Silencing the Suffering Servant

It was 2:00 am on what should have been a normal night. Everyone who belonged to the house should have been in bed, awaiting in their naïve slumber for another normal day. But that night was different, and there would never be another normal day. The house was the emptiest it had ever been. In fact, the concept of home was the emptiest it had ever felt. The tangible vacancy in the air was suffocating. My sister and I sat across from one another in the sunroom, and questions hung in the air between us. My dad, at 62 years old, had died suddenly just hours ago from a massive stroke. The questions that hung in the air as they escaped our lips seemed to mock us as they took a dark and nefarious form in the middle of the room. We both wanted to be free from them, but no matter how much we poked them with our hope-tried words, they would not go away. Instead, they were more resolved in their presence to stay.

And haunt us. How would we deal with them?

The obvious question that lingered in the room, making obsolete memories assumed and hoped-for, was why he had to die now. I was 21, and my sister was 35. I had not even begun as a person. There was not anything I had done yet to be proud of. My sister had three young children who were robbed of the magical joy they had mindlessly and assuredly enjoyed just days ago of growing up with their beloved Papa.

Even more insidious in the room, stealthily entangling our throats and sitting on our chests, was having to deal with the reality that my dad suffered. Yes, he suffered in his two-day stint with a clot bent on destroying any hope of a possible earthly resurrection. But even more than that, my dad suffered his whole life because hands intended for protection were the source of the most treacherous harm.

It shadows the mind to think about parents knowing and allowing insidious abuse, all the while perpetuating further abuse themselves. My dad’s parents were bent on protecting family hands that hurt my dad, likely all for the sake of preserving their good “Christian” family reputation. They ostracized him his whole life, doing everything to show him and the watching world that they considered him to be the outsider, so that any possible help my dad sought outside of the hell he lived in was made void and obsolete. Painfully, my dad worked out of every bit of goodness in his heart, which was bigger than anything I have ever known to this day, to prove that he was worthy of their protection and love. They responded with isolation and further abuse. They made him feel that he was not worthy to be loved or protected until the day they died.

It wakes a part of the mind that God intends to sleep in unabated peace to see your dad’s face contort in recalling a “darkness” from his childhood. His eyes unwilling to open as he sheltered us from the contents of his window into hell. It was an act of love towards us then. He was not thinking about his own protection; he was thinking of ours.    

The most beautifully terrible truth in this story is the way my dad’s entirety was completely disparate from that of his entire family. My dad was one of the most remarkable people I had ever met, bent on this unceasing need to make people feel less alone. I have been told countless stories of the high school “jock” who always sought out the “nobody” kid in the cafeteria. He could not stand the idea of anyone feeling alone, and I attribute that to the suffocating loneliness he felt as a child and throughout his life with the people who should have been his first line of defense and unequivocal love. He was pure goodness and joy, easy-deep humor, and the magic of every holiday. If I knew anything about my dad, I knew that he loved me. That is a gift I know not everyone can cherish, so I do: I have something beautiful to grieve.  

But my dad’s suffering was never resolved. He just unfolded more and more darkness from the membranes of his memories as the years went on, and I saw them play out in his interactions with his family, as those old dark hours continued to manifest in his current realities. My sister, nearly fourteen years my senior, speaks of a childhood not remembering the man who struggled outside the few interactions he had with his family over the years. However, about the time I knew him, I knew a man of juxtaposition. One who nearly combusted over the love and joy he felt for the family he had made, but also perpetually drowning over the family that had failed him violently.

My sister and I sat in that room, and she kept echoing the same line under the breath of God, “I struggle that Dad struggled.” I kept trying to fix how hopeless the room felt, trying to grip sovereignty with my hands. However, it kept slipping through my fingers as we recalled the injustices of my dad’s life. So much goodness, such little reciprocation. I kept saying that if Dad had never struggled, I did not think he would have had eyes that sought and attached themselves to people overlooked and crushed by other people and even by their own decisions. People would have remained unloved in their lonesome corners of the earth had my dad never struggled. However, my sister repeated her line of struggle, and my frail words agreed and ceased, and it seemed that sovereignty not only slipped out of my hands, but out of the room, leaving us alone with our questions.  

Here I was in the frailties of the dark night of the soul and the early mornings of grief.

No justice. No resolution. No making sense of anything.  

Just questions. What was I going to do with them?

