Suffering Servant

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks visited John Hopkins Hospital complaining of bleeding. Doctors discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. Lacks began undergoing radium treatment for cervical cancer and later underwent a biopsy to determine the progress of the treatment. Doctors were shocked to find that Lacks’ cells were unlike any others they had ever seen. Whereas other cells that they used for research would die, Lacks’ cells doubled every 20-24 hours.

Today, these cells, nicknamed “HeLa” cells, are replicated worldwide and have been used to study the human genome; the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones, and viruses on the growth of cancer cells; and played a crucial role in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines. Lacks’ cells were the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cells in medical research.

Henrietta Lacks died more than seventy years ago at the age of thirty-one. History would have long since forgotten her if not for that special something drawn from her blood. Today, scores of polio survivors and the billions who've been vaccinated for COVID-19 owe a great debt to this woman of whom most people have never heard. Only as her story is retold each February as part of Black History Month is she remembered.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus' story bears many similarities to Henrietta's. He, too, died around the age of thirty. He, too, might have long since been forgotten if his story wasn't regularly retold and at Easter especially. Like Lacks, Jesus is honored for that special something about his blood. As Isaiah puts it, "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

Rabbi Elliot Kukla once described a woman with a brain injury who would sometimes fall to the floor. People around her would rush to immediately get her back on her feet, before she was quite ready.

She told Kukla, “I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor. But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.”

We all need someone to get down on the ground with us. This is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

When police officer Cpl. Annette L. Goodyear holds up her hand to direct traffic in front of the local middle school, drivers usually stop. But when one driver didn’t, Goodyear didn’t have time to get angry or offended--she was instead focused on the girl crossing the street.

Cameras caught Goodyear as she pushed the child out of the way and was instead struck by the car herself, landing hard on the pavement. Goodyear said, “It was strange. As I’m lying there, I’m thinking to myself ‘this actually did happen.’ It didn’t seem real as it was happening.”

Authorities cited the driver for multiple infractions including negligent driving, failure to stop for a pedestrian in the crosswalk, and an expired registration.

Despite her hard landing, Goodyear was not significantly injured. She was in good enough spirits when she left the hospital that she immediately went to check on the student, who while not injured, was too shaken up to go to school.

Goodyear said, “She saw me standing there and as she was walking toward the door, she was getting teary-eyed. And when she got teary-eyed, then her dad started getting teary-eyed, and we all started at that point. I was just so thankful she was standing there and that she was OK.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When you put your safety on the line for the benefit of others, you embody the sacrificial love that God has for all humanity which he showed in his Son on the Cross.

How are we to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” along with his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God “if possible, let this cup pass from me?

Here’s the (question): Many mere mortals have managed to face death with more (composure) than Jesus did—Stephen, for example, just months later. Jesus knew he would rise from the dead, so why all the anguish?

In his ordeal on the cross … Christ mind-reads the mental states found in all the evil human acts human beings have ever committed. Every vile, shocking, disgusting, revulsive psychic state accompanying every human evil act will miraculously, be at once, in the human psyche of Christ … without yielding an evil configuration in either Christ’s intellect or will.

Such psychic agony “would greatly eclipse all other human psychological su­ffering … Flooded with such horror, Christ might well lose entirely his ability to find the mind of God the Father.” This drives home the suffering of Christ, a suffering so comprehensively horrible that it surpasses even the physical abuse of crucifixion.

In her book Ten Fingers for God, Dorothy Clarke Wilson writes about Dr. Paul Brand who worked with leprosy patients in India.

Sometimes they would all gather together in fellowship. One evening, Paul joined them, and they asked him to speak.

Dr. Brand had nothing prepared, yet he willingly stood up, paused for a moment and looked at their hands, some with no fingers, and some with only a few stumps. Then he spoke: "I am a hand surgeon, so when I meet people, I can't help looking at their hands. I would like to have examined Christ's hands. With the nails driven through, they must have appeared twisted and crippled. Remember, Jesus, at the end, was crippled too."

The patients, on hearing this, suddenly lifted their poor hands towards heaven. Hearing of God's response to suffering had made their suffering easier.

A Franciscan University in Ohio recently posted a series of ads on Facebook to promote some of its online theology programs. But Facebook rejected one of them because it included a representation of the crucifixion. The monitors at Facebook said the reason for their rejection was that they found the depiction of the cross "shocking, sensational, and excessively violent."

The Franciscan University of Steubenville responded with a blog post that no doubt surprised Facebook: they agreed with Facebook's assessment! The Franciscan university posted:

Indeed, the crucifixion of Christ was all of those things. It was the most sensational action in history: man executed his God. It was shocking, yes: God deigned to take on flesh and was 'obedient unto death, even death on a cross' (Philippians 2 v 8). And it was certainly excessively violent: a man scourged to within an inch of his life, nailed naked to a cross and left to die, all the hate of all the sin in the world poured out its wrath upon his humanity.

