Tonight, I’d like to introduce you to someone. He was a writer and preacher from the 16th century, and he left an amazing legacy to the Church: no, he’s not Martin Luther, he’s Ignatius of Loyola.
Ignatius was a dashing Spanish soldier with a brilliant career ahead of him, but then he fought in a momentous battle in 1521. During the battle, a cannonball ricocheted off a wall and shattered his leg. Ignatius was almost killed and he was left with very little hope of survival.
Left convalescing in his father’s castle, he figured that all of his dreams of fame and fortune were forever gone.
Desiring for some way to pass the time, Ignatius figured he would read about the exploits of brave knights and dashing cavaliers - anything that would be cathartic and pleasurable. But all that was available to read was a book on the life of Jesus and a book on the lives of the saints.
As Ignatius read these books, he slowly noticed changes in his heart and mind. His imagination was “baptized” as he entered into the stories. He imagined he was in Galilee, walking next to Jesus. He imagined he was at the foot of the Cross, holding hands with the Lord’s mother. Day after day Ignatius read the life of Jesus and the lives of the saints. And day after day in his heart and mind he was fasting, praying, proclaiming, and worshiping with his own Lord and these men and women from the past.
It was here, in a kind of hospital room, lying in his bed, that Ignatius converted. As soon as he was well enough to manage a limp, he left his father’s castle to live a new life to the new Leader of his life.
And his life was far from being bleak or boring; Ignatius soon sojourned to part of Spain to live as a cave-dwelling hermit for a time, he made a barefoot pilgrimage to the Holy Land and lived there for a month, and he marched into the pope’s presence in Rome to establish a new religious order called the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, which exists to this day.
Ignatius wrote a lot on the Christian life, but probably his greatest insight for the worldwide Church was that the thoughts and images that flood the heart every day fall into two categories: desolation and consolation. In desolation, Satan and our sinful flesh tempt us, depress us, and mislead us. In consolation, the Holy Spirit and our sanctified conscience works through Word and Image to save, guide, and comfort. In all of his writings, there is this recurring invitation to believers to pay attention to their thoughts, imaginations, and feelings - to pay attention, because either the Devil or the Spirit is stirring our heart.
You can learn more about this in an important manual Ignatius wrote called “Spiritual Exercises.” These are exactly what they sound like, a Christian training program to deepen one’s spiritual life and to draw one closer to God.
A central part of the spiritual exercises is the practice Ignatius calls “contemplation,” it’s a slow, attentive way to receive into heart, mind, and imagination the stories, people, and images of Holy Scripture. It is essentially a way to recognize and welcome the consolations that the Spirit brings to us through Word and story.
Always the ambitious one, Ignatius planned an entire regimen of biblical contemplation, beginning with Adam and Eve, and proceeding through the Ascension of our Lord. When he gets to the Gospels’ narrative on the suffering and death of Jesus, he asks his readers to linger for a long time. In his book on spiritual exercises he outlines what you can do each day to become fully immersed in God’s story.
Tonight, I want you to take some guidance from Ignatius and linger in the stories and images of Jesus. Contemplate them. Receive them with a heart that longs to know God better and love him more deeply.
Tonight before you is the gift of the prophet Isaiah - his fourth Servant Song.
"Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem."
Tonight I don’t have a pep talk. I don’t have Lutheran talking points. I don’t have a heart warming story. I don’t have a solution to the Coronavirus. During this pandemic which is getting crazier by the day, I can’t give you an answer to your WHY questions. I can’t give you anything to change the past. I can’t give you any fix.
I can only give to you the pure, holy, limitless Word of God - the Word which never returns empty, which never fails, which never misleads, and which always transforms us.
So tonight, I invite you to contemplate this Man - the Suffering Servant. Welcome the feelings that come to you. Feelings of pity and love, of worship and thanksgiving.
Encourage your heart to pay attention to the details of his story, and ask yourself, “What is God bringing to me tonight? Where in my life does God seek transformation? How else is He guiding me?”
Ask yourself these questions and any others as we follow our Suffering Servant through the Scriptures.
The Psalmist - “All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: 'He trusts in the Lord; let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.’”
And again, “Malicious witnesses rise up; They ask me of things that I do not know.”
Isaiah - “I gave My back to those who strike Me, And My cheeks to those who pluck out the beard; I did not cover My face from humiliation and spitting.”
Zechariah - “[W]hen they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.”
Matthew - “They spit in his face and struck him. And some slapped him, saying, ‘Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?’”
Mark - “Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, "Prophesy!" And the guards took him and beat him.”
Luke - “Now the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him as they beat him.”
To John - “When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!”
Paul - “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Peter - “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
This is quite a picture of the King of Kings, isn’t it? How mysterious God is, that He should save us through this sufferer - this broken, crucified God-Man - this Messiah who comes to us as someone with no beauty or majesty, but only deformity.
His deformity and death gives to us beauty and life.
Saint Augustine meditates on this paradox and writes, “It is Christ’s deformity that gives form to you. For if he had been unwilling to be deformed, you would never have gotten back the form you lost. So he hung on the cross deformed; but his deformity is our beauty. Therefore in this life let us hold fast to the deformed Christ. What do I mean by the deformed Christ? Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. That is the deformity of Christ. Have I ever spoken to you about anything except that way? This is the way to believe in the crucifix. We carry the sign of this deformity on the forehead.”
God stooped this low to restore us, to recover His Image in each of us. God took on our human flesh - divinity was joined to humanity - in order to repair our humanity and raise us up to God. The Word became flesh and the Word died on the cross. One of the Trinity suffered for us. This is something so unthinkable and so ugly, but it has become for us something so beautiful. Carry the cross not only on your foreheads, but in your hearts, and lives, and homes. Carry it especially now, in these uncertain days. Amen.
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| A contemporary watercolor of Ignatius of Loyola, from www.ignatianspirituality.com |
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