February 17, 2010 | 12:10 p.m. | Ash Wednesday

An Acceptable Sacrifice

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51:1–17
Isaiah 58:1–9

One of the greatest privileges, I think, of being a pastor is being permitted to enter into the lives of people, even people whom one doesn’t yet know all that well, at the most existentially personal moments of life: at moments of birth and of death and during periods of suffering in the face of death. Sometimes these moments happen in a hospital room during visits in which not just the pastor is present, but also family members, nurses, doctors, and technologists coming and going. And occasionally in such situations, I have been invited to overhear what is being said, sometimes between patient and doctor. This experience, common to pastors, is what Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ pastor and friend of this congregation, calls holy “eavesdropping” (This Odd and Wondrous Calling, p. 2).

In her most recent book, Daniel describes how, being invited to listen in on a doctor-patient discussion about her congregant’s living will, she realized that she was eavesdropping not only on the words exchanged, but also on the Word of God. The living will of which she heard them speak and written into her congregant’s medical chart “was not the last word.” The final word, Lillian Daniel writes, will be the Word that in the beginning gave life and in the end will give life eternal (p. 2).

Whether from the creation story in Genesis, the prophecies of Isaiah, the psalmist’s songs, or the letters of Paul, the images and lessons we learn so powerfully shape our consciousness that even our most basic existential attitudes are oriented by them. This is because scripture deals fundamentally with the existential relationship between God and humanity.

The Old and New Testaments are, among other things, a record of how God’s people have struggled throughout history to answer the toughest moral questions about human existence. In the passage from Isaiah that we heard earlier, we find Israel struggling to answer in a new way the question that had dogged them throughout history: How can Israel, guilty of sin, be reconciled to Yahweh? Earlier in its tradition, Israel had relied on its kings to intercede on its behalf to God, only to result in failure. Generations later, a prophetic tradition arose in which Israel relied on prophets, such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah, to intercede to God on behalf of the people. This too proved to be futile. So persecuted by people was the prophet Jeremiah that at one point he even asked God not to blot out their sin (Jeremiah 18:20). By the time Isaiah 58 was composed, Israel was becoming conscious of a new approach to reconciliation with God. This new approach involved at its core the notion of vicarious suffering.

Isaiah 58 is what biblical scholars call the Fourth Servant Song. It is a song about a servant who suffers tremendously, neither because of the people nor because of God, but rather for others (Hermann Spieckermann, The Suffering Servant, p. 11). Isaiah 53 speaks about a servant of the Lord who takes upon himself the guilt of others in order to suffer for them, to suffer in their stead: “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. . . . He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4–5). Through vicarious suffering, the servant in this song makes it possible for the relationship between Israel and God to be healed and made whole.

Biblical scholars tell us that it is hard to know the extent to which the idea of vicarious suffering had any success in the Old Testament period. Isaiah 53 is, in this regard, “a singular text in the Old Testament” (Spieckermann, p. 15).

In the New Testament, however, the idea of vicarious suffering is central to our understanding of what God accomplished in Jesus Christ. The incarnation and life of Christ, the suffering unto death of Christ—these can only be understood as salvific for us if we understand them as acts of vicarious suffering. About Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

For us, the idea of vicarious suffering is fortunately very familiar. As familiar as it is, however, it is still hard to grasp. Even for perhaps the greatest philosopher of modernity, Immanuel Kant, the notion that a person could bear the guilt of another was unthinkable. Guilt, Kant argued, is not like other debts, such as financial debt, which can be paid off by another party. Guilt is the most personal of all debts, and it cannot be transferrsed to or wiped out by another.

For the Bible though, Bernd Janowski notes,

The question is not whether guilt is transferable or not, whether it can be compensated or gotten rid of . . . as if it were . . . an unpaid bill. . . . The question is rather whether there is someone who identifies himself with us in this situation, who steps in between us and our past and makes us once again bearable for God and the world . . . for ourselves—not . . . in order that we might progress to the point of taking this place ourselves, but rather that we might never fall again into this place. (Bernd Janowski, The Suffering Servant, p. 72)

Sin is personal. It is not simply an action or a deed. It is not merely a misbehavior. It is our human condition. It is that which permeates human nature and existence through and through, so much so that the psalmist was right when he prayed, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

The psalmist is right to pray to God, because only God who created the world can effect this kind of radical transformation. No king, no prophet, no nameless suffering servant can effect the new creation that God intends us to be. Therefore, Paul writes to the church in Corinth that the human point of view simply cannot suffice for understanding either who Christ or anyone who is in Christ is. “So if anyone is in Christ,” Paul asserts, “there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

On this first day of Lent, the ashes with which we mark ourselves remind us that from nothing we, each of us, were created and that the God who created us will not rest until we are at last transformed. Amen.