The Wounds He Inflicted

Preached at Wycliffe Hall Chapel
8^th December 2015: Morning Prayer
Isaiah 30:19-33

Lord Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, take these words, bless them, break them open to us and, by the transforming and life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, use them to feed a hungry multitude; to the glory of God the Father. Amen.

I have a confession to make. I really don’t want to be standing here preaching to you today. Now some of you are probably sat there thinking the same thing—“Oh no, not him again!” In which case, I have these very pastoral words to offer: tough luck, because here I am! Others, perhaps a bit more charitably, might be thinking to yourselves, “Well, you didn’t have to preach. They asked for volunteers to preach this week in chapel. Nobody forced you to do it.” And, of course, on one level you’d be right; but on another level, I do feel compelled to stand here today. So please let me explain…

I have a rather chequered history with Isaiah 30. You see, before coming to Wycliffe, I spent two years poring over this chapter of Scripture (and in particular vv. 18-26) for a PhD. I dissected every word of the Masoretic Hebrew text. I compared and contrasted it with the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, the Greek of the Septuagint, the Aramaic of the Targum and the Latin of the Vulgate, as well as tracing its subsequent reception history. But after all that, I’m even more baffled by this passage than I was before.

The fact is that the time I spent wrestling with this passage left me thinking, “This is not the way, and I don’t want to be walking in it!” My research was a real struggle (and not just because doing a PhD isn’t all that easy). For all sorts of reasons including the sinfulness of trusting in the Egypt of my own academic abilities, my studies left me well and truly crushed, to the point that I had to walk away from it unfinished. Sadly, those years of unhappy labour on this passage has cast a shadow over this section of Holy Scripture for me. Thus, when we were emailed to ask for volunteers to preach in chapel this week and I saw the texts for today, I knew I had to offer myself for it.

It was, therefore as I hope you can now appreciate, with quite a sense of foreboding that I heard a word from behind me, a forsaken voice from the past, saying, “This is the text; preach on it!” My years of working with these verses left me battered and bruised; through them I felt that the Lord had inflicted a painful wound on me. And yet, that wound is also now the very reason that I’m here at Wycliffe Hall training for ministry, which leads me very neatly onto our text for today:
The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted. (Isaiah 30:26)

It’s an incredible vision, isn’t it? The moon will shine like the sun. The sun will shine seven (yes, seven—the Hebrew number of perfection, completeness, shalom) times brighter than usual, like the light of seven days squeezed into one. What’s promised is a veritable explosion of light, a supernova no less. And this to a people who have been devastated, to a people who have rejected the word of the Lord and been left naked and exposed like a lonely banner on a hill. The entire created order participates in God’s restoration of His people. It’s incredible.

And yet, there are four words at the end of this verse to make even the apologists among us squirm: “the wounds He inflicted.” We like the idea of the Lord binding up our bruises, don’t we? That fits brilliantly with the psycho-therapeutic gospel that we think people might buy into. But the Lord healing the wounds that He inflicted? Now that is a much harder sell. The problem is that it doesn’t sound like good news. In fact, it sounds like bad news. You can imagine the evangelistic appeal: “Come, give your life to the Lord. He’ll wound you, but don’t worry, he’ll heal you again.” You can hear the stampede of people rushing forward, can’t you?

But what if this really is good news? The blinding luminescence of the sun and moon and the healing of the wound the Lord inflicted are linked. And notice also what is described in the first half of that verse. It’s not a simple return to the way things were. No, on the day that the Lord heals the wounds He inflicted, the light will be seven times brighter than it was before. The light is even more glorious for the darkness that God made His people endure. As strange and as unpopular as it might sound, it seems that God has a special way of using pain to mediate His grace to us.

