He Bore Our Transgressions/For Every Man a Brother
Isaiah 52:13-15; 53:1-12
13 Look! My servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.’
When my Pop died some years ago, it fell to me, as namesake and only son, to manage the funeral and burial arrangements.
First, a little background. After four generations of Lutheran Ministers, my Pop’s life took him in a different direction. He became a gifted newspaperman—and a full-blown alcoholic. Growing up with that paradox was a real challenge in many ways. I never had a friend over to my house the whole time I was growing up. Well, actually, once, on a Saturday afternoon, Trippy Mead, a neighborhood buddy, came over. Pop got drunk and my sadness and shame was almost overwhelming.
Every time we went out of the house as a little family unit, I was afraid.
Coming home from school in the afternoon was the most terrifying moment of my young life. Would my Pop be sober and alive and vibrant and interested in what I had learned that day, or would he be passed out on the living room floor in his underwear with the whole place smelling like stale cigarettes and booze? I wanted so much for him to find himself and be the extraordinary man I knew him to be, down inside, underneath the alcoholic with zero self-esteem. For years, I saw my Pop as ‘The Problem’: If only Pop would stop drinking, The Scherer Family System would be fine.
Then I went off to Roanoke College and started learning about things like Psychology. The next time my Grandma called to tell me he was drinking again, I had the sudden realization that she was ‘in on it’ somehow. By continuing to give him money, she was ‘feeding the problem’. And, thank God, I saw how Pop was in many ways actually the victim and a ‘symptom-carrier’ of some unresolved and unspoken issues that permeated The Scherer Family System. When a system is under pressure, ‘The Problem’, like acne on a teenager, will manifest at a weak spot. That pimple is not The Problem, but a symptom, an expression of a deeper issue.
Then Pop died, and I had to decide what to put on his tombstone. This verse from Isaiah came to me immediately, and, tearfully. I remember thinking, ‘He bore our transgressions’. In my heart and in my gut I knew this to be true—and a wonderful way to ‘send him home’ free of the guilt and burden of being The Problem.
But fortunately I had second thoughts and realized how hard that statement would be—and what an accusation it represented—for the rest of the family. It might be true, but it would also be devastating. Finally another set of words, equally true about Pop, came to me, based on what had been beautiful, powerful and bone-deep in him: ‘To Every Man a Brother’.
My Pop ‘never met a stranger’. He had friends from the Governor’s mansion to the streets. Beat cops, judges, doctors, pimps, whores, young people, old people, white people, black people. My Pop treated them all as equals—and taught me to do the same. ‘Son’, he told me, ‘everyone is just trying to get to The Post Office. . .’
So, when you find yourself judging someone for being where they are in their life, remember ‘Pop’—and today’s saying from Isaiah. Perhaps this person is ‘bearing the transgressions’ of a family system—and a world. Perhaps he or she just happened to be a weak spot in that system. Perhaps, like the figure in Isaiah’s pronouncement, ‘aimed’ at Jesus many centuries later, the person is in so many ways, an innocent, caught in the web of life, deserving, not our rejection or despising, but our deepest appreciation. Perhaps they have been wounded for our transgressions, and crushed for our iniquities.
Today we pray for discernment, the courage and ability to look beneath and beyond our judgments about those we meet, and find the deeper source of their troubles. Help us discover in our harshest judgments the deepest and most-precious truths about OUR role in creating a world where this can happen to people, even people we love. AMEN
John J. Scherer
