Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45; Psalm 33
October 17, 2021
Tatiana Friesen
Isaiah 53: 10-11
This section of Isaiah is all about the figure of the Suffering Servant, and it was written long before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Still, it’s hard to read it without projecting the figure of the Messiah, and the lectionary reinforces that association: according to the assigned Epistle reading, Jesus, the Son of God, has suffered and been weak just like us; we could add that he had the option of retaliation but chose submission. But he made it through, and that should serve as our example and our hope. And in the selection from the Gospels, Jesus sees a teachable moment with his disciples, countering our ambition for positions of power with his upside-down structure based on humility.
Does Isaiah predict Jesus, or is Jesus riffing on Isaiah? (Can things be significant enough to record in their own moment and context, and then later be repurposed to apply to a new situation?) There’s a lot of talk about whom exactly Isaiah was speaking about, and when I was reading up on this passage I encountered plenty of material I could have used to continue that debate had I wanted to. Similarly, many people are interested in talking and writing about what Jesus addresses in Mark: that his glory lies not in political power but in servanthood. I think this is lovely, but I didn’t see the purpose of writing a homily about something that doesn’t get my shackles up, not when there’s something in the readings that definitely gets my shackles up.
It’s time to talk about Penal Substitutionary Atonement. (Thanks to Craig for helping me refine my language since last time I talked about atonement.) The theory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is the bit that I think we all cringed at, right there where we hear that God the Divine Parent subjected Their Only Begotten Child to a violent death in order to appease God the Divine Parent’s own offended justice at the sins of humanity.
Yuck.
I read a lot of translations of that verse, hoping that there was one where God doesn’t come out as the bad guy, even if you think the Suffering Servant wasn’t a reference to Jesus. I won’t read them to you now, but I’ll tell you: God keeps coming out as the bad guy.
Role play:
You’re you, you’ve done something wrong, and someone else steps in to receive a punishment.
You’re innocent, you’ve done nothing wrong, but someone else has, and you step in to receive their punishment.
You’re God the Divine Parent, someone has done something wrong, and you’re about to punish them, but someone else, who is innocent, steps in and recieves the punishment.
God as Punisher doesn’t make any sense to me. For a long time now, this just hasn’t fit; and the worst part is that I see it everywhere, in the ways the Church often deals with sin, but also in the “secular” world. Humans get mean with each other, we set up unhelpful patterns of so-called justice, and we decide for ourselves all the time who deserves what kind of treatment. Whether God is named or not, we’re conditioned to believe in a moral authority that says that punishment is a necessary response to perceived misbehaviour. Even when it’s proven again and again that punishment doesn’t work. Even when punishment just leads to new generations of traumatized people. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have this problem after centuries of Church-supported European colonialism.
I went back to do some more reading, and came across a blog by Greg Boyd, where he lists his “10 Problems With The Penal Substitution View Of The Atonement.” This is from problem number ten: “The Penal Substitution view makes it seem like the real issue in need of resolution is a legal matter in the heavenly realms between God’s holy wrath and our sin. Christ’s death changes how God sees us, but this theory says nothing about how Christ’s death changes us.”
Christ’s death changes how God sees us, but how does Christ’s death change us? This question goes a long way towards clarifying why I find PSA problematic. It limits God to very few ways of operating, and it leaves us and our patterns unchanged. It smells like us remaking God in our image.
Boyd continues: “I do not deny that Jesus died as our substitute or even that it was God’s will to “crush and bruise” him. But we don’t need to imagine that the Father vented his wrath against sin on Jesus to make sense of these facts. One can (and I think should) rather see this as the Father offering up his Son to the principalities and powers to be bruised and crushed in our place, for this unsurpassable expression of self-sacrificial love is what was needed to destroy the devil and his works and to thus set humans free, reconciling them to the Father.”
Here he begins to lose me again, citing the exact verse that got me all riled up to begin with. The Parent offering up the Son to be bruised and crushed at all makes me trust that Parent a whole lot less.
Taking on others’ payment: great. Absorbing pain intended for others, especially others who are in positions of less power: wonderful. And this is what I hear the Gospel passage saying. Making a gift of debt forgiveness is beautiful and noble. But why is it necessary? Why is debt being stacked up at all?
Could it be because humans just do that? We remember stuff, we keep track of wrongs, and not just those of others, but our own as well. And that awareness hobbles us. In critical theory terms, people talk about internalization: internalized racism, internalized misogyny, and so on. Types of hate that are so prevalent in our society that we enact them ourselves even when the object of the hate is our own body and identity. Maybe we could also speak of internalized sin. We need all kinds of rituals to help us process our wrongs, from quiet time to apologies to confession. An important part of repentance is reparation: making things tangibly right with those who have been harmed. But that’s not all that’s going on. When we’ve caused pain, we need something too.
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world...I wonder what it means to take away sin? I wonder why sin must be removed? I wonder what kind of life one lives if one’s sins are always around?
I can only do so much with this right now. I need to do a lot more reading and wondering and talking with some of you folks. This stuff matters. But for now, here are some words from Richard Rohr: “Jesus’ passion and death exemplified in dramatic theater this ‘third way,’ which is neither flight nor fight, but a little of both. It is fleeing enough to detach oneself from excessive ego and the emotions that attach to it and fighting just enough to stand up courageously against evil, paying the price for change yourself. Such a third way, I believe, is the unique pattern of the Gospel. It neither plays the victim nor creates victims of others.”