October 18, 2015 – Isaiah 53:4-12
Isaiah 53:4-12
Healing in Community
Lectionary 29B – October 18, 2015
First Lutheran Church
Isaiah speaks of a mysterious Suffering Servant who somehow mysteriously
bears the illnesses of the people and heals them of their brokenness.
There is much debate about this passage: much of it is unclear and the grammar is difficult.
There is no consensus as to what it means.
Who is the servant who somehow through suffering brings healing and wholeness to the people?
Is it a single person who somehow suffers for Israel’s brokenness and sinfulness?
Or is it Israel itself, who somehow through its suffering brings healing and wholeness to
all the nations of the world?
And what exactly is God’s place in all this?
Is it really God’s will to crush the Suffering Servant with pain?
Is that the only way God can bring healing?
Does someone have to suffer?
There are no clear answers to these questions.
Isaiah wrote about 600 years before Jesus,
but what is clear is that the early Christians identified the Suffering Servant with
Jesus and his ministry – we always read this passage on Good Friday.
And it seems that maybe even Jesus himself received clues about what his ministry was
all about from this passage in Isaiah.
At the very least we can say that
the Suffering Servant identifies with the illness and disease and brokenness of the people.
And somehow that brings healing and wholeness and well-being.
Jesus has great compassion for the sick and
throughout his ministry he heals many from all kinds of brokenness.
Jesus knows about the plight of the disease of poverty having been born into an
impoverished family and never having a single thing to his name throughout his ministry.
Jesus feels the deep weight of the illness of grief when his friend Lazarus dies.
Jesus feels the weight of humanity’s great sickness – the sickness of injustice –
in his own body when he undergoes an unjust trial and a painful unjust execution.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus comes to know the great spiritual sickness of
separation from God when he feels completely and utterly abandoned by God
as he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And he comes to know intimately the painful reality of death,
the sickness from which there is no seeming cure.
You can see why the early Christians and maybe even Jesus himself came to identify
Jesus with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant – he, like the Servant, identifies with
the illness and brokenness and disease of the people.
And somehow, perhaps greatly mysteriously, Jesus brings wholeness and healing by
bearing with us these things we must bear.
Jesus never cures by answering the question of why we must bear them;
perhaps that is a mystery we may never completely find an answer to.
I know we think we may find healing in answers as to why we must undergo the things we do.
But I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
Rather, Jesus brings healing in other, more wondrous ways.
Jesus knows there is healing in embrace and in inclusion.
Jesus knows there is healing in journeying with those who carry heavy burdens.
Jesus knows there is healing in deep compassion and in gentle touch.
And Jesus knows there is a mysterious kind of healing in prayer.
Embrace, community, touch, and prayer – these are the tools of Jesus’ healing.
Jesus commanded his disciples to heal by the laying on of hands and by prayer.
And today that is why we have a healing service that involves the community laying on of hands
and community prayer.
It’s because there is a kind of healing and wholeness in knowing a community is journeying
with you in your difficulties.
It’s because there is a kind of healing and wholeness in knowing that you are not alone.
It’s because there is a kind of healing and wholeness in knowing that somebody cares enough to
get out of bed on a Sunday morning to come and pray – for you.
Years ago someone got really mad at me for putting them on the Sunday morning prayer
list without their knowledge.
I thought they knew and that the request had been made on their behalf –
but I should have checked.
The person was mad – and I could understand why to an extent.
I could understand that he thought his privacy was violated.
And I guess I could of get that he really didn’t want anyone knowing he was sick –
because he thought it was a sign of weakness, although that still seems not quite right.
But I couldn’t understand why he would be that mad: I mean,
the end result was that people who knew and loved him were praying for him.
The thing was that people were hauling their butts out of bed on a Sunday morning
to pray for him, so that he might be healed, and whole, and well again.
And we do that because we, now, are the physical body of Christ on earth.
What Jesus did, we do: what the suffering servant did, we do: we bear the diseases of the ill.
And we heal.
We heal by sharing the load with the broken.
We heal by embracing and including.
We heal by journeying with those carrying heavy burdens.
We heal on this day through deep compassion, and very gentle touch, and prayer.
We pray for physical cure, for sure.
But physical cure is not the same as healing in the biblical imagination.
I’ve known lots of people – and so do you – who may have been physically cured but who
are not healed, whole human beings,
full of thankfulness, and generosity, and compassion, and care.
And, by the same token, I’ve known lots of people – and so do you – who may not have been
physically cured – and yet were strangely whole and well.
Those people who by their acceptance, and fortitude, who by doing what they can
in spite of their brokenness, shine forth as healing, whole people.
Healing does not always come in the ways we think it might.
It might come as a deep peace and acceptance of a seemingly irreversible situation.
It might come in thankfulness for the care one receives.
It might come in using your own brokenness to connect with another person.
It might come in forgiving someone for a wrong.
Healing comes in many ways – and not just or even only in physical cure.
And connection to a community and to people who love you can help that healing and
facilitate it.
Sometimes the most healing thing of all is knowing that you are not journeying alone –
that others are bearing the burden with you.
That is the power of the ministry of the Suffering Servant – the servant who suffers with.
That is the power of the ministry of Jesus, who came to bear our brokenness with us.
That is the power of this community, as today we gather to journey with one another in our
brokenness, in our illness, in our suffering –
with compassion, and gentle touch, and prayer.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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