Jesus knows it is their last supper together and he makes no secret of it. “This is my body,” he says, picking up the bread. He breaks it in two and gives it away to them – “take … eat …“ And then the wine. “This is my blood which is poured out,” he tells them, “Drink of it all of you,” and while the stain of it is still dark on their lips, he says, “I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

It is the great Messianic Feast to take place beyond time that he is speaking of, but he must have had a hard time believing in it there in that stuffy room full of frightened Jews.

When he first sent them out as disciples, he reminds them, he told them to take no purse or bag or sandals, nothing to arm themselves against the world, “but now let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag, and let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one.” This side of paradise there is to be no paradise, and this side of “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” there is to be no peace that they are likely to understand. They are going to have to fight fire with fire, he tells these feckless men, and if it is to be a fire that lights the way to truth, it will also kindle the blaze of their own cruel martyrdom. He promises them no less.

And then they sing a hymn, the Gospels say. Their mouths spit dry, not one of them with heart enough to carry a tune. Their voices thin and quavering as they try to keep their spirits up, they belt out some crazy, holy song and leave for the Mount of Olives where Jesus says, “You will all fall away.” (Mark 14:27)

Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus

He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;” “by his wounds we are healed”; “and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Every year during Lent and Holy Week we hear read aloud these and similar words from Isaiah’s songs of the suffering servant, but I wonder to what extent we actually contend with them. It is too easy to hear such words and without really thinking just take them to be words about Jesus Christ. He died for us, and that death atones for the sins of the world. As Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians, “through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

And yet it is impossible to know precisely what Isaiah had in view when he offered us these images. Perhaps it is Israel itself, broken and suffering in captivity in Babylon. And notice that Isaiah speaks not of death but of suffering. It is no doubt true to say that whatever else he understood his poetry to mean, just about the last thing he would have had in view was the idea of a dead Messiah.

How, too, can deep suffering reasonably be proclaimed as bringing about a good? We avoid suffering, and recoil when we see other humans caught in its grip. We recoil, or maybe in that emotional exhaustion called “compassion fatigue,” we reach for the remote and change the channel on the television.

Isaiah’s “poetry cannot be reduced to a rational formula,” says Walter Brueggemann. “It must remain poetry that glides over rational reservation. We are not told how hurt and guilt can be reassigned and redeployed from one to another. We are not told how the suffering of one makes healing possible for another. But it is so here; ‘we’ have thus been healed and made whole.”  And at this point Brueggemann notes that Isaiah offers no theory of atonement; nothing of the mechanics of how this might happen. “Instead, the poem offers a confession, an admission, a dazzlement, and an acknowledgement.” “And by his wounds, we are healed.”

We are healed, we are made whole, but is there any sense that we have been lifted beyond suffering and struggle? Perhaps ultimately—that is part of the deep mystery of Christ, whose blood shall give a final peace to the whole of heaven and earth—but in the mean time? No. There remains the suffering of grief over the death of a loved one, the physical and emotional pain experienced in our sometimes all too vulnerable selves, the suffering that comes with having cared enough to risk love. Paul even writes of how he wants “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,” (Phil 3:10) by which he seems to be saying that to follow Jesus is to be prepared to do as he did. That kind of “following,” though, can also do its own very particular kind of work.

During the opening years of the Second World War, a Polish Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) provided shelter in his order’s friary to countless refugees, including some 2,000 Jews. For his efforts, on February 17, 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and three months later was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670. Just two months later, a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, the consequence of which was for ten other prisoners to be starved to death in the camp’s notorious Block 13. One of these men selected at random was Franciszek Gajowniczek, who cried out in a kind of agonized protest that he had a family to whom he hoped to return. At this point Father Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place.

After three weeks in the starvation cell, Kolbe and three others were still alive, and so in the end he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid.

Of this portion of Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant, Brueggemann writes, “This is no cold, detached, reasonable statement. It is, rather, the voice of those who have been healed and are as bewildered as they are grateful.” As bewildered as they are grateful…

Franciszek Gajowniczek survived his imprisonment in Auschwitz, and later recalled:

“I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me—a stranger. Is this some dream?”

The voice of one who has been saved, and who is as bewildered as he is grateful.

“For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.”

“I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise.” Though tattooed as Auschwitz prisoner number #16670, it was the imprint of Christ deep on Kolbe’s soul that defined him that day. Beyond cold, detached, and reasonable ways of knowing, something so upside-down as suffering and dying for a total stranger became a powerfully restorative act.

