SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST
BENTLEIGH
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.
From our Old Testament reading today:
I have endowed him with my spirit
That he may bring true justice
to the nations.
One of the perks of being able to preach regularly is that
of being forced to grapple with some of the most stirring passages of biblical
literature, and, together with the authors of those passages, to wrestle with
the very intentions and plans and will of God. Today’s first reading, from the
Old Testament, is one of those great passages.
For what we have heard read to us this morning is what the
scholars now identify as the first of four poems known as the Servant Songs.
These are passages in the second part of Isaiah about some anonymous figure who
is set aside in a unique way to be the chosen that servant of Yahweh. One of
the four poems in particular will be familiar to lovers of Handel’s music, four
he turns part of it into the aria “He was Despisèd”
from his Messiah.
“Behold my servant,” says Yahweh, in today’s passage,
“whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights.” But who is this
servant of God about whom such eloquent poetry has been written? Quite simply,
we don’t know. But we do know that Christian theology from its very beginnings
in the New Testament began to identify the life, suffering and death of Jesus
of Nazareth with the vocation to suffering of the mysterious servant of these
poems. These passages would have been as familiar to the authors of the New
Testament as the Lord’s Prayer or perhaps the national anthem are to us today.
Quickly Christians came to identify Jesus the Christ with the servant figure
who is introduced to us in our passage today.
So what is the task of this servant? What is it about this
mysterious figure in the Old Testament and his vocation that came so soon to be
linked to the vocation of Jesus?
Almost as though these poems were a great symphony, the
answer to that question is first given in the line I have chosen as my text
today. It is to recur again and again in the following three poems, to be
enlarged upon and developed as the central theme of the series. Here again this
theme as it is first introduced:
I have endowed him with my spirit that he may bring true justice to the nations.
“Justice,” or “true justice,” is to be the keyword of this
servant’s work – and that theme of justice was clearly at the back of the minds
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as they each recorded their account of the
gospel, and particularly as they record the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as
he emerges from the waters of the Jordan following his baptism. From our gospel
reading today,
No sooner had he come out of
the water then he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending
on him.
If not before, Jesus then knew that his calling was to
suffer for his vocation, and that his vocation was to proclaim justice to his
people, true justice to the nations
Justice. But what is this justice that our Old Testament
Servant and our New Testament Christ we are called to live and to proclaim to
the nations?
The answer is not easy. The original Hebrew word is mispat,
and it appears to mean both a right relationship to God, and, stemming from
that, a right relationship to one’s neighbour. It is, if you like, essentially
the same as the ancient mosaic law that is a summary of all the commandments:
you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with
all your strength, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Now, whatever else we are called to as Christians, it is
abundantly clear that we are called to strive towards some kind of imitation of
Christ, and certainly to imitate his love primarily of God and of his neighbour.
We too are called then In Christ to proclaim by our lives, mispat-justice,
true justice, to the nations, we too are called to proclaim true faith (love of
God) and justice for all people (love of neighbour). We can open our New
Testament anywhere and find that message clearly imprinted on its pages. But
how do we proclaim this mispat-justice to the nations, to the peoples of
the world in 1988? And let us also be certain, as we proclaim mispat-justice
to the world we are almost inevitably going to share also in the other great
hallmark of the Servant’s , misunderstanding and rejection. The passage quoted
by Handel in The Messiah reminds us,
He [the Servant] was despisèd and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,
and as one from whom men hide their faces,
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Some of you will know by now that I am opposed to and I am
boycotting the Australian bicentennial celebrations. I must emphasise before
saying anything further that you should take the stand, and I am not going to
respect any person less because they may be responding differently to me on
this issue; it is a well-known fact for example, that the archbishop is
participating in the celebrations. But my own stand, like that of Gerry Hand, is
that I find myself unable to celebrate in these celebrations. That is a
personal response to an ethical problem. The point however is that, regardless
of where we might rest on the political spectrum, or with regards to the
specific question of the bicentennial celebrations, we must as imitators of
Christ, as followers of the Servant of God, be prepared to make our voices
heard in a call for justice to the nations, a call for justice to the
dispossessed of our own nation and the dispossessed of all the nations of the
world. As a response to our experience of and love of God we must make our
voices heard on behalf of all our brothers and sisters for whom justice is not
being done.
My own stand on the bicentenary is just one way, and perhaps
some will say not the right way, of expressing my concern for those within
Australia and beyond for whom justice is not being done. The point is that we
must as followers of Jesus the Suffering Servant find some way of expressing
God’s concern for justice in the world.
So then, whatever our stand on this particular issue, the
point remains that our lives must be based on a concern to proclaim God’s
justice to the nations as we seek to imitate the concern for true faith and
true justice that we see in the life of our Lord end of the Suffering Servant
of Isaiah to whose life his was so similar. Our stands on issues of justice
must not be taken out of a desire to score political points, but out of a
desire to communicate to this world something of the love that we experience in
the person of Jesus Christ end of Yahweh-God, his father. For that is the God
who calls the Suffering Servant and the suffering Christ his “chosen.”
So: as we move through this new year of 1988, let us take to
heart the responsibility to be moulded into the image of the one who was the
chosen Servant of God, who is called to proclaim true faith and justice to the
nations, and yet who for his pains was “despised and rejected by men, a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Let us proclaim the unique justice
of God to our nation and to all the nations. Amen.
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