I can certainly testify to that in my own experience. As painful and as agonising as my time studying Isaiah 30 was, I firmly believe I am in a better place for it. Through it the Lord shattered the illusion of my academic abilities as something worth trusting in. He showed my intellect for the splintered staff it is. And I am better for it. Oh, it hurt. It hurt like hell at the time. But thank God he inflicted that wound because through it I heard once more the word we are always rejecting, always turning our backs on, always casting behind us to trust something else—“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.”  But I, like Israel before me, you would have none of it.” (Isaiah 30:15)

The truth is that God’s salvation doesn’t look particularly convincing. In the face of the overwhelming might of the superpower of your day, going to Egypt and stocking your arsenal with chariots looks a much better option than the passivity of repentance and rest, quietness and trust. We want a salvation that is much more front-foot than the weak salvation the Lord offers us. But when we go our own way and we’re battered and bruised as a consequence, it’s then that we hear that wonderful voice pointing us back to the cross of Jesus Christ and saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

“The wounds He inflicted” sounds like bad news. But maybe this verse says that actually it’s good news. And it’s good news because it is the Lord who inflicts the wounds upon us. The rich young man of whom we read in the Gospels heard Jesus’ words to go and sell everything he had as severity; He couldn’t comprehend that it might be grace. And it’s grace because when the Lord heals, He doesn’t just restore us to our former glory, our pre-wounded state; but makes us infinitesimally more glorious than before, healthier than before He wounded us.

The fact is that if we hang around God long enough, we will be bruised and He will wound us. He will ruthlessly destroy every illusion that we so foolishly and persistently cling to that there is some security or strength that exists apart from Him. By making us eat the bread of adversity and drink the water of affliction, He would show us where truth is to be found. The wounds He inflicts would send us running back again and again to the cross of Jesus Christ. The Lord wounds His people; but unlike the wounds He afflicts on Assyria (vv. 27-33), He wounds His people in order to heal them, to heal them of their self-sufficiency. And that is good news—very good news.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rest

Preached at Holmfirth Methodist Church
6th July 2014: 3rd Sunday after Trinity (Prayer Service)
Psalm 145:8-14; Matthew 11:25-30

“Lord, you are great, and greatly to be praised. Awaken us to delight in your praises, for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

St. Augustine, who first prayed this prayer some 1,600 odd years ago, was, for much of his youth, a rather restless young man. He spent many years searching for meaning, purpose and direction to his life, and that search led him to look for it in many different places. It was during this time, in fact, that he famously asked God to grant him chastity and continence (that is, self-restraint), just not yet. St. Augustine, like so many of us, sought things which would make him happy, things which would give him some sense of satisfaction or significance, things which would give rest to his restless soul. What he found was that only Jesus, the Creator-Lord, could fill the void inside of him.

“Come to me, all who labour and heavy-laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” No doubt, in a few hours times, there will be a good many cyclists passing through here for whom the promise of rest would be an enticing prospect. And yet, this is a particular kind of rest that Jesus is talking about. The truth that St. Augustine discovered was that if there is a God who created us, who made us in love to relate to him, then any attempt to define ourselves, to build a life or identity apart from him will leave us empty and unfulfilled. If we were made by God for life with God, then only life with God at the centre will give us the rest, the fulfilment, we crave.

Whatever we life for, whatever we derive our sense of self from, whatever we look to in order to give us our identity—who we are, that is our god, our Lord. For some people, like the young St. Augustine, their god is sex. For others, it might be family. For others still, it might be their career. Suppose, however, you make being a parent the centre of your life and your children grow up and leave home or don’t turn out as you’d hoped, you’ll be devastated. Alternatively, suppose you make your job the most important thing in your life and you’re made redundant or you have an accident which prevents you from doing it any more, your self-worth and security will be shaken to the core. It’s not that a career or family are bad things, not at all; it’s just that when we try to make them the main thing, they can’t bear the load we’re trying to put on them.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” Jesus says, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” What we need is a wholesale reorientation of our lives until they are entirely centred on God. This is what we are to learn from Jesus. And we are to learn it from Jesus because Jesus is the only human whose life is entirely centred on God, who is completely in tune with God; he is the One whose wholehearted devotion to God led him to the Cross. And it is the Cross which is the yoke that Jesus would place upon us. “If anyone would come after me,” he says, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

“Wait a minute!” I hear you saying, “That’s not ‘easy’ or ‘light’, is it?” Welcome to the paradoxical world of costly grace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” It is costly because it asks us to take up our cross, and it is grace because it asks us follow Jesus, who is “gentle and lowly in heart” and who has already taken up his cross for us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who gave up his life for us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who, no matter how badly we fail him, will buy us back and forgive us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who, if we come to him, will give us the rest we so desperately desire. Though the yoke might appear heavy at first, we’ll find that being yoked to him is, in fact, perfect freedom.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.