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Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?
From the Midweek Lenten series:
Job and Jesus: The Mystery of Human Suffering
Text: Isaiah 53:1-11; Hebrews 12:1-2
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
March 17, 1993
Transcription of the spoken sermon
The question tonight is whether suffering can be vicarious, that is, on behalf of
another or in the place of another. Or, perhaps, is suffering redemptive? Is it
possible that there is a suffering in the world that works for the salvation of the
world? Not thereby attempting to rationalize suffering or to take away anything
that I have said in the last couple of weeks about suffering, but simply
recognizing that suffering is a mystery in our human experience, and asking the
question: beyond the fact that in so many cases we can simply give no reason for
it, beyond the fact that we want to affirm that it is not punishment and there is
not a causal connection between sin and suffering as we have seen in the Book of
Job, nonetheless, is it possible that sometimes suffering has a positive, saving
consequence? That’s really the question.
In the Old Testament, as I said, obviously in that servant poem, there was the
conviction that there would be one who would suffer and thereby bring salvation
to many. Through this one, who bore the sin and the grief of the many, there
would come salvation. “He will see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.”
Interpreted by the Christian Church after Good Friday and Easter as a portrait of
Jesus, it is very possible that Jesus fed his own soul on these servant songs. It is
very possible that when Jesus moved away from John the Baptist with his calling
down of the judgment of God on humankind and announcing the end world, that
Jesus, moving away from that mentality of John, found his own identity and his
own ministry in these servant poems: that he was not to be the Elijah who would
come and bring down fire from heaven, but that he was to be the servant who in
his exemplary life and in his suffering would effect salvation. It is difficult to say.
We can’t really say that. We can say that the New Testament Church certainly
understood the life and the death of Jesus in those terms.
It seems as though there is something, not only in Israel’s state tradition, but
really in a wide spectrum of religious systems, or a wide spectrum of religious
expressions that there is some sense that something has to happen to deal with
© Grand Valley State University
�Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?
Richard A. Rhem
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what is wrong in the world in order to make it right. That something has to be
paid. Or that someone has to pay. Now it has certainly been a part of Old
Testament faith as well as some interpretations of the New Testament at the
heart of things, but it’s not only biblical faith but also many other faiths as well
have some kind of sacrificial system. It seems as though there is something very
primal in the human person that believes that God must be appeased, that we are
wrong and need to be put in the right, and that in order for that to be effected
some offering has to be made. I say that’s not only in the biblical tradition; it
seems to be in religion in general, and I wonder then if it is not something very
primal in the human person.
Is there hell to pay? For example, we read about genocide in Bosnia. Not just
genocide or ethnic cleansing, but the methodical rape of Muslim women as a
strategy of war in order to dehumanize, in order to impregnate with a generation
of children over against whom there would be this equivocation. The systematic
rape of women by an army of men as a military strategy. How does that make you
feel? The last time the Balkans erupted there was a world conflagration, and then
there arose a Hitler who conceived of the final solution using the Jewish people
as scapegoats. Ripping families apart. The Holocaust. Six million Jews in the gas
ovens. How does that make you feel? There is a report by the United Nations that
has just come out which I think will probably (It’s always a little risky to call these
things at this point.) reveal the complicity of the United States government, the
Reagan and Bush administrations, in the financing of the El Salvadorian conflict.
They supported the army over against the guerilla groups that perhaps had as
much atrocity on their side. Though there were voices raised about the fact that it
needed to be a political solution, nonetheless, we continued to pour in guns and
tanks and helicopters, and military advisors, supplying a regime that murdered
the Catholic nuns. We were part of the configuration that gunned down
Archbishop Romero who had taken the side of the poor in El Salvador. We the
superpower, in order to make sure that Communism did not get an inroad into
Central America, we are all tied up in the atrocities, the massacres of the people
in El Salvador. That report will reveal more than we will want to know. I could
not help but feel repulsion, revulsion, as I saw Alexander Haig, at a Senate
committee testifying about the fact that perhaps the nuns were gunned down
because they tried to run a blockade! How cynical can we be?
I just got a little tail end of a clip of a movie that’s being produced. James Garner
is going to be in it. I don’t know what it is going to be called. It’s about the sale of
the R.J. Reynolds Company and the breaking up of all its subsidiaries in a move
which turned that business into a cash cow, weakened the industry, split up the
conglomerate, had absolutely no concern about the future of the companies or
the economy of this nation, but was a bold and blatant grasp for immediate
money, capital. Apparently they are making a movie about it now. I don’t know
what will happen, but it will be interesting to see. It is a story that happened two
or three years ago. I had 100 shares of R.J. Reynolds, and a member of this
congregation called me, my broker, who said, “It just went up 20 points. Do you
© Grand Valley State University
�Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?
