Because He Was Tested

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 12, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Exodus 17:1-7
Hebrews 2:5-18

"Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested."

Likely most everyone of an age in this congregation could testify that there are times when human existence is experienced more as a test than a gift. No doubt in these days when our trivial pursuits as well as our hopes are frustrated by yet another drop in the Dow, we feel put to the test by the prospect of an unsecured future.or more significantly when our moral fiber is tried by some circumstance that leads us to cry out with Paul, "The good that I would do I do not," we fear we have failed the test and will spend eternity with the goats on God's left hand.or most immediately given the landscape and limitations of our human hearts that cannot heal the infirmities of those we love or even forgive our own failings, in these times we find ourselves crying out as those who are being tested by a God whose purposes we cannot fathom.

Exactly how, we wonder, is God able to help us who are being tested by the death of those we love or a disease that has returned with a vengeance, by anxiety for the future because our bare fortunes have vanished or the needs of the least of these unmet or by the dread that comes over us as we contemplate our end at the edge of an open grave? Can God in Christ sympathize with our weaknesses because he has in every respect been tested as we are yet without sin? Or is God sublime in nature, only seeming to be human for a time and so ultimately untouched by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

"There is but one living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions.." confessed the Westminster divines, Calvinists one and all who proclaimed the gospel of a God without passions to popular acclamation in the seventeenth century. Apparently it was a great comfort.

But in the first decade of the twenty-first-post Holocaust, post 9/11, post Rwanda, post Tsunami and Katrina and Kyle--we find little comfort in a God without passions. We seek instead a God whose will will be subject to our finite whims and whines and why nots.who feels things as we do and arranges the details of human existence accordingly.who knows, from inside-out, the pain I am undergoing, the darkness in which I have walked, the sorrow nobody's seen but me, the death I must die. "Only the suffering God can help," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell in 1944.

Only the suffering God can help when you "get caught holding one end of a love," writes Annie Dillard at the end of a long tantrum about God's distance from the human condition, "when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."

But in response to our Godward tantrums the old theologians thunder back, "There is but one living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions." What do they mean to say to us when they say that God cannot suffer?

Impassible is a word that modifies a person who cannot feel pain, is incapable of suffering, in the first place; who cannot be injured, is invulnerable, in the second place; who cannot be moved emotionally, is unfeeling, in the third place. Early on in the church's theological thin air, creedal wars were fought and lines drawn over the question of God's impassibility. The question, miscast throughout much of the church history, seemed to be this: does God cease to be God if God is confessed as One who can suffer, feel pain, be vulnerable to the warp and woof of time or moved by some godly emotion to feel for us mortals?

Yes!" said a theologian named Arius in the fourth century who insisted that God could not in any way "stoop to contact with humans." This was said on one hand; yet, on the other, theologians realized "that salvation required a God who could 'place human salvation even above [God's] own impassibility,' [a God] of whom it could be true, as it in fact is of [Jesus], that 'like a man, he weeps and suffers.'" The solution of Arius and his followers to this apparent contradiction was to be found not in Scripture but in the philosophical flavor of the day. Platonism offered the idea of a spectrum of being so that the Son could be, on the spectrum of being, less than the Father and therefore could suffer while the Father remained above it all.

But in 325 at Nicea this distinction within God's being was ruled out of order. Through the brilliant use of philosophical categories in the service of the church's confession--phrases such as "God from God, Light from light, true God from true God" or "Begotten not made" and "of the same being with the Father"--were coined from the culture. The resulting creed claimed that any God abstracted from the person of Jesus Christ, any God removed "from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises," says Robert Jensen, "has, according to Nicea, no place in the church."

Yet even with the Nicene Creed in place, the fifth century saw the debate surrounding God's impassibility relocated within the person of Christ. Now it came to pass that the question of Christ's two natures was up. How exactly, the church fathers asked, could it be that the Son was human and divine, suffering and incapable of suffering? Some believed [namely the pope] that these two natures existed in Jesus side by side, the divine doing the miracles and the human doing the suffering. Others such as Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, simply held to the paradox and won the day: "We confess that the very one.who is only-begotten God-and who is indeed according to his own nature impassible-suffered in the flesh for us." The church held to the paradox, the mystery, the incomprehensibility of God's being, and that is where most of us, if we hang in with the old theologians at all, hang today. The paradox of God's impassibility and Christ's suffering is where we have been left to do our believing, you and I, unless we find ourselves searching the Scriptures rather than the stars or the culture for the God who has chosen to be known by us in Jesus Christ.

