upon the biblical record—from Jeremiah, Joel, Luke, and John—to support this interpretation of the Christian faith. Once again, his final paragraph drove the point home.
“Deliverance in our experience comes through the effort, suffering, and devotion of persons, but in the larger sense that deliverance always comes from God. The suffering of God is not finished. The labor of God is not done. We are being delivered from the prisons of darkness and fear and death to become free persons, loving human beings, living in communities of love. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of Jesus Christ, is the God of the people of this time, and is the God of the future that is to be. We have been bound, but we are being delivered by One ‘born to set the people free!’”
The Lenten Dialogues
Following the pattern established in the Advent series of sermons, Robert Thomas devoted the first Lenten sermon to the theme that he and his three colleagues intended to develop during the following season. He stated that at a time when many peoples’ reflections alternate “between consideration of events in Christ’s life and events in our own” the Scripture readings and the sermons would “encourage introspection in the light of the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord.” He referred to recent “gospels of modernity” and their teachings that science or education could resolve the problems of life. In contrast, he continued, poets, dramatists, disillusioned philosophers, other writers, and theologians were “making common cause against the sentimentality of former generations, vigorously attacking that delusive optimism which held that goodness always triumphs.” After citing disorders of the time—urban crisis, the Vietnam war, and hordes of refugees—he referred to Nathan Scott’s 1957 book, The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith, declaring that all of us are displaced persons “who cannot find anywhere a satisfactory dwelling place in the world of our time.”
Acknowledging that “the final accent of the Christian proclamation is not on tragedy, but on hope and victory,” he declared that this hope depends, in part, upon our facing seriously “the passion of Jesus, the pain and anguish of our Lord, its evidence of the God who himself suffers and thereby accomplishes our deliverance.” Thomas described Jesus’ final trip to Jerusalem as the turning point of his life’s work and the beginning of a series of events that would result in his crucifixion a few days later. It would be his final effort to persuade his followers and the crowds that his mission was religious, not political. Jesus came proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God, but his disciples and the crowds did not understand his message or realize that he faced the probability of death. He wept tears of tragedy, not for himself, but for them. The sermon concluded with a declaration that God sees the cities of our time much as Jesus saw Jerusalem, as places marked by materialism, destructive forces, and suffering. “Christ still weeps, and still hopes, and God still intends the Kingdom.”
The second Lenten sermon, “His Hand with Mine on the Table,” developed one of the factors that helped to account for the tragedy described in the introductory sermon: the conflict between two powerful forces that have always been present in human life. The more obvious of the two is the “will to achieve, to become a success, to gain wealth and power, to seek one’s ‘place in the sun.’” The other powerful force is clearly seen in Jesus “who went about ‘doing good,’ who seemed to care little for his own physical needs and advised his disciples to give their attention to other matters first.”
As the dialogue partner in this sermon, I summarized the history of Israel, beginning with David’s reign, and pointed to the contrast between “the kingly messiah” who would lead the Jewish people to military victory and political power and “the Suffering Servant” who would be “despised and rejected by the people, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, wounded, bruised, oppressed, rejected—and all for the sake of the people whom he came to serve but who turned away from him.”
At Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, this conflict and the seemingly inevitable tragedy that would soon occur were the dominant factors in his heart and mind. During the meal’s ceremonies with bread and wine, Jesus added a new meaning when he declared that this broken bread was his body. I then referred to “two elements—disaster and hope—that must be present for an event to be tragic,” and supported this idea with references to contemporary writer Charles G. Bell4 and classic authors, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Both factors were present as Jesus and his closest friends participated in that last meal together.
Thomas concluded the sermon by asserting that at the table “the Suffering Servant confronts his disciples, and those who are considering discipleship, with the fundamental choice as to life’s dominant motif—whether or not it will be the servant stance for us. The crisis of his decision is reconstituted in this room, his hand with ours on the table, his life calling ours to the way of servanthood.” On this Sunday the liturgical force of the sermon-sacramental supper sequence was especially clear. The word proclaimed brought worshipers to the table where we encountered once again the Word made flesh (see John 1:14).
Eugene Kidder and Robert Thomas devoted the third Lenten sermon, “In Anguish of Spirit, He Prayed,” to what happened in the garden of Gethsemane where Jesus and his disciples went to pray after finishing their somber meal. “Gethsemane closes the door on any spiritualizing of Jesus or our faith in him,” Kidder stated. “No more human picture of him is found in the New Testament. The valiancy of his work of mission and the agony of his suffering were so bound together in Jesus as to be almost indistinguishable. In Gethsemane these realities were expanded to ultimate proportions and Jesus was stretched to the breaking point. That event, written upon the face of history, epitomizes the deepest suffering of all who live in the spirit.”
As they concluded the sermon, both preachers referred to the sleeping disciples, and to other followers who were not there, who seemed to have abandoned Jesus in the hour of his deepest grief. All that can be said of them was “that they misunderstood who he was and the nature of his mission; only that they failed him when he needed them most.” Kidder then spoke in their defense. Soon thereafter, they experienced the resurrection and were the first to proclaim the good news. They carried the gospel across land and sea, and they organized the church. Thomas continued the recitation of their good work after the resurrection and concluded: “So anguish may turn to acceptance, and failure of discipleship may be the prelude to commitment, and the purposes of God redeemed from the worst work of the enemies of the Son of Man.”
In the fourth sermon of the Lenten series, “His Teaching Is Causing Disaffection,” Thomas McCormick and Robert Thomas interpreted the scriptural accounts of the public trials that came next in the narrative of those fateful hours. As had been done in earlier sermons, they acknowledged that the biblical narratives differed in detail, but then identified what seemed to them to be the heart of the message. Both Jewish and Roman authorities were agreed: “His teaching is causing disaffection among the people all through Judea. It started from Galilee and has spread as far as this city” (Luke 23:5).
Thomas explained: “Disaffection is a strong word, describing a condition that autocrats in every age and place fear. It means an alienation from those in authority; at least a lack of affection or good will; at most a tendency toward hostility and ill will. From the point of view of those interested in protecting the status quo, maintaining the establishment, carrying on in the traditional ways, the disaffected are disloyal and apt to be dangerous or traitorous. They are the dangerous nonconformists who must be silenced or destroyed.” The two preachers alternated in illustrating ways that political and religious leaders are threatened in tragic periods of time. McCormick then referred to Christopher Frye’s description of Greek tragedy as “the catastrophe which occurs when the individual’s vision or value conflicts with the structures of society.”
In his conclusion, Thomas told the congregation that one reason for “struggles in the church of our time is the new insistence of its most committed leaders and members that the faith relate to the life of the world, that the church speak and act as its Lord, that it really become a servant
