'Jesus said: 'Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant'. Mark 10:43
In a few minutes - after this preacher with his funny Danish/Dutch accent is done - we will do what our reading from Hebrews told us to: “let us hold firmly to the faith we profess” - we will confess our faith in the Creed. Now, have you ever noticed how the Christian faith is a topsy-turvy one? How all seems to be thrown upside down? We see it in our Gospel today: how do you become great and the first of all? By serving, by becoming even a slave. That is plenty hard to do in life, isn’t it? But we see it even more offensively by our first reading. I mean truly, do you even want to be a Christian hearing that “It was the Lord’s will to crush his servant and cause him to suffer[]”? That sounds really unpleasant. God, the Lord, wants to crush and cause his servant to suffer!? What is that all about? If I said such a thing about my children - I want to crush them and have them suffer you’d rightly report me to Social Services! So where do we go with our complaints about God here? Now you may know the prophet Isaiah a little. This “servant” of which our passage speaks - the one to be crushed and suffer - is a really significant figure in several places. To this day there is a lively discussion about whom Isaiah may have been thinking -who is the servant? Isaiah himself? God’s people of Israel? The Messiah? Amazing though the servant is - “by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.” - even so, you wouldn’t want to be in the servant’s shoes, do you?
Perhaps, you might say, I’m a Christian - and that really helps in making sense of this passage. We know the Suffering Servant to be Jesus, so that’s the solution. Really!? “It was the Lord’s will to crush his servant and cause him to suffer[]”? That’s what God wants and actively does to the perfect man, who has done no ill? We’re at risk of making God even more evil - not only does he allow suffering on flawed people such as you and me - but he actively desires it for the perfect and flawless high priest - “without sin” as Hebrews put it? How surreal. There is a popular critique of the Christian faith which condemns God of child abuse - divine child abuse - is that the God we believe in? But what that critique misunderstands is the most fundamental and foundational Christian idea of all. It’s what shapes all that we are - that we are - and all that we believe. The whole faith we profess is shaped by it. You’ll see it in the Creed we’ll say shortly: it’s divided up in three parts: I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty […] in one Lord, Jesus Christ […] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. This idea of the Trinity is pervasive throughout today’s liturgy: in the opening of the service, in the kyries, in the Eucharistic Prayer, and in the blessing - to name but a few. When we read “It was the Lord’s will to crush his servant and cause him to suffer[]” - it is not the Lord putting some suffering on someone else, it’s him taking it upon himself. He is the Lord crushing, but He is willingly crushing himself - so that many will be justified and their iniquities will be born. That is, if we allow him to.
For the Christian faith is like the Lifeguard watching out over the beach. And he sees a person in trouble far away into the waves, and at great cost to himself - perhaps even his life - he goes out to save said person. He swims all the way, and the person he means to save is only kicking and screaming and panicking. Whereas what is really needed, is to surrender, to let go, to trust the lifeguard to do the work for them. The Christian faith is a topsy-turvy one. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” Our call to be redeemed, to be saved, to inherit eternal life is not to do anything - but to let go, to place ourselves into the hands of the master, to let him do it for you - and then you may respond in gratitude by following in his footsteps and doing likewise.
Now you may well know that there are four gospel writers. But I know few descriptions of the gospel better than that by Roald Dahl. Do you know his book of the Twits? I think it show the upside-down-ness of the gospel brilliantly. Rather than giving the whole story away, however, let me tell you this version I once heard from a preacher at Wycliffe Hall, where both Fr Mike, I and my wife studied: There once was a man who owned a house, and he had a mice problem, more and more of them came into the house. So one day he decides to do something about it. He goes to the shop and buys traps, bait, and glue. When he comes home, he glues the traps with bait in them to the ceiling and goes to bed. That night, the mice come out, and looking up they notice all the traps glued to the ceiling - and they laugh to themselves: ‘we’ll never fall for this!’ In the morning, having noticed that he has been unsucessful, the man takes his dining room tables, chairs, sofa, and all his furniture and glues it all upside on the ceiling. That night, when he is asleep, the mice come in again. They look up and get all confused and dizzy, and don’t know what to do with themselves. Thankfully, one particularly smart mouse notices that if you stand on your head - it all makes sense again! And so it is that they all stand on their heads, but it exhausts them and they die. So in the morning, the man comes in, sweeps them all up, and throws them in the bin. The point is this: this world we live in is an upside down world. We all live on our hands pretending its normal, but it wears us out and down. All we do is exhaust ourselves and die in the end. So the solution to our predicament is not to stand on our hands, do pretend we can save ourselves, BUT to join him who turns things right again.
Are you tired of life? Are you ever exhausted? Fed up? Desponded or despairing? Or indeed, does this life have all that you ever wanted or needed? Either way: the gospel may well seem bizarre to us at times - it looks topsy-turvy indeed - but that’s only because the Gospel, God, shows us things the right way up. So, finally, come to him, “hold firmly to the faith we profess” in the Creed next, and receive from him what seems rather tiny and useless: a little piece of bread & a little sip of wine — but upside down, seen as for what they really are, this is a heavenly banquet, you and I are welcome to receive the medicine of life, and this place completely filled with angels inspires us to pour out our praise to him now and forever. So shall we get on with it? Amen (from Fr Thomas Fink-Jensen).