Song 3 Isaiah 50:4-9a
50:4 The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens– wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.
50:5 The Lord GOD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward.
50:6 I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.
50:7 The Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
50:8 he who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me.
50:9a It is the Lord GOD who helps me; who will declare me guilty
Song 4 Isaiah 52: 13-53:12 13 See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.
14 Just as there were many who were astonished at him, so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals
15 so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
53 Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 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.
4 Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
5 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.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
8 By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.
9 They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.10 Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the LORD shall prosper.
11 Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
The righteous one my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
We have seen some ways in which the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah foreshadow the ministry of Jesus; how the servant is in some ways a typical prophet, embodying the word of God but also bringing something new; and how he also exemplifies the people of God, expanding the chosen people from Israel to all peoples, as all are drawn to him on the cross. Tonight I want to explore the underlying theme; that of suffering, rejection and ultimate reconciliation.
Prophecy is inevitably an outsider activity; the prophet knows the working of his contemporary society and may be close to its centre of power, but he stands outside and what he has to say is not always welcome. The suffering servant depicted by Isaiah has more in common with Jeremiah than Isaiah himself; Isaiah, in his last chapters, is bringing a message of relief and hope as he promises a return from exile; Jeremiah and the earlier Isaiah are perhaps more typical; they speak with the tongue of a teacher critical of their contemporaries, calling them back to God, and warning of the consequences of continued failure to respect God and their fellow men. None of this is, of course, very welcome, and the prophet is typically treated as a stranger, threatened and exiled like Elijah or rejected like Jeremiah. Despite this treatment the prophet/servant is steadfast, confident that the word of God will ultimately prevail. This is the main theme of the central verses of our reading; “it is the Lord who helps me; who will declare me guilty?”
It’s easy to see parallels in the Passion of Christ. Isaiah is not predicting the Passion, but the Gospel writers in describing the events of Holy week seem to have these songs in their minds; partly because this was how prophets behaved but also because the poignant psychology of the songs drew out the human drama and turmoil of Christ’s own mind- a turmoil which is however underlain by confidence in the message, the certainty that despite the betrayal and misunderstanding of those around him, he would finally be vindicated.
The exclusion and strangeness of the prophets inevitably leads to their persecution, and it also foreshadows the redemptive power of that persecution. The scapegoat was driven out of the camp into the desert to suffer symbolically what the people avoided suffering themselves. The particular hatred and spite for the prophet is in part the hope that by killing the messenger the unwelcome message will go away. But I think it goes deeper than that; unconsciously the rejection of the criticism and the attempt to silence its source is in in fact to accept its validity and to treat the prophet as capable of carrying our guilt and somehow exonerating us. I’m not suggesting that we should go so far as to think that the scapegoat, the prophet or Christ takes the punishment we deserve and satisfies the anger of a vengeful god, but there is a way in which the loading of opprobrium and hatred on someone who has been such an acute critic of our behaviour both acknowledges the criticism and so our guilt and that is the first stage of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s telling that these critical prophets were not consigned to oblivion; they were remembered and their sayings became scripture. The suffering servant like Christ, is impassive before his tormentors, but yet confident of final vindication as the word of God cannot be silenced.
This is I think why these songs echo so vividly for us as we remember the final stages of Christ’s life on earth; they articulate our own sense of suffering and guilt. We want empathise with the servant, as we do with Christ, but cannot quite identify with either except by taking a huge imaginative leap; the leap is to accept that what is happening is not that we sympathise with God, but rather that God is entering his creation and so us and experiencing pain and mortality to the full. It is, I think, through that realisation, that the immortal God can take on our mortality that we can have the confidence to see through the physical world to eternal life. That is a confidence that we can share with the Suffering Servant, as we hope to share it with Christ.
Amen.