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Questions
on the Way to Cross I: “How Much Longer Must I Put Up With You?” Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 9, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 53:1-6 “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” According to the headlines this is soon to be a season of war waged against evil by armies and armaments. According to Christ’s church, the season is Lent. It is the time when we, who would follow Jesus in the world, retrace his steps from the story of Peter’s confession and Jesus’ transfiguration to the story of Peter’s denial and Christ’s crucifixion. And while we could fill the Sundays of Lent with miracles accomplished along the way or parables told, what instead confronts us in these disturbing days are the questions Jesus asked, and asks us still, as he makes his way to the city of his death. “You faithless generation,” Jesus says to his disciples this morning, “how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” The question in scripture is prompted by the failure of Jesus’ followers to cast an unclean spirit out of a little child. Though underlying their failure to heal is their failure of faith: “All things are possible to those who believe,” says Jesus to the faithless generation with whom he is ready to be finished. Unfortunately, those eight little words—“All things are possible to those who believe”—have been used, generation after generation, to increase the suffering of the afflicted, to deepen the sorrow of the bereaved, to intensify the pain of one who already cannot bear what has become unbearable. How many people have I known who have been accosted by supposed Christians and told that if they just believed enough, if they just had enough faith, they would be healed. With more than twice as many Americans claiming believe in the devil as in evolution these days, God only knows how many more will be accosted by the conservative religious tide now upon us! Curiously this little story from Mark’s gospel, despite its ready use for proof-texting, finally holds up our unbelief rather than our belief as a paradoxical and disturbing condition for the faith we will be given, even as it reveals, through Christ’s question, the agony our unbelief causes him to suffer. The story would seem to be a simple one. Jesus, Peter, James and John are returning from the high mountain—in the Old Testament, from the top of the world where divine revelation is received. There God’s glory is revealed in Jesus and a voice is heard to say, “This is my Son, my Beloved.” Now near the bottom of the mountain--presumably at a place far from God’s revelation only because people are blind to the God who has come to them in Jesus Christ--confusion and conflict ensues. The disciples, the ones who had not been privy to the transfiguration, were having it out with the scribes. It is Mark’ way of saying that the story we are about to be told is not an isolated story in time, but is a story in which a fundamental encounter is about to unfold between the church and the world, an encounter meant to reveal the substance of Christ’s suffering, the pathos of our Savior’s love lost on the likes of us. “What are you discussing with them?” Jesus asks of his disciples, leading us to expect another linguistic back and forth between the followers of the law and the giver of all grace. But before the disciples could answer, Mark inserts the cry of a father for his son. It is the cry we know all too well: of a parent for a child, a husband for a wife, a daughter for a mother, a friend for a friend, a lover for the beloved. It is the cry we cry when we have exhausted all other possibilities, and are left to hope for a miracle. It is a cry that has about it more the sound of desperation than of deep trust, and understandably so. Sometimes the cry issues from beneath the sheets of a hospital bed, but more often it is the cry of the one who stands alongside that bed, helpless and alone: the cry of a father whose son has been afflicted since childhood, saying to a stranger, “Have pity on us and help us.” There is a suffering born by the one who stands alongside which words cannot speak. I look out and know that you know better than I, for so much of ministry is standing beside the one who stand beside. No doubt pain observed is of a different order than pain endured. Still, it is the suffering we undergo because we, like the disciples, cannot heal the ones we love. It is the agony of being able only to wait with and watch. Though love always seeks to do more: seeks to bear the loved one’s pain, which is to say that love wants not simply to heal, but to take upon itself the struggle unjustly give another; not only to cure, but to remove from a dear one’s life the pain by claiming it as one’s own. So it is that here, more than any other place, here where the limits of our human being come up against the impotence of our healing touch…here where the helplessness of our outstretched arm is compounded by the hopelessness of