Scripture was precisely where a little known theologian in the seventh century turned. His name was Maximus Confessor and some say he was the last creative thinker in antiquity! Thinking out of the reality of his own faith, Maximus searched the scriptures not for some abstract nature of the human and divine in Jesus, not for some concept of God apart from the story of our salvation, but he began to pay attention to Jesus' prayers. He began to notice what that holy conversation revealed about the relationship between Son and Father.

Maximus was particularly taken with a conversation in Gethsemane where the Father's will and the Son's will seemed not to have been in sync. Jesus, said Maximus, had some "decisions to make about the Father's will, decisively, about the Father's command to suffer for his fellows." This was a test! "If it be thy will," the Son prays in the garden, "let this cup pass from me." Clearly the suffering of Jesus was his Father's will. Therefore, Jesus had to make the painful human decision to "become obedient to the Father even unto death." In response to his Father's will, Jesus chooses to suffer, and in that choice, God revealed to us the love which alone defines passion: not a feeling but an act! The great and almighty Creator of the heavens and the earth, compelled by nothing but God's love for us, chose to suffer death, even death on a cross. The God who is love, loves us in this way.

What is this to us as the Dow plunges, our dear one lies dying, our own mortality begins to take its toll? One the one hand, "According to the gospel of love," said another church father named Origen, "at least this strongest single 'passion'-that is, what is denied by 'impassible'-belongs to the divine life." On the other hand, wrote 21st century theologian Steven Harmon, "To affirm [that God suffers] without further qualification.overlooks the dissimilarity between God's relationship to suffering and [our] relationship to suffering. Much human suffering," he notes, "is against our will [we are powerless to do anything about it]; God's suffering is always voluntary" and I would add, always redemptive. God joins us in our suffering but is not overcome by the suffering. God has, in fact, overcome suffering and pain and death in him who was tested as we are but without sin. And because God entered into suffering without being overcome by it, then through God's Spirit so may we.

Novelist Reynolds Price tells of a letter he once received from a man he had never met, a man who had just been diagnosed with a virulent cancer-something Price himself had undergone. The man had two questions: Does God exist? Does God care? About midway through Price's letter to the man, which is about as dense as this sermon, Price turns to the second question directly and confesses, for himself, that "God has 'cared' on a singular occasion of extraordinary promise for our earthly lives and thereafter." That singular occasion, of course, was Jesus Christ. "But," Price continues, "that conviction serves as no feather bed beneath me, no opiate; for I'm also aware, with less natural consent, of Paul's almost violent insistence that God's love literally hunts down the souls he has chosen for grace. And I likewise glimpse-this time," he says, "in the book of Hebrews--a straight shaft onto the fullest truth that I think we can count on when choosing our steps: the dismaying assertion that 'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.' We can ask for relief, for healing and respite; we can beg for our loved ones. But the hands we're in, at all times, are neither predictable nor intimately knowable. They may cushion us, even deck us out with unasked-for gifts; but they're never less than burning to the touch."

My friends, the God in whom we believe is the God who suffers with us not because we have thrown a tantrum, not because we have finally prevailed by way of some emotional appeal, not because we have successfully battered God with the details of our truly pitiful plight. Were that the case, say the old theologians, God would be of no more saving help to us than our next door neighbor who lends a sympathetic ear today and tomorrow is loading the moving van, weary of the effort.

No! Rather the fact that Christ chooses to be obedient to the will that wills to love us at any cost, taking on our flesh and blood, assuming completely our life and death.that Scripture reveals to us a savior who alone is subject to the way of God's loving rather than to the way of our wanting.that we have a God not at our beck on whom to call.that Christ himself was tested by what he suffered and so is able to help us who are being tested, this is our only comfort in life and in death. It is enough. Thanks be to God!

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