There is a man who lived thousands of years ago whom the Western World is bent on burying. He does not answer every prayer. He does not always give you your dreams or bring to fruition your “good plans.” He is not found in the fog lights on a stage. He is not always attractive to the lens of a camera. He does not sell out conferences. He does not always make you “feel” good. His power does not fit or coincide with the narratives we write ourselves. We cannot manipulate his divinity to give us what we want. His victories do not look like ours. He does not gravitate to what we are drawn to. His concerns do not always align with our own. His company repulses us. We contort at who he invites to his table. His beauty is not outward, and he would not be plastered all over the media. He does not worship the pursuit of the American dream. He is not at home in the kingdoms we build ourselves.

“…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

(Isaiah 53:2-3).

This was the man Scripture tells us was God.

But the Western church does not like this Jesus. We want a Jesus full of power and big plans for our lives. We want Jesus to give us our entitlement-soaked American Dream. We want him to drive our enterprise and entrepreneurship. We want the six or seven figures, whether that be in dollars or followers. We want the family, 2.5 kids, and the house on just enough land that we do not have to consider people neighbors. We want the platform and the notoriety. We cannot abide the idea of anything resembling weakness, especially a God who wore suffering like a robe of glory.

Suffering cannot be sovereign, so it must be silenced.

But to erase this part of God is to make obsolete the cross. There is no resurrection without the suffering isolation of the crucifixion. We do a disservice to the Church when, in the mainstream modern church movement, we water down God to a deity of “good plans,” when the God Scripture speaks of bleeds from injury.

This Jesus Isaiah describes is not the dream-granting, attractive Jesus. He was a soul born and thrust into the brutalities of life. Instead of being received into hands that should have adored him, his images in human skin, he was met by hands that abused him, tortured him, mocked him, and destroyed him. He was not removed from pain, but he loved to the utmost despite it. It sounds comfortingly familiar, even as it pierces my heart. It sounds like a God worth worshipping, One understanding the violent realities that attempt to choke his humanity free of all that reminds him of himself. The blood on our hands and our hunger for death and all its cousins were our attempt to drive earth’s maker from his favorite address. Yet, despite everything, despite us, he still came home. His defeat was our victory.

Beaten down by the violent pinpricks of our questions, my sister concluded that we needed to go to bed. As she went into my mom’s room, substituting for my dad’s empty space in their bed, I lingered in the darkness of the hallway upstairs. How does one close their eyes when the stability of their world has been upended? I still remember the feeling in my chest: “The world feels unsafe without him here.” I ached. It is here that your belief stares at you in the face, and you grab onto it with white knuckles, begging it to convince you that it is true. I shuffled about in the darkness in my bedroom and grabbed the devotional Streams in the Desert, which had already seen me through valleys of darkness in my life in recent years, and because of that, it was an anchor of love to me. There was even a quote hidden in those pages that I lived my life by and had mentioned getting permanently etched into my skin. I fumbled to the bathroom and flipped on the only light now left in the house. I sat in an unknown world, a world without my dad. Catching and clinging to my every breath was the beauty of my dad and the reality that he had suffered. Was it true? Did my dad gravitate toward brokenness because his family broke him? Had Jesus used his suffering for love, a picture of His Suffering used Ultimately for Love? Was I just telling myself fairy-tale stories to cope, or watering down my dad’s battles?

I turned to the date in Streams where my dad’s story ended: January 18^th. I grasped my mouth in disbelief as I read the first line of that day’s devotional, the quote I had long cherished but could not locate immediately in the book:

“God wins his greatest victories through apparent defeats.”

Though my dad’s life, from the viewpoint of the world, seemed to prevail with defeat, his life in the Real Reality was victorious, and his story carried God’s flavor of eternity because he loved despite the rejection and abuse. The darkness could not snuff him out; it propelled him to seek out the otherwise invisible. I write these words today because my Dad knew love, even when his bloodline did not. My dad was a miracle, though he never knew it. My dad was the cross embodied because in his life, love and suffering collided, and his beauty was made more striking because of it, not despite it. His life sang the Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and I can hear the music because I knew and was loved by my dad.

I could not grip sovereignty with my hands, but I know they are human and pierced.

Dad did not silence the suffering servant; he sang his song.

And for all the questions, they will remain, but they also, unbeknownst to them, sing that same melody, born when God questioned God on a block of wood:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

And though that does not solve everything, it does settle me into a life listening for the music that necessitates a minor chord, deepening, enriching, and preparing my soul, even as it injures it, for the world to come, and the sight of my dad not juxtaposed, just whole.