And by Christ’s wounds we are healed. Healed, and perhaps made ready to follow.

Amen.

Although numbers only tell a small part of the story, over 500 guests and 60 volunteers from 7 different churches joined together to share food, fun, music, conversation, and a few highly competitive games of Scrabble together. A HUGE thank you to everyone who prayed, volunteered, or has made a financial donation to help make this event possible.

It is also a privilege to pass along thanks from Agape Table and the guests who came out that day. I have received an overwhelming number of thanks you’s and kind comments in the last couple of days.

One of the key things we hope that people come away with after their experience at Agape Table is the simple fact that every person is unique and has something to offer. From a distance we often try to generalize and talk about “those people” but that kind of thinking is impossible when you’re sitting together at a table sharing a meal.

If you volunteered this year, I think you know what I mean. And if you didn’t volunteer this year, then there’s always next year!

In his book Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves, the philosopher of aesthetics Calvin Seerveld offers the following observations around what it might mean for an artist of faith to create a truly Christian art:

What really has given ‘christian art’ its bad name has been the cheap way that stock motifs such as conversions, happy endings or Bible phrases are popped in like vitamin pills to pep up one-dimensional, outdated material which is then sold as ‘Christian novels,’ ‘Christian plays,’ or ‘Christian songs.’ Using Christ in that way is, in my judgment, taking his Name in vain. You do not get the rare pearl of Christian art by dubbing in a few crosses or chalices, or by draping a good-old-days kind of atmosphere around a trite plot. Christian art in our days, I believe, will take suffering to produce.[1]

While that might sound as if Seerveld is drawing on the old stereotype of the so-called “tortured artist,” this is not at all the case. What he is pointing to is the reality that in our current social and cultural context for the Christian artist to do his or her art authentically is to risk rejection, marginalization, misunderstanding.

But why, really, should that surprise us? So many of the people we point to as heroes in this faith were rejected and misunderstood; people who suffered for the sake of their gospel vocations. Think, for instance, of 20^th century figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both of whom not only suffered, but actually died for the sake of that in which they believed.

And then think of Jesus, whose life was lived in such perfect accord with the Sermon on the Mount that the dominant powers of his own day seemed to see little option but to put him to death.

But for all that, suffering is a word we don’t much like. It is a dead end; we all want a comfortable life and a painless death.

We’re not the first ones to wish for such a path in life, which is why when the prophet Isaiah sings his strange songs of God’s suffering servant we should recall that his original audience found them all at least as baffling as we do… maybe even more so.

The great heroes of recent memory in Isaiah’s world were kings, particularly David and his son Solomon. Sure, David had paid his dues when he was forced to flee from King Saul and to earn his keep as a bandit and a mercenary. But even in the worst of days, David never ceased dreaming of establishing a proper kingdom, with a royal city, a palace, a holy temple (which, of course, he was never to build…). And in spite of his reputation for being a man of great wisdom, Solomon really defined himself by his building projects, his wealth, and the strength of his standing army. This is how God’s presence should be made manifest in a proper kingdom, right?

Which makes those songs of Isaiah all the more odd and enigmatic. In the brief passage we read aloud tonight—just three verses, which more or less set the course for all that will follow during these Lenten Wednesday evenings—we heard language of exaltation regarding this servant of the Lord, but also words that point to his humiliation, brokenness, and suffering: “so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals.”

Who is this servant of the Lord, who in and through his mortification, “shall startle many nations,” causing even kings—kings, of all people—to “shut their mouths because of him” in a kind of jaw-dropping silence? Who did the prophet Isaiah have in view when he first offered these songs? Frankly it is impossible to know; and maybe Isaiah himself didn’t really have a clue about the subject of his songs. Judaism has long seen the servant as being Israel itself—Israel broken and defeated by Babylon, and Israel rebuilt against all odds. The Christian tradition has read these songs as pointing to Jesus Christ—broken in his crucifixion, and radically vindicated in his resurrection. And maybe both are good and fair and true readings.  “The claim,” observes Walter Brueggemann, “is that both Jews and Christians have seen in their own history, in quite particular ways, the capacity and willingness of this God to do something new through suffering. [It is] a deeply inscrutable claim that speaks powerfully against common worldly insistences that suffering is a dead end with no future…”

We are tempted, in our sometimes numbingly comfortable society, to imagine that there is nothing worse than death—nothing worth dying for, in fact—and that suffering is to be avoided at all costs. Yet through the words of the prophet Isaiah we are challenged to recall that to God suffering is not necessarily a dead end, and death does not—cannot—have the final word. God’s “new thing” can and will break in, even when all seems to have ended in defeat.

