Bruisers

Lections: The Baptism of the Lord, AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations … A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.

Bullying is not strength. Bullying is a weak man’s impersonation of strength. And I see it all the time: in the news, in television, often in our schools. Immature men—and it is largely men—imagine violence to be a virtue, as though might might make us right. I see little understanding of the power it takes to be gentle, to provide and to protect rather than simply to abuse. It is a weak man who cannot keep his viciousness in check.

Our world would have us believe that gentleness is not just, nor is justice gentle; that we must choose between the pushover and the brute, the open heart and the closed fist. This, I think, is why we so often misunderstand our God—one of the reasons, anyway. Make no mistake: Christ remains a conundrum. The early Church’s response to His teachings, His miracles, and especially His Resurrection was to stand dumbstruck in wonder, astonishment, and fear.

He’s a lot to process, you know? The way in which He saw the world—the way in which He makes us to see the world—caused us not merely to ask Him, “Who are you?” but “What are You?” Jesus wasn’t like any man we’d ever known. It was as though He were somehow more human than we are, the only truly human being. Yet at the same time, we came to find that this Man was divine. He did things that only God could do. He kept impossible promises.

And nothing seemed to faze Him: not sin, not rejection, not violence. He didn’t care about status or money or reputation or power. It was like He was beyond all that, beyond any fear of poverty or punishment or death. Yet that very transcendence made Him more eminently, immanently present. He saw people whom no-one else saw, loved people whom no-one else loved, forgave people whom none of us could ever seem to forgive.

And then—and then!—He would make some offhanded comment that would calm the sea, or still a storm, or set a legion of demons to flight. He could feed an army with a few dry loves and fish. He spoke to the dead and the dead got up! That’s terrifying. Everything that we’re horrified of was horrified of Him. What then does that make Him?

But then He went to the Cross, and went willingly. All of our Gospels agree on that. He could have fought back, but He didn’t. He made Peter put up his sword, even healed the slave whom Peter had wounded. Why didn’t He fight? Why didn’t He kill them all with a word? They were tyrants and foreigners, agents of a false usurping king and his imperial overlords. No-one would have mourned them. No-one would have missed them. Everyone wanted a Messiah who would fight, even Judas. Especially Judas.

Instead He did the damnedest thing. While He was being crucified—while we were murdering Him in the worst way we knew how—He said, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” My God. That is the most powerful thing that any man has ever said. Other men conquered the world, conquered empires, yet could not conquer themselves. This Man conquered death! And He did so not with fire or wrath or vengeance, but with a love that cannot die, that cannot ever be quenched; a love that fills up Hell to bursting, and shatters every tomb.

I mean, we don’t even have a category for this kind of power. It is beyond anything that we have ever known. And it remains at work in our world today.

We tried to make sense of it, of course, in the aftermath, post-Resurrection. The fact that Jesus is risen transforms both all that went before and all that follows after. We looked to the Scriptures in that light, in the light of Christ, and found Him on every page. The Prophet Isaiah, 700 years before Jesus, spoke of the Suffering Servant, an enigmatic prophetic figure who appears simultaneously to have a mission as God and on behalf of God. In Him, Isaiah prophesies, are justice and gentleness one:

A bruised reed He will not break. A dimly burning wick He will not quench. He will faithfully bring forth justice.

Why doesn’t God, we are tempted to wonder, just bring the hammer down? Why doesn’t He kill all the bad people, or at least the worst of the worst? Certainly there are those whose deaths I would not mourn, sinner that I am, whose headlines would cause rejoicing over half this benighted sphere. Why doesn’t God just snap His almighty fingers and force this world to be good? After all, we imagine, that’s what we would do if we were God.

But this is the faith of Judas: Judas, who knew that Jesus was the Messiah, who saw the power at Christ’s command; and thought that if he could just give Him a little push, force Him into a corner, then Jesus would have to fight, and all would be the better for it. But Jesus wouldn’t do it. Even nailed to a piece of wood, He would not bow to violence, or to vengeance, or to our claims to the wrath of God. Even in His death, the Cross could not break Him, could not make Him into something He was not.

That’s what Judas could not understand: the justice and the gentleness together. And when he belatedly realized all that he had wrought, he took his own life in despair. Yet I have to believe that Jesus met him in Hell. And when Christ rose, I pray they rose together.

I will not glorify weakness, nor absolve the strong of their duty to defend the vulnerable. But as soon as we imagine that justice can only be meted out through brutality, through the bomb and the blade, then Satan has already won. He has already convinced us that we must either be harsh and just, or gentle and impotent. But Christ puts the lie to all the serpent’s scheming. Real justice, real power, can only come through love. And I don’t mean that as some milquetoast platitude. “For love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, compared to love in dreams.”

But I tell you that the strongest amongst us is the gentlest, that the most human of us is divine, that the One who laid down His life for love of us is more alive than we’ve ever been. And we must reckon with that every day. For He will bring justice to the nations, and a bruised reed He will not break.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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