They went on to say that it wasn't the nails that kept Jesus on the Cross but his love for mankind:

He was God, he could have descended from the cross at any moment. 'No, it was love that kept him there. Love for you and for me, that we might not be eternally condemned for our sins but might have life eternal with him and his Father in heaven.’

Kevin Martin was a minister at a massive church—but one of those churches where it got too burdensome. The administrative machine ate him up, and his world was blackened with depression. At one point he was so depressed, so crushed, that he hastily wrote a letter to his board, immediately resigning from office, and then wrote a letter to his wife and his children saying he would never see them again.

Kevin got in his Buick and drove up to Newfoundland, Canada, without anybody knowing where he was. He got a job as a logger. It was winter. He lived in a small metal trailer, heated at night by a small metal heater. One night, when it was 20 below, the heater stopped working. In a rage, Kevin went over to the heater, picked it up with both his hands, and chucked it out the window—then realizing that was a stupid thing to do, for it was 20 below.

He throws himself on the ground and starts pounding the floor of this small metal trailer. As he’s pounding on the floor, he is yelling out to heaven, “I hate you! I hate you! Get out of my life! I am done with this Christian game. It is over!” He went into a fetal position.

Kevin writes, I couldn’t even cry. I was too exhausted to cry. As I laid there, I heard crying, and heaving breaths, but they were not coming from me. Instead, in the bright darkness of faith, I heard Christ crying, and heaving away on the Cross. And then I knew, the blood was for me: for the Kevin who was the abandoner, the reckless wanderer, the blasphemer of heaven. And then the words rose up all around me: ‘Kevin, I am with you, and I am for you, and you will get through this. I promise you.’

Kevin rose to his feet, got into his car, sped back home, and reconciled with his family and his church. And then went on to lead that church in a healthy way.

Since 1939, Stan Lee created or co-created some of the world’s most popular superheroes. His super-human imagination gave birth to Black Panther, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, just to name a few.

Of course, the world has no shortage of storytellers, but Lee was something of a mutant in the field. The Avengers series alone has generated more than $10 billion in ticket sales at the box office since 2008. So, what set his stories apart from the rest? Lee was able to tap into deeply rooted human instincts.

He explains his secret in a 1984 interview with ET:

The whole formula … was to say: Let’s assume that somebody really could walk on walls like Spider-Man, or turn green and become a monster like The Hulk. That’s a given; we’ll accept that. But, accepting that, what would that person be like in the real world if he really existed? Wouldn’t he still have to worry about making a living? Or having acne and dandruff? Or his girlfriend jilting him? What are the real problems people would have? I think that’s what made the books popular.

We all know we need a superhero to rescue us from our enemies and from calamities. But we simultaneously want this hero to be someone with whom we can identify. There are two instincts woven into our fallen nature: the knowledge that we need someone to save us and the deep desire for another to understand our struggles. Lee was also well-known for his cameo appearances inside the stories he had written. Each film since X-Men in 2000 (until his death in 2018) has featured a brief incarnation of the author.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Stan Lee wasn’t the first to write himself into his storyline. Jesus did not simply rescue us from afar. He wrote himself into our story. He became a man and subjected himself to all the tyrannies of a fallen world.

Richard Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He once debated John Lennox who is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. They debated the existence of God. At one point Dawkins says of John Lennox:

He believes that the creator of the universe, the God who devised the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics, the physical constants … that this genius of mathematics and physical science could not think of a better way to rid the world of sin than to come to this little speck of cosmic dust and have himself tortured and executed so that he could forgive.

That, says Dawkins, is profoundly unscientific. Not only is it unscientific, but it doesn't do justice to the grandeur of the universe. Why would God bother entering into our small and broken planet? Dawkins chided Lennox and all Christians for believing in that kind of God.

God’s only and eternal Son on a Roman cross? Despised and rejected by men on this tiny planet. It’s like being blind-sided in the subway station on a Friday morning in Washington DC in a hurry to get to work and you pass by one of the most brilliant violinists in the world playing some of the most beautiful music in the world on one of the most expensive violins in the world. You don’t expect to see the master violinist performing in such a dirty, undignified place. But that is the very point. Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners.

Charles Price in his sermon: “God's Power in Unexpected Places,” PreachingToday.Com (March, 2014)

An article in Christianity Today traces how early African American Christianity proved the power of the Resurrection against oppression.

In their book The Genesis of Liberation, scholars Emerson Powery and Rodney Sadler Jr. explore what they call the "miracle" of how many African American slaves came to faith in Christ. For most of them, Jesus was the "White Man's Savior." They used Jesus and the Bible to pacify slaves and justify their enslavement.