So artists of vision will create truth-telling pieces of art or music, without any guarantee that they will be recognized, much less able to make a living; Martin Luther King will challenge a movement to resist returning hatred with more hate, Bonhoeffer will utter his defining “no” to the killing spirit of Naziism, and both will end up being killed for their efforts; and from an executioner’s cross Jesus will utter those jaw-dropping words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And in the midst of what at times can seem to be only loss and defeat, God’s new thing will again have broken through. We are to be a people trained to look upon a cross of wood, and to dare to see in it not merely a death, but also what Frederick Buechner called “the magnificent defeat.”

Amen.

Nicholas Greco is Assistant Professor of Communications and Media at Providence University College and a pioneering fellow of The Canadian Institute for the Study of Pop Culture and Religion. He has recently published “Only If You Are Really Interested”: Celebrity, Gender, Desire and the World of Morrissey on McFarland Press.

• To listen to the podcast, simply click the arrow

The podcast is also available as an  iTunes download.

The next day Colleen Peters sent along the following reflection on this great prayer, written by Frederick Buechner and originally published in his book Whistling in the Dark: a Doubter’s Dictionary. If you’ve never read any of Buechner’s work, this might just inspire you to dig in a little deeper:

In the Episcopal [Anglican] order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say…” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying.

“Thy will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come… on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.

You need to be bold in another way to speak the second half. Give us. Forgive us. Don’t test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God’s, it perhaps takes no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do nothing without God. We can have nothing without God. Without God we are nothing.

It is only the words “Our Father” that make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed something like a father, then as something like children maybe we can risk approaching him anyway.  – Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

 

You might notice, by the way, that Buechner writes how in the Anglican liturgy the priest often introduces the prayer by saying, “Now, as our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say,” while at saint benedict’s table I always change the word “say” to “pray.” We are bold to pray, because to my mind such words really must be prayed, not simply spoken. It is when we pray them that they do their deep and at times unsettling work, reminding us that there is yet work to be done. And thankfully, this God of ours knows us the way a parent knows a child…

Whistling in the Dark is a great introduction to Buechner’s writing, as is a similar collection of short pieces called Wishful Thinking: a seeker’s ABC. You can also watch an excerpt from a film on Buechner’s life and work by clicking here.

Jamie Howison

Behind Gord’s song is a famous quote from the writings of a fourteenth-century mystic and theologian, Julian of Norwich. In her one book, The Revelations of Divine Love, Julian reflects on a series of sixteen visions or “showings” that she received over two days in 1373. In The Revelations, Julian writes of how at the age of thirty she experienced these visions, and then shortly thereafter moved permanently into a cell attached to the parish church of St. Julian and St. Edward in Coniston, England. In everything God revealed to her, Julian wrote, “Love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us, and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall.”

It was in light of this that she could write her most famous line, “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” That word “behovely” means something between “necessary” and “inevitable,” and what she is saying here is that sin simply is a part of the world as we know it. Sin is a source of pain and suffering, yet it is can also be a path to self-knowledge, in that insofar as we become aware of our own brokenness and failings, we may well be moved to seek God.

Yet Julian is clear that sin will not have the final say, for in God “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” As she saw in her first vision—in which God held out to her what appeared to be a hazelnut, which she realized symbolized the whole of the created universe—“the world exists, both now and for ever, because God loves it… everything owes its existence to the love of God.” Her posture, then, is not one of naïveté or of shallow optimism, but rather it is one of foundational trust.

And it is that kind of trust that informs Gord’s song.

• To listen to a basic recording of song, taken live during worship, click the arrow:

Saturday February 4 will find us in the home of Lorne and Sigrid Penner, 799 Waterloo Street (just a bit south of Grant Avenue), for an evening of music with Kerri Woelke and Jon Lawless.

