Calverton Baptist Church, April 4, 1982; Howard University Chapel, April 9, 1982; Takoma Park Baptist Church, March 31, 1985
Recently a Methodist pastor in South Carolina created something of a stir in his church, and all of it quite innocently. He asked a member of the congregation who was known for his skill as a woodcarver if he could use those skills to turn out a cross to be carried in the processionals in the church. The pastor had in mind something quite simple, just a clean, simple cross that one of the youth of the church could carry down the aisle in front of the choir to remind everyone that the church is an army which marches under the banner of the cross. Simple, clean, easy.
But, says the pastor, what he got instead was a dramatic difference: a heavy cross, complete with a realistic, bleeding, broken body, complete with the figure of the crucified Christ, hanging there in all of his agony. What the pastor got was no clean abstraction but instead the full force of the suffering one; and also what he got was a series of comments from those good Methodist folk, who might just as well have been Baptist folk; you and I can identify with at least some of what they said: “It's too Catholic; it’s depressing; it doesn’t go with the color scheme."
The pastor's wry comment was this: “What is a modern, progressive, slightly liberal, well-budgeted church to do with a bloody cross these days?”
Well, you might want to remove the reference to being well-budgeted, but the question remains just the same. What is a church like ours to do with a bloody cross these days? What is a nice, neat, well-turned-out, middle-class, up to snuff, slightly sophisticated churchgoer to do with these images of death and morbidity, these pictures of suffering? What does an upwardly mobile, two-career and two-mortgage and two-car family do with this case of defeat? I am suggesting to you this morning that although we are thoroughly orthodox, we are nonetheless uncomfortable with this wounded one; I am feeling that in times like ours, in a society like ours, perhaps too in churches like ours, we would prefer it to be sanitized, we would prefer to make it more abstract, we would like to forget that our redemption was purchased at so great a price.
But it is not so. It cannot be that way. At the heart of the Christian faith and life is a cross, and not a bejeweled work of art, either, but an old rugged cross. At the heart of who we are there is a cross-shaped life, and it is more than an emblem to be worn around the neck or to be made palatable with banks of lilies around its base. At the heart of our faith there is the agony of God Himself, and it will not, it must not, go away.
“See, from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?
As we enter this week called Holy, this week in which we Christians remember again the central mysteries of our faith, I would ask you to recall and reaffirm that from beginning to end, at its deepest depths, the Bible speaks to us of the suffering of God. The Scriptures at their most profound give us the report of a Creator whose heart breaks at the waywardness of his children, a father whose joy in the thing which he has created is tarnished as the creature becomes arrogant and disobedient. And though, as I will readily admit, there are plenty of passages in which our Lord is portrayed as a jealous God, an angry God, who metes out terrible punishment, yet I submit to you that the dominant and overriding theme is of a God who suffers.
And so there is one of the spiritual high water marks of the Old Covenant, the prophecy of Hosea, that prophet who saw perhaps more clearly than anyone has how we have injured our God at the depths of his heart, that ours is not a God who can be portrayed as a perfect and passionless marble figure as the Greek sculptors loved to show their deities. But ours is a God who if He is pictured at all is to be seen as a grotesque figure outstretched upon a Roman cross, with nothing between Himself and the elements but a loincloth, with nothing at all between himself and the elements of violence in the human heart. So Hosea's God: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me. How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, 0 Israel? My heart recoils with me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy. “
Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who has done much to deepen many people's understanding of ministry, wrote a little book just a few years ago and called it The Wounded Healer. In one of his chapters he suggests that the pastor, whose first call is to be like Christ, is therefore called to be a wounded healer, one who, like Christ, identifies with human pain and becomes a channel for its healing. And, says Nouwen, Christ heals our pain and binds up our wounds not just by saying something superficial like, "So you've got it bad; I’ve got it bad too, tough luck, fella." Christ does not heal by some sort of me-too-ism; rather, says Nouwen, "He deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared.” “He deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared". In other words, if I may put it in my own language, at the cross the Lord God is so entering into the brokenness and the woundedness of being human that he gives new direction, new substance to our human experience. At that cross, if our eyes can but open to see it, there is infinitely more than another unjust death, infinitely more than another poor beggar who has been mauled by the machine; instead there is an eruption of the very volcano of compassion and caring and understanding which is at the heart of God. God cares: that's the message of the Cross. God cares, God comes and shares our brokenness and is broken himself. God cares.
“See, from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love and sorrow meet Or thorns compose so rich a crown?”
Twenty-some years ago, a young college student, walking the streets of a small North Carolina town, away from home for an extended period of time for only the second time in his life … a young man walking home on Good Friday after a worship service at his church passes another church building and sees there in the churchyard a large white cross with lettering painted on it. He stops, leans over the fence in the half-darkness to read the lettering, and makes it out, "ls it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" And those words, lifted out of the Book of Lamentations, speak to his heart and confirm for him a sense of call that he has been nurturing for several weeks. "ls it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?"'-- for he concludes that it does matter, that it is more than nothing to him that Christ died, and that it was for him. For others, yes, for the whole lost world, yes, but for him, for me. I was that student. And I learned again that night that it is the very humanness of Christ which reaches out to me and takes hold of me; I learned that I am crushed to think that even a man, a mere man, albeit a good man, would die for me. That in itself is too much to handle. But this, this is the unspeakable. This is very God himself, suffering, wounded for me, wounded in order to become my healer. And that matters; that matters above all else.
Or does it? Does it really matter? Does it speak to us any more? Is it true, perhaps, as I began this morning, that we are in another place, another era, and we would like our religion more abstract, please, more cool, more comfortable and more comforting?
Perhaps it helps if we remember where it is we have been wounded; perhaps it would make a difference to recall that we too have a wound, and the name of that wound is loneliness. The name of our pain in this twentieth century is alienation, separation; it is isolation which stalks and destroys us, it is the legacy of violence and hatred, the pattern of enmity and misunderstanding that shapes the world in which we live. And maybe it helps to remember that the Christ endured His suffering as the suffering of aloneness, the agony of knowing that all power was in his hands, that it was his to summon legions of angels, but he would not, he did not. As the folk hymn puts it, “Jesus walked this lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself. Oh nobody else could walk it for him, he had to walk it by himself. “
You see, he has deepened the pain to a level where it can be shared.
Even on this Palm Sunday, as we reflect on the Scripture which reports his entry into the city, I am struck by his aloneness amid the crowds. They shouted, they waved the palm branches, they cried hosanna, but in his heart he knew that scarce five days later there would be another cry and that his ears now filled with the hosannas would have to endure the bloodthirsty, “Crucify, crucify.” The alienation, the characteristic aloneness of our contemporary life: that he knew. He is, as one writer put it, our eternal contemporary.
I submit to you this morning that we need to see the wounds of Christ and to feel their healing power. I submit to you that in a world like ours we need to confront and then to understand the images of the suffering servant, the wounded healer. This week I received for use as a display on one of our campuses a set of drawings and paintings made by the survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, and as I looked at what these men and women had recorded of their experiences with the ultimate in human suffering, again I knew that the Christ has suffered, that our God had felt deep in his heart the pain of what we do to one another. But I sensed also that in that agony he is working and will be at work to bring healing to the nations.
“See, from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?
We in this week may bring all our hurts and know that God hurts too. In this week the pains of living alone are gathered up in the one who went to the loneliest of places, the Cross, and are healed.
In this week the body is broken and the blood is spilled, but for me, for you, for us. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, but wounded as he is, he is the wounded healer. He cares!
“See, from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?