our broken heart…here that our voices are given to cry out for him who bears our griefs and carries our sorrows, for him who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, for him by whose stripes alone we are healed. “If you can do anything,” cries the father. Listen as the words themselves catch up our highest hope and our deepest fear. If you can do anything, we pray, as though to ask a question: if there is a God and if that God has any power, please, for Christ’s sake, do something, anything! If all powers are thine, if it only is a matter of what thou wilt, then please dear God, do thou bear this grief, do thou take this pain from the one I love, do thou heal what I barely can help. The father’s cry is surely our own. Yet what is hidden in Mark and kept from us by the poverty of the English language is a word whose translation as pity or mercy or compassion does not begin to reveal both what is asked and what is given. “If you can do anything,” cries the father, “have pity.” Have pity, he is said to cry, yet the Greek word—splangchnistheis—is curiously a verb used only of Jesus Himself and of three familiar characters in Jesus’ parables: one being the good Samaritan, another the father of the prodigal, and the third a magnanimous king who has splangchnistheis toward a hopeless debtor. It means not mercy or pity or compassion—the movements of the human heart; but it denotes a movement in the bowels—a movement of the innermost being—a movement that is the movement of God’s very being toward us in Jesus Christ. It is from such depths that we cry and it is to such depths that Christ alone can come. “He does not merely help from without…standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again and leaving [us] to [our] selves until further help is perhaps required,” writes Karl Barth. Rather, “he interposes himself for [us], he gives himself to [us]…he puts himself in [our] place…he makes [our] state and fate his own cause, so that it is no longer [ours] but his….” Splanchnistheis. In that prayer, spoken at the bottom of the mountain where nothing is evident, Christ does for us what we most long to do for each other and cannot manage…what the disciples tried to do and could not pull off. Jesus takes into himself and upon himself this grief and that sorrow, he bears within his bowels this wound which will not heal and that hurt whose pain will not go away. Splangchnistheis. There is no analogy able to bear its meaning to us, for it is not like anything we know in ourselves: not like the sympathy we feel at a friend’s side, nor the compassion we know at a child’s tears, nor the pity we have for the sake of another’s sorrow. What scripture tells us—and finally can tell us only at the foot of a cross—is that He does for us what only God can do: into the depths of God’s own self, does Christ carry our sorrow and the sorrows of those we love. And there, by Another’s stripes, we are healed, whether we can believe it now or not. The problem, of course, is that we do not really believe this, bringing us to the heart of this story, a story that Mark has tried to tell us is bigger than this man and his son, is more significant than any given disease and its cure. For finally we here have to do not with human grief relieved, but with the grief that is Christ’s and Christ’s alone to bear: the grief that fulfills the prophet’s words concerning Him who was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It is the grief we cause him by our unbelief. When we cannot trust the fact that we are so loved, when we cannot believe that God in Christ loves us from the bowels, when we miss meeting in him the God who bears our sorrows until they are no longer ours but God’s, then it is that we grieve his heart of love with the greatest grief of all, causing him to cry, “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” What I cannot seem to shake from my own head and heart—what haunts me as I stand beside the one who stands beside another—is the awful necessity of our unbelief to the story of our salvation. What I cannot forgive is my own necessary rejection of the God who, in Christ, loves me so. What seems too much to bear is my part in his betrayal and my reasonable denials that inevitably echo through this season until I stand as a silent witness beneath his cross. Why is it that short of unbelief, shy of that moment when we are left only to wonder if the gospel could really be true, right before the time when we dare question if God can do anything: why short of our doubt, there can be no possibility of faith that is faith, faith that is not our own doing, but a gift of God? “O miracle of our empty hands,” cries George Bernanos’ country priest at the side of a member of his parish, “Hope which was shriveling in my heart…the spirit of prayer which I lost in me forever was given back to her by God….Lord, I was stripped bare of all things as you alone can strip us bare, whose fearful care nothing escapes nor your terrible love.” I believe: help thou my unbelief. Thanks be to God. |