Title: The Death of Power Is the Triumph of Love
Author: Daron Lindemann
Last saved by: Barb Bartz

Determined to Suffer
Isaiah 50:4-7

I’m sorry to do this. I feel like a medical examiner asking you to identify a body, but you’re part of this picture whether you like it or not. So for the moment just swallow hard, take deep breaths, and look at your God. Not painted with an artist’s elegance wearing a welcoming smile to match his sparkling eyes and flowing tunic, but wearing nothing. Except his own blood. Draining from his lacerated back lashed open by the shards of metal cruelly tied to the scourges. Oozing from his swollen face pummeled to such a pulp he can barely see you. It’s not a pretty picture, I know. I also know it’s extreme, but that’s the point and for that I will not apologize. This scourging of Jesus makes us wince because it’s so out of control, way beyond what should have been allowed, and let me just say it now, was it even necessary? I understand that to be saved I need a Savior who would die and then rise to life. But this scourging? Mel Gibson needed it to add drama to his movie but does God really need it? And why do we need to spend our time viewing such graphic violence? When people look for God they want flowers not thorns!

Imagine that you are a 21-year-old Marine serving in Iraq, eager for a taste of home, so you get on the internet, log onto the website of your hometown newspaper, and discover that your father is leading anti-war demonstrations in the front yard of your home. He has stripped your bedroom of ribbons, certificates, and any other Marine material, and is making statements about how embarrassed he is that you are fighting in Iraq. Imagine that you are a nurse working in the ER and a desperate mother comes screaming though the doors carrying her six-year-old daughter, bloody, bruised, and limp from being beaten and violated by her drunken dad. Fathers are supposed to protect their children from shame and hurt, not cause them shame and hurt!!

	The scourging of Jesus was inflicted upon him by Pilate and the Roman soldiers, by us and our sins, and also by his very own Father. Think I’m dangerously overstating something here? Think that God the Father would never be so vicious as to actually hurt and shame his own Son? The Bible says otherwise.“The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all … It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer … the Lord makes his life a guilt offering,” Isaiah reports in his awesome prophecy (53:6,10). “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,” the apostle Paul explains (2 Corinthians 5:21). And didn’t Jesus pray, plead, and petition his Father to take away the bitter cup of suffering and death if it was his will – but the Father willed the pain, the blood, the wounds. The Father’s fingerprints are on the scourge that tore open the flesh of his own Son!

Why, Father? Why hurt him so? Leave him alone! He’s done nothing to deserve this! Why the scourging? Just let the soldiers take him away to the cross and be done! Why such extreme cruelty to your innocent Son? Jesus, listen to me. Your Father’s gone mad! Things are getting way out of control! Use your power - the power that calmed a vicious storm on Galilee, the power that reclaimed health and life to the sick and the dead - summon your power now to strike back at the soldiers and just get to the cross before they kill you right here! This gruesome scourging is not necessary! It’s scandalous!

Then again, we should know better. By now we have heard Jesus many times talk about his Dad in scandalous terms. Remember when Jesus told us what a terrible farmer his Dad is? He just throws seeds anywhere and everywhere hoping as much of it will take root as possible, not caring if some falls on some rocky soil or the hard path, not lining up his seeds in careful, neat rows. Remember when Jesus revealed what a terrible bookkeeper his Dad is? Here’s a scandal. His dad doesn’t even keep an accounting of all the hours each of his workers puts in but just pays everybody the same thing! Everybody.  And what kind of irresponsible parent would first of all let a young and foolish son walk away early with his share of the inheritance, but then when that son returns and the dad sees him at the end of the street returning for who knows what - another few thousand dollars, a quick meal or two - instead of telling his son to get lost the dad throws a party! Jesus’ dad is such an ignorant shepherd that he taught his son if he loses one of his flock of a hundred sheep he should leave the ninety-nine behind to go find the one! No, it doesn’t surprise us now. The extreme violence of the scourging seems to be only another miscue in the scandalous collection of botched mistakes by Jesus’ dad.
Yet Jesus doesn’t complain. He doesn’t appeal to Pilate for mercy when he hears Pilate give the order for him to be flogged. He doesn’t shrink into the fetal position when the Roman soldiers tear off his clothes. He doesn’t duck when the Roman soldiers swing again to smash a spiked club into his skull. When one soldier begins taunting him with the crown of thorns Jesus doesn’t try to talk his way out of his scalp being perforated by its needles puncturing skin and bone. When the Roman soldiers pretend to bow down to him as their king and then spit into his face, he doesn’t threaten them, “You’ll pay for this in hell!” When the scourge and whip split open his skin and zing their impulses of pain throughout his body he doesn’t silently curse his destiny or even hope that it ends soon. There is no pain and suffering that, at some point, will make him finally say, “That’s enough!!”

The Bible says that isn’t just loving commitment but unbreakable determination, comparing it to one of the hardest substances known at that time, flint. We might say it’s harder than the steel reinforcement beams in the bridges over the Marquette interchange that aren’t destroyed even when the heavy machinery pounds the bridge to pieces. The Father and the Son could have scripted the passion so that Jesus would be sentenced to crucifixion by Pilate and immediately taken there on a horse and nailed to the cross, but that’s not extreme enough for a God who knows how weary the people he loves become because of guilt, how clearly our memories haunt us with images of our past sins, how persistently the devil tries to persuade us that we are beyond God’s reach. However extreme you have become in sin and guilt and regret and unfaithfulness, God has been more extreme in his unbreakable determination to touch you, forgive you, bless you, and keep you as his own. The most painful torture did not stop Jesus then, and so nothing will stop him now. He loves you. To the extreme. 

	Today’s prophecy predicting the scourging of Jesus reveals the unbreakable determination of God the Father and God the Son to go to the extreme for people. Presented by the prophet Isaiah centuries before being born in Bethlehem, Jesus is given the title “the servant of the Lord,” and here speaks to us about how and why he endures his scourging. Three times he refers to his Father as “the Sovereign Lord,” a name reflecting the faithful love of the supreme power in the universe, which is a combination that is sure to save. Depending on such faithful love and supreme power to give divine sturdiness to a frail human nature, Jesus offers relief that his Father has helped him know the proper answer and explanation to such extreme suffering. Through constant communication with his Son, the Father has opened his ears to receive the reassurance that even the most extreme suffering is not a disgrace, but it is grace indeed. Amen.