Richard A. Rhem
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want to sell?” And I said, “Yes.” If I had waited another week it would have gone
up another 20 points. But Gordon Van Hoeven said, “You can be a bull but you
hadn’t ought to be a hog.” (Laughter) So I sold and made $2,000. Somehow or
other I am also in complicity with this move in corporate America that was a
blatant grasp for immediate cash. Perhaps the problem with our economy is the
fact that there has been so much greedy grasping for the short term, a refusal to
pour the resources into research and development, or to look at the long term
and the good of the nation. Who would look for the long term good of the nation?
Well, obviously there are those of you here present who could speak to these
financial questions with much greater erudition. I mean simply to be thinking
about our world, and I am asking you: Is there anything wrong with the world?
Are there things that are so obscene, so unspeakably awful that it would be
obscene to say that God can simply say, “Well, I forgive you”? Is it possible, given
what I have set forth as admittedly extreme instances, but which nonetheless are
part of a fabric of wrongdoing – is it possible that the only thing that needs to be
done is for God to say, “You are forgiven”? I wonder if that primal thing in the gut
of humankind has resulted in religions coming up with sacrifices and offerings. In
Israel it became the conception of Isaiah 2, the innocent suffering on behalf of the
others, the one bearing the guilt of the many. In the Christian Church, Jesus is
seen as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” I think that’s
perhaps all of a piece, and it is all that kind of primal sense we have that it would
not be decent for God to say, “It doesn’t matter. I forgive you.”
Now the problem that I have is that I don’t believe that God is a God of
retribution. I don’t believe that God is going to line us up against the wall and say,
“tit for tat.” It seems to me that that system would fall right back into the trap of
the thing that we saw in Job, where God rewards the righteous and punishes the
wicked. The Book of Job said, “No, that’s not so.” And what I see in Jesus also
says, “No, that’s not so.”
So, how does a God who would be gracious deal with that which is so terribly
wrong in our world without just making light of it and pushing it aside as though
it wasn’t there? How does God deal with that awful evil and still grace us and
redeem us? That I think is all tied up in the Mystery of Jesus’ life and Jesus’
death. Certainly Jesus died because he lived the way he lived. And living the way
he lived he ran into the Hitlers and the Bosnias, the El Salvadors and the R.J.
Reynolds of this world, which means he ran into all of us. And so in that sense he
did die because of the sin of the world.
But I wonder, in all of the biblical metaphors that are used in trying to get a
handle on this Mystery, I wonder if somehow or other in identifying with Jesus
who felt abandoned, God was absorbing into God’s self all of the pain and
darkness and evil and wrong. I don’t know. I just wonder if the Mystery of the
cross, symbolized in the darkness and the cry of God’s forsakenness, was the
identification of God with Jesus, soaking up like a sponge all of the acid and
© Grand Valley State University
�Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
venom and bloodshed of human existence in order that God could say to all of us,
“You are forgiven.” Not cheaply because it doesn’t really matter, but in a costly
fashion because somehow or other God swallowed the poison, God’s self in our
brother Jesus, who drank the cup to the dregs. Somehow or other in the Christian
Church there has been an understanding of Jesus as bearing our sin, as suffering
in our place.
I suppose the power of the Christian Gospel stems from the fact that it speaks to
that primal sense within us that somehow or other all of the hell that has been
suffered in this world cannot simply be shoved aside, but needs to be absorbed,
which is maybe the hell of Calvary and the desolation that Jesus experienced. If
that is true, then maybe we can see Jesus in the history of Israel as in his life,
living out what Israel was called to be: the servant of the Lord, and it is life living
it out. Living it out as that one exemplar on behalf of us all, and being faithful
even unto death, thereby fulfilling what we are called to be and calling us to
follow in his footsteps. Then he gathers us into himself, absorbs all of our wrongs,
and all of our pain, and all of our suffering, suffering for us and not without the
fruit of salvation. For God raised Him up. God said, “It is enough.”
And now to the whole world and the whole human race is the glad announcement
that there is forgiveness. There is grace through Jesus Christ our Lord. I don’t
know, but it seems to me sometimes one can suffer on behalf of another and
bring salvation.
© Grand Valley State University
�
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
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An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
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Rhem, Richard A.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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English
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Sound
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
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Event
Midweek Lent
Series
Job and Jesus: The Mystery of Human Suffering, Midweek Lent
Scripture Text
Isaiah 53:1-11, Hebrews 12:1-2
Location
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Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
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KII-01_RA-0-19930317
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1993-03-17
Title
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Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?
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Richard A. Rhem
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
Relation
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Text
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audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 17, 1993 entitled "Suffering: Can It Be Vicarious?", as part of the series "Job and Jesus: The Mystery of Human Suffering, Midweek Lent", on the occasion of Midweek Lent, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Isaiah 53:1-11, Hebrews 12:1-2.
Forgiveness
Grace
Hebrew Servant Poems
Nature of God