to save the vulnerable and oppressed.
When Jesus of Nazareth sets out on his mission he makes the servant’s programme his own. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus announces that he will fulfil the servant’s role by bringing good news to those who rarely hear good news, namely the poor, by restoring sight to the blind and by liberating the enslaved (Luke 4.16–21).
What is remarkable about the servant is the way he works. The servant’s method, which will be Christ’s method, is not the means by which most would-be liberators operate. The servant’s way is not an exercise of power but a display of gentleness – even of weakness. Certainly it will look like weakness to those watching. It is, in a word, the way of the cross.
The servant does not ‘cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street’. Nor does Jesus as, bearing his cross, he makes his painful way from the Antonia Fortress, where Pilate has condemned him to crucifixion, to the killing field outside the city where the execution will take place.
The servant’s way will always be Christ’s way. It is ‘not to break bruised reeds’. The Christ, who is so like the servant, does not impose yet greater burdens on those already near breaking point. So it must be for those who seek to serve the servant Christ. The disciples of Jesus, says Paul, are to be known for their master’s gentleness (Philippians 4.5). The implications of the principle of ‘not breaking bruised reeds’ are far-reaching. To begin near home, the Church that preaches this Biblical ethic would do so more persuasively if it did not overload its own clergy so badly. Maybe it is right to ask the Christian minister to go the extra mile, but not if you have already broken his back.
The servant does not quench ‘the dimly burning wick’. Nor does the servant of Christ. It is easy to snuff out a feeble flame, whether that flame be some first stumbling step of faith or a tentative attempt to lead a better life.
Our readings in Holy Week are chosen, first, to bring us closer to the cross and, second, to guide us on the path of the cross which will be our pilgrims’ way until our life’s end. We ask what it is about ‘the servant’ that determines Jesus’s understanding of his mission and that must shape our own discipleship. This at least we learn from the servant and from Christ: that in worlds as harsh as ours, their way was gentle. Which gentleness we crave.
We are directed to the servant songs in Holy Week. We are sent too to John’s Gospel. Today we watch and ponder the gentleness of Jesus towards Mary whose extravagance and outrageous conduct incensed Judas and – if the parallel Gospel stories are anything to go by (Matthew 26.6–13, Mark 14.3–9) – angered others present too.
But we notice Lazarus as well. Lazarus, recently exhumed and brought back to life, is an object of macabre fascination. For some, their fascination has turned into faith, faith in the one who has made good his claim to be the resurrection and the life. For others, Lazarus back from the dead is a threat they must eliminate. They realize that there cannot be a stronger sign that Jesus is who he says he is than having someone lately a corpse walking around for all to see.
We read that ‘they planned to put Lazarus to death as well as Jesus’. Did they succeed in doing so? History does not tell us, but they may well have done. Again, we are bound to reflect what a mixed blessing it was for Lazarus to be restored to life. Lazarus’s death and resurrection were his baptism, his participation in the dying and rising of Jesus. All of us, when we are baptized, are set free from our grave-cloths to become Christ’s soldiers and servants to our lives’ end. For Lazarus, that end probably came soon enough.
Tuesday of Holy Week
Isaiah 49.1–7; 1 Corinthians 1.18–31; John 12.20–36
THE BROKEN KING
In the closing pages of T. H. White’s magisterial reworking of the Arthurian myths, The Once and Future King (Collins, 1958), we have an almost unbearably moving portrait of a broken king. Arthur concludes that his life’s work has been wasted. 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
