For Monday of Holy Week

From our congregational devotions, Devoted.

Monday, March 30

Lowell Hennigs

Monday in Holy Week

Read Isaiah 42:1-9

Being God’s Friends

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) once wrote, “If this is how God treats his friends, it’s no wonder he has so few of them!”  In the first half of Holy Week, we can read from the Songs of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 40-55.  The prophet describes one who will save by suffering, who will win by losing, who will live by dying.

It is not surprising that Jesus takes these songs to describe his vocation and his destiny.  The God whose heart is love, whose nature is compassion and whose way is peace—that God would come apart at the seams if God tried to save the world through violence and coercion.  So the path of suffering service is the only way.

This Suffering Servant is the one in whom God’s soul delights.  We can hear echoes of Jesus’ baptism at this point.  “You are my beloved Son,” God says to Jesus, “in whom I am well-pleased.”  Lovely words, but God has a funny way of showing it.  From that moment, Jesus is pitched into a battle with sin, death and evil.  That battle takes Jesus to a violent death.

If this is how God treats God’s friends…

And yet, this is the nature of love.  There can be no other way.  As C. S. Lewis reminds us in The Four Loves, to love is to be vulnerable, to be “wound-able.”  To love is to risk having your heart broken, over and over.  And the only way to avoid that risk is to shut your heart up in a loveless casket.

To live without loving is to be dead before you know it.

So this is precisely how God must treat God’s friends.  We are partners now in that task of saving the world through loving self-giving.  We dare not do violence in the name of Jesus, for it we do we contradict our call.  Instead, we suffer the price of loving.

Let’s pray.  Thank you, God, for your willingness to suffer our pain and heal our sin.  Use us to love the world you love.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.