Thought for the week - 20 October 2024

It’s probably not unreasonable to walk into a battle which you are almost certainly going to lose and to forget what you have been told to do just moments before. We may have a vision in our heads of the trenches of the First World War, and men running over, being shot almost immediately and wondering what was going through their minds – maybe not much, given the fear and the hunger and the exhaustion they felt. Either way, those men were not us and all we have are films and guesses and conflicting testimony. The men in the Gospel today are not us either and we should be quick to stop judging James and John, for asking for seats in the Kingdom with Christ. He has explained to them a third time that he is to suffer and die and I suppose they have realised that they too await the same fate, yet they walk on with him to the trenches of Jerusalem, seeing the enemy all around them. Matthew says that their Mother was there too, pressing the case, which adds another level of human emotional complexity to the story which we do not have to face in the passage from Mark today. John misses the story out completely in his Gospel – probably because it’s about him, his brother and his Mother and he would rather not go there in retrospect, as it does not seem to put any of them in the best light.

There is the shadow of suffering in the readings today and for generations the liturgy has presented the suffering servant of Isaiah in the first reading as a prophecy of Christ proclaimed in preparation for the Gospel of Mark. Such an interpretation of Isaiah appears to be as old as the first preaching of the good news as we find in the Acts of the Apostles and the reference to it in Luke’s account of the road to Emmaus.

With a complete lack of humility however, I would like to suggest this is not the case, or at least, it is not, I think, what Isaiah thought – how could he, God’s entry into the world was to be many centuries hence, but also such a revelation is the culmination in the fullness of time of a process by which God was revealing his intentions to his people . Isaiah was certainly a part of this process, but not privy to its fulfilment in the same way that Abraham and Sarah had no concept of the Temple in Jerusalem as they left their farm after the auspicious visit of the three men in the form of God by the oak of Mamre. If you will entertain my thought process, then this means that Isaiah refers to something else by his prophecy: some other event, some other person who is bruised by the Lord. But because God in his providence was leading us to the fulness of truth, this initial meaning and referent must contribute to our understanding of Christ’s suffering and death, the seed of which was sown many centuries earlier. Christology is not prophetic revelation but a mixture of that, along with lived experience as the people of God, direct revelation and prayer. None of us can write about the fulness of that which has yet to be shown to us, the incarnation began the process which Isaiah played his part in.

What, then, might Isaiah be talking about? A reasonable supposition is that Isaiah 53 refers to the time when the Persian King allowed the return of the Israelites to their land to rebuild the Temple. In this context, struggles over this momentous change lie behind the suffering that ‘makes many righteous’. And this is understandable. Almost one hundred years had passed since the deportation to Babylon and not everyone had left the land. Life had continued—without priests and scribes, without a Temple, without Jerusalem even having walls.

‘Is it a time for you yourselves to live in your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?’ (Haggai 1:4)

The immigration of a new generation with grandiose ideas and a sense of superiority because of their exile, would hardly have been received well. We can read about this struggle in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the prophets Zechariah and Haggai. But Isaiah too, seems to reflect on what this ideological clash means.

‘The Lord desired to crush him with pain; if he sets his life as a sin offering, he will see descendants, he will lengthen days, and the Lord’s desire will prosper in his hand.’ (Isa 53:10)

Isaiah shows us that the rebuilding of the Temple is worth the cost in human terms of travail, work, sweat and blood because it builds up a place where God dwells among His people and this is exactly the lesson given to James and John and possibly their Mother -

‘Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up’ (John 2:19).

James and John ask Jesus for glory on the way to Jerusalem – the place of the Temple and the place of suffering. They don’t see that the cup Jesus will drink is the glory, that the baptism is the reward; that Jesus has come to rebuild the Temple, no longer the building in Jerusalem, but the person of Christ, whereby God dwells among us, ‘full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14). This is how revelation is given to us, through our own experience, through our own labour, through our own lives. It’s a gift, but it’s a gift that needs work to understand and use.