Miraculously, many African Americans, though not all, became Christians and attributed authority to the Bible. The question that remains is why. Why did enslaved Africans embrace the religion of their captors, who used the Bible to justify the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Here is their simple answer: "They fell in love with the God of Scripture … In Christ they found salvation from their sins and reconciliation." They write that in the Bible they found not just an otherworldly God offering spiritual blessings, but a here-and-now God who cared principally for the oppressed, acting to deliver the downtrodden from their abusers. They also found Jesus, a suffering Savior whose life and struggles paralleled their own struggles.

As they came in contact with this God, they found a different reality in him: the reality of Resurrection power. It was the reality of Jesus' death and resurrection that created a community of faith and … provided slaves with a theology of "resistance." The Resurrection had proved its power; there are Christians—even among African Americans.

In his everyday life, Charles Foster is a respected veterinarian, a practicing lawyer, and a teacher at Oxford University in England. But as noted in his book Being a Beast, Foster also has an unusual practice. Every so often Foster tries to live like a badger. Yes, like one of those dark-dwelling, tunnel-making, rodent and worm-eating mammals. Usually he does this alone, though for a few days he went with his eight-year-old son, Tom. On a friend's farm, they made a human-sized badger home, a 15-feet long hole that they would sleep in. Charles says he's probably spent six weeks living underground like this over the years, sleeping during the day, awake at night like real badgers.

For Foster the main part of living like a badger involves getting low to the ground, crawling around on his hands and knees. He also blindfolds his eyes (because badgers' eyesight is terrible) and eats earthworms (since 85 percent of a badger's diet consists of worms).

Now as strange and even repugnant as this sounds, think of something even stranger and potentially more repugnant—the God of all creation who exists in perfect beauty and splendor becoming a human being and living on our fallen planet—and there was no escape for a full human lifetime. Jesus Christ came to us not just as an interesting nature experiment. Nor was he repulsed by us. He came out of love to rescue us from our sin.

On his 39th birthday, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer. He wrote frankly about the agonizing effects of his illness and the treatments.

I have had bones die and bowels fail; joints lock in my face and arms and legs, so that I could not eat, could not walk … I have passed through pain I could never have imagined, pain that seemed to incinerate all my thoughts of God and to leave me sitting there in the ashes, alone.

When the diagnosis came, Wiman was a rising star in the literary world and the editor of a prestigious poetry publication. Though Wiman confessed his Christian faith had "evaporated in the blast of modernism and secularism to which I was exposed in college," the diagnosis started a journey that ultimately led him back to God. It wasn't a particular doctrine that drew him back to the faith, but Wiman found a friend in the suffering Messiah.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me." … The point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering. I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolute solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. I'm not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I'm suggesting that Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering.

In the face of brutal, isolating pain we don't really want answers. We want a person. At such times there is simply no substitute for the presence of Christ.

No greater pain has ever been experienced on any level than the hell of Christ suffering in this moment. But why? Because he carried all of that pain, sin, guilt, and shame in that moment. Yet on a far deeper level he was forsaken and punished for us to reconcile us to God (2 Cor. 5:18).

Tim Keller illustrates it this way:

If after a service some Sunday morning one of the members of my church comes to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," I will feel pretty bad. But if today my wife comes up to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," that's a lot worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of its loss.

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. … Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing Judgment Day. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. And the answer is: For you, for me, for us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we would never have to be. The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

He whom none may touch is seized;

He who looses Adam from the curse is bound.

He who tries the hearts and inner thoughts of man is unjustly brought to trial;

He who closed the abyss is shut in prison.

He, before whom the powers of heaven stand trembling, stands before Pilate;

The Creator is struck by the hands of his creature.

He who comes to judge the living and the dead is condemned to the cross.

The destroyer of hell is enclosed in a tomb.

O thou who dost endure all these things in thy tender love,

Who has saved all men from the curse,

O long-suffering Lord, glory to thee.

Sever Christmas from Good Friday and the result would be to doom Christmas as nothing more than a time to be merry and gay based on Lore.

The mystery of the humanity of Christ, that He sunk Himself into our flesh, is beyond all human understanding.

There was a time during the most horrible persecutions of the Jews by the Nazis in Poland that an old Jewish cemetery keeper came into the cemetery one morning and found that during the night a woman had crept into an open grave and there given birth to a son. And she had died. He found this child, and he said to himself and to others about, "This must be the Messiah, for only the Messiah could choose to be born in a grave."

Well, it wasn't the Messiah; the child died before noon of that day. But the truth of which that cemetery keeper spoke is absolutely accurate. Only the Messiah of God could choose to be born in a grave. Only a God who loves as our God loves could come into the midst of all the pain of life and death and here bring his grace.