Kerri Woelke is an accomplished musician whose debut CD released through Avante Records took her across Canada numerous times and received two Covenant award nominations,  as well as a Western Canadian Music Award nomination for Outstanding Christian Recording. This recording resulted in Kerri being signed to Signpost Music for her second album, Where We Were, which in turn led to an 8-month tour opening for Steve Bell. Where We Were used accomplished musicians Michael Longoria (percussion – Patty Griffin), Ryan Boldt (“Deep Dark Woods”), Steve Bell, Matt Epp and “Last Ditch On The Left” duo partner Brent Warren. Alongside of these other recordings, she was also a contributor to our Beautiful Mercy project. Currently working as part of the neo-folk duo Last Ditch on the Left, we’re delighted that Kerri will be with us for this event.

Jon Lawless is a regular at saint ben’s. He records and performs as part of First Rate People, though for this one he’ll be working solo and acoustic. For a taste of that side of John’s music, give a listen to his song “It’s Never Not Happening (Pt. 1)”. You can also click here to take a look at a story about some recording Jon did in All Saints this past autumn. In Jon’s own words, “The gift of youth is the wide-eyed innocence that accompanies it.” The desire to explore their vast musical palette is what drives Jon’s “First Rate People” project. Formed almost immediately out of high school in small town Ontario before scattering across the country, it didn’t take long for First Rate People’s world to be embraced by the one we live in today, garnering positive press in The Guardian and The Village Voice.

There is a suggested donation of $15 for the evening, which gets you a couple of sets of great live music, a bit of food and drink, and some very fine company… but we’d like to get a sense of how many people will coming, so do send an RSVP through our contact form.

17 and Crazy: A collection of thought, song, and art created by the adolescent imagination, presented by Davis Plett and friends in collaboration with saint benedict’s table

Friday January 20

7:30PM

Aqua Books, 274 Garry Street

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyrical, fanatical, poetic.” Join an eclectic mix of young people from the next generation of creatives as they attempt to be all three. In essence, “17 and Crazy” is an evening of youthful musings on Life, the Universe, and, well, pretty much Everything. Featuring performances and presentations by Davis Plett, Nanau Loewen, Elyse Loewen, Nadine Plourde, Shayn Martens, Kaitlyn Malazdrewich, Noah Falk, Cale Plett, Jase Falk, Shaylyn Plett, and Emily Baron.

Advance tickets are only $5, and can be reserved by contacting us.

Back in 1993 when Bruce Cockburn first released his album Christmas I was intrigued to discover that he’d chosen to record the well-known “Huron Carol” in its original language. Composed in 1643 by the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf and widely recognized as being the earliest Canadian Christmas carol, many of us have sung the carol—“Twas in the Moon of Wintertime”—in Jesse Edgar Middleton’s familiar 1926 version. I remember being quite delighted when I first heard Cockburn’s Huron-language version, partly because at the time I was working with a predominantly aboriginal community at Marymound School. How wonderful to be able to share this version with those girls.

Well, if I was intrigued to discover this recording, I was quite taken aback when during the course of a CBC radio broadcast I heard Cockburn read a direct English translation of Brébeuf’s Huron verses. There was no sign of the familiar “lodge of broken bark” with the child wrapped in “ragged robe of rabbit skin,” and no mention of “hunter braves” or of “chiefs from far” bringing “gifts of fox and beaver pelt.” The verses Cockburn offered in this radio broadcast sounded far less quaint and picturesque, and I recall thinking at the time that these were words meant to be sung on the Feast of the Epiphany more than at Christmas.

Being that this was all happening before the days of e-mail, I quickly wrote to Cockburn’s management company, asking if I might get a copy of the translation. In short order a photocopied document arrived, accompanied by a hand-written note wishing me all the best in my work at Marymound.

I pored over the direct English translation rendered by the Huron language scholar John Steckley, and quickly concluded that this was indeed an Epiphany hymn. The carol’s third verse introduces the figures of the magi, or “elders”:

It is in the fifth and six verses, however, that the sense of “epiphany” or “manifestation” is really emphasized:

These words celebrate the adoption of the Gentiles as sons and daughters of God through the Incarnation. And yes, some might bristle at the words in Brébeuf’s first verse as being disrespectful and dismissive of indigenous Huron religious life—“Behold, the spirit who had us as prisoners has fled / Do not listen to it, as it corrupts the spirits of our minds.” Yet I have very vivid memories of the Dakota Elder Gladys Cook making a very similar observation when speaking to those girls at Marymoud about how a trust in Jesus could stand against the fear that often creeps into our spiritual lives.

In that is found the deepest meaning of Epiphanytide.

Jamie Howison

• For the full text of John Steckley’s translation from the Huron, click here.
• Thanks to Bramwell Ryan, for the photograph of light in the darkness.