas had hoped he would be. If so, there is much of Judas in most of us. Like Judas, we have asked great things of God but our prayers have not been answered, and we are angry too. Our anger still burns, however piously we pretend otherwise. Better to let that anger out and to direct it towards the one place – we shall reach it on Good Friday – where it can be extinguished.
Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, still gives his back to those who strike him. The First World War army chaplain Studdert Kennedy witnessed men being slaughtered like cattle. That experience blew to bits his complacent faith in a God somehow above it all, untouched by our misery. There in the trenches he became convinced that if Christ’s passion tells us anything, it tells us what God is like.
Father, if he, the Christ, were thy revealer,
Truly the first begotten of the Lord,
Then must thou be a suff’rer and a healer,
Pierced to the heart by the sorrow of the sword.
Then must it mean, not only that thy sorrow
Smote thee that once upon the lonely tree,
But that today,