What kind of laser will God need to break through our steel walls?

Good Friday: During the celebration of the Passion in April 2017, Father Roger Robert comments the « Suffering servant » (Isaiah 52.13 to 53.12)

This text is one of the most enigmatic texts of the Bible. The Jews don’t fully understand its meaning, except that they see it as a bit of a symbol of their entire history. But Christians, after seeing what had happened to Jesus and how he had suffered, immediately found the meaning of this prophetic text attributed to the prophet Isaiah.

At the time of the exile in Babylon, the Hebrews were chained together like slaves, abused and humiliated with many dying on the way. The story of this man is told now, as the person who wrote it was seized with horror, and thereafter, once he understood it, seized with deep veneration.

So, the Hebrews were taken into captivity and along the way, one of them said:  "We must pray for those who mistreat us, for our enemies". So, all eyes turned to him and people said, "What? You want us to pray for those bastards who hurt us, who have killed, who have taken everything from us ... who we’ll now be serving them as slaves like animals! And you want us to pray for them? You're a traitor, a traitor!". And they started beating him, torturing him, removing his beard. And no one understood what was happening. The writer of this text, tells us that everyone "was shocked when they saw him because he was so disfigured" he no longer even resembled a man." Yet, he writes this:  thanks to him that we have all been saved… "Because they will see - as he sees himself when he writes - what they were never told before, they will discover what they had never heard of before. Who would have thought that", that this man who was treated more like carrion, was a man sent by God?  

He looked like nothing. He was brought up like a kind of wild root in the desert, a puny plant in an arid land. "His appearance had absolutely nothing to envy, nothing at all. He was despised, abandoned...” And everyone turned away when they saw him. Nobody wanted to see him; nobody wanted to talk to him…"We despised him; he was a nobody." And then, the one who chose to ignore him altogether as if he didn’t exist, is suddenly moved deep down when he sees how this man endures it all. While he endures, he looks with genuine goodness at those who are literally destroying him in such a way that the author himself, is touched by such goodness, thereby discovering that what this man is and what he has become today is because of the evil we so easily inflict upon human beings. He is the epitome of what one can do to a human being when one degrades it.  "We even thought,” he said, “That it was God who allowed him to be mistreated in this way. We didn’t see at that point that this man was showing us God’s way. But it was him who showed us God’s way, because of the way he looked at us with goodness. What we wanted was strength. We wanted to save ourselves but we had gone astray like lost sheep."

So, "Abused, he humiliates himself, he doesn't open his mouth". He could complain and say, "Don't do this to me," But no.  "He does not open his mouth, like a lamb being led to the slaughterhouse, like a muted sheep faced with the sheers, he does not open his mouth. Arrested, then tried, he was eliminated...” Who paid any attention to him?

Deeply moved by the goodness of his view, the author discovers how God and all those who suffer, by joining with him in a certain way, speak to the hearts of those who use violence. What kind of laser will God need to break through our steel walls? "And the Lord desires to cleanse him from his blow." Because this man expressed, through his behaviour, the goodness of God, the goodness of all those who are humiliated. Thus, he is the one who opens the way to the true face of God.

God takes on the human condition in its most repulsive aspects. It's as if he was saying to each of us right now: "Ah! Give me your life, give me your sins... I'll take everything upon myself!" This is what Jesus lived through on the day of his Passion. Saint John notes the day with precision:  "It was on the eve of the great Sabbath feast." So, it is the Friday and Jesus is on the cross at noon, he will remain on the cross until three o'clock. Before that, he will suffer all sorts of torture and humiliation. In many parts of the world, today, at three o'clock, the Way of the Cross will take place. This Way of the cross will revive the way God appeared to us in our memories, in such an unexpected manner that we find it hard to understand. Jesus was tortured, he no longer has any strength. As he carries the horizontal part of the cross on his shoulders, he falls, he falls ...  No doubt it must be hard to be unable to move forward, to feel your legs letting go, to feel all strength disappear ... And they tried to make him get up with lashes. Eventually, he is so exhausted that a peasant coming back from the fields is grabbed from the crowd. His name is Simon, originally from Cyrene, Gaddafi's former country. He will be ordered to carry the beam on which Jesus will be crucified.  Christians saw in the way he was being killed, what the prophet here called “The suffering servant”.

Jesus, whose skin was completely torn apart by the lashes trimmed with pellets, is undressed naked. His body is laid bear on the beam, and the nails are hammered in. That's how he is put on display in front of everyone. And all those who previously feared him are now sniggering. They say: "Ah! He called himself the Son of God. If God is His Father, may He deliver him now!" And this is how Jesus stays facing the city of Jerusalem. He walked through the gate of Ephraim which is still in Jerusalem.

And all along, Jesus, with what was left of his breath  -  for, when one is crucified as he was, the ribcage falls and breath need to be found much further – Jesus said: "They don’t know what they are doing, they don’t know what they are doing". In the Gospel,  we often hear Jesus say:  "...because they know neither my Father nor me."

We read this text today thinking of the Passion of Jesus, of God. You will hear the Good Friday music:  "God who was of divine condition did not hold onto the pageants of his divinity, but he became a man. And he is known in everything as a man, he became a servant, a slave, obedient to everything. He even lowered himself further; he was obedient all the way to death... And shock horror! death on a cross.” It was the most horrible torture of the time, and there were many.

This is God’s exaltation. Only the Christian outlook, with Easter and Pentecost, was able to understand, at that very moment, that Jesus’ attitude showed what God was doing. He is the guardian of our dignity beyond all the affronts that can be exerted on human beings to make them suffer. Some of us know what I am talking about as they have experienced it. What horror can men do to each other. In a certain way, they lived this Passion of Jesus which went to the point of total madness... So, here is our God: someone who takes everything away from us and as us, including the violence of the violent. The man who wrote this testimony was deeply moved by the one he lashed into, exactly as he would have done to others. It was the way he was looked by him that moved him so much, that converted him..."And we thought that it was God who allowed him to be punished in this way." Therefore, it was he who made visible every human’s ability to destroy another human being…

So, we are more than grateful to the One who says:  "But do not be frightened, do not be frightened. I'll take everything upon myself. I'll take everything upon myself." With such a text, we cannot be led by despair "because he took upon himself all of our sufferings, all our distresses”, including our ability to hurt.

Due to this beautiful testimony given well in advance by this man, this Jew, taken into captivity, Christians understood God's goodness. John tells us: "God loved mankind so much that He gave them his Son so that as we trust in Him we do not die." As he was dying, Jesus was praying, may it be our prayer at the time of our death:  "Father, my life is in your hand. Oh! Father, into your hands, I commend my breath."

F. Roger Robert

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simon