Sermons from the Pulpit
GOD'S PATHOS
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Palm/Passion Sunday, April 16, 2000, by Jane Geffken Henderson, pastor.
Mark 11:1-10; Mark 14:26-15:39
George Frederick Handel composed Messiah in London, 1741, during August and September. The first performance was in Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, l742. That was during Holy Week, the most solemn time of the church year, but even so, the ladies in the audience did not put off wearing their finest new clothes for the occasion. (Some things never change!) However, a plea went out asking women to please refrain from wearing their dress hoops, in order to make room for more people to attend. The performance, you see, was to benefit The Society for Relieving Prisoners and two hospital charities, and more available seats would mean a higher yield.
The alto soloist, a Mrs. Susannah Cibber, was not a trained singer; she was an actress. Apparently, she required a lot of coaching, but Handel was so taken with her ability to express feeling in her singing that he kept her, despite widespread skepticism that the woman could do the job. But apparently, Mrs. Cibber passed muster. The Dean of the city's cathedral, after hearing her sing "He was despised," cried out from his music hall box in a loud and spontaneous burst of enthusiasm, "Woman, for THIS be all thy sins forgiven thee!"
Today the choir is singing from Part II of Messiah. It is a musical commentary on the passion of Christ, using Isaiah 53 for much of its text. And alongside the music is the reading of Mark's Passion, the harshest and sparest of all the passion stories. As Messiah and Mark are heard together, it's easy to see why Christian tradition has understood the "Suffering Servant" of Isaiah 53 to be a foreshadowing of the suffering Christ. In fact, the figure in Isaiah and the person of Christ are so enmeshed in the Christian mindset that we cannot hear the story of the cross without also thinking of Isaiah's Man of Sorrows.
And there is a connection, even though it's clear that those beloved words of Isaiah 53 have been lifted from their original context and used in a way different from their original intent. And the connection is: suffering. Both the suffering servant and the suffering Christ are wounded healers - wounded healers who suffer in and through their human brokenness. Wounded healers who are "despised and rejected of men," in the poetry of KJV. Wounded healers who are in some holy and mysterious way agents of God's own healing.
Today, the Sunday of the Passion, is above all the day for focusing on God's pathos. Pathos is Greek for "suffering;" its cognate in Latin is Passion, which also means "suffering." That's why we call Jesus' suffering his "passion" - The Passion of Christ.
We are talking her about the kind of radical suffering that is an essential component of human existence. This needs to be distinguished from the pain that was pictured on the front page of yesterday's Globe, which showed, after Wall Street's plummet, the "passion" of the traders on the floor. I submit that the present suffering of Wall Street does not begin to reach the depths of unavoidable human misery that is built into the very structure of the universe: war, poverty, sickness, oppression, degradation, death.
But in the face of this suffering, Biblical faith offers a response. Not a solution, exactly, but a witness: the witness of Scripture that God is in agony over human suffering. God hurts so much that God suffers too. The Hebrew prophets, the life of Jesus - these testify to the Divine compassion. And this might be just where our hope lies. Human life can be unbelievably vulnerable. But ours is a God whose own self chooses vulnerability over majesty if that's what it takes to be with us. And some folks have learned to call this aspect of God's character the greatest of gifts.
Why? Because compassion is the ultimate show of solidarity. It is the one thing which is always possible to offer; it is often the last gift at our disposal in these finite, limited, mortal lives of ours.
True compassion is a godsend to those who receive it. And for those who practice it, it is not a fleeting sense of pity; it is rather an orientation to life, a disposition, a way of relating to another fellow creature that recognizes that the other person's situation is fundamentally one's own. In other words, this could be me; this is me; I am not entitled to distance myself from another's suffering, as if I were a different species. I am not entitled to bypass the pain of any other human being.
This is the disposition that leads to solidarity with those who suffer. And when that happens, I think compassion quite naturally leads to justice. If we open ourselves to the reality experienced by those hurt by life, then doesn't that push us toward fellow feeling, toward a deeper and more committed struggle to help mend the world, which is exactly the work that God calls us to do?
Compassion is often what saves us; it can make the difference between being able to bear pain or being destroyed by it. Each of us (at least, I hope each of us) can testify to what it has meant to be the beneficiary of someone's compassion. But can we imagine what it would feel like to have compassion withheld from us? We can choose what we will do: we can grant compassion, or we can deny it. Many of our neighbors can testify to what it means to have compassion denied, to be despised and rejected, to have one's very humanity so distorted in the eyes of others that they turn away.
And that is the condition of the Man of Sorrows. That is the condition of the crucified Christ. This is the burden of human suffering that God takes into God's own being. You can hear the weight of this burden in the music you are about to hear and in the witness of Mark's story of the Passion.
Amen
. . . A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.-Isaiah 53:3 21:8