In a Christian reading of the Old Testament, this passage receives reading every Good Friday. Acts 8:32-33 has the evangelist Phillip applying the imagery of Isaiah 53:7-8 to Jesus. It causes the Christian to ponder again the suffering of Jesus for us and for our sins. What value can we receive out of reading and re-reading this passage? Soren Kierkegaard authored a book on repetition. He said that which one repeats what has been, otherwise one could not repeat. The fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new. Frankly, this is a difficult book. For most of us, if we were going to understand it, it would be through reading it repeatedly. Yet, if we receive new insights in each reading and gain in our understanding, have we repeated? Has not the book become something new to us? Do we truly repeat the reading? The same can be true in other categories of repetition. We develop habits, such as running and exercise. An addiction can reveal a bad habit, for its repetition becomes destructive. We may have rituals we repeat because they have become symbolic and expressive of certain values and beliefs. We choose the ritual precisely because of its symbolic meaning. Yet, its repetition can reveal something new. People tend to stick with the status quo, an act of repetition as well, because a new decision of thinking or acting can become exhausting. We stick with the boring job because looking for a new one requires too much from us. We grow accustomed to certain political views we no longer question or to certain stores at which we also shop. We may repeat because we like it. Repetition can breed affection. We repeat because we feel like we have come home to that which is comfortable and familiar. Repetition can reinforce something for which we feel nostalgic. We have some fondness for the way things were. Like an old song from our youth, it simply brings back some good memories of our past. Repetition can be therapeutic as one repeats the journey. You go back home. A pastor visits each of the churches of which he or she was pastor. Such a journey can bring healthy reconciliation with the journey one has travelled thus far. Re-reading certain books or re-viewing certain movies can have the same effect. In all of this, re-engaging with the past allows us to re-work the past as we ponder our present and anticipate a potential future. An old memory gains a new perspective.[2]
This passage is well worth repetition on our reading list for the year, especially Good Friday.
The passage is a difficult and contested one. Fifteen verses have attracted enormous attention. The identity of the servant is of primary oncern. Some argue that the servant symbolizes the Jewish people. If so, it describes the unjust tribulations of the nation at the hands of the Babylonians and later oppressors as a well as the salvific role of the nation in the world. It could also portray a pious minority with the Jewish people that suffers as a result of the sins committed by the nation. In II Isaiah, “servant” refers to the nation or an idealized representation of the nation in 42:1-9, 18-23, 49:1-13. Like 50:4-11, it could refer to an individual. In the Targum and midrashim, the servant is the Messiah. The significance for interpretation is that this notion is part of the Jewish tradition of interpretation. The interpretive issue here is whether II Isaiah addresses the messianic themes we find in Isaiah in this passage. Given that Jeremiah describes himself in similar ways in 10:18-24 and 11:19, II Isaiah could refer to that prophet. The Talmud (b. sot. 14a) records the opinion that it describes Moses. The call of Isaiah (6) has some impressive parallels with this servant. In addition, he ponders why Israel should be beaten and revolt more, with sick and faint head and heart, with wounds, welts, and open sores throughout the body (1:5-6). The Day of the Lord of armies will address the proud and arrogant (2:12-14). Further, a descendant of Jesse, the father of King David, will bring peace (11:1-10). The poet says the Lord will call on him, and he will answer, the Lord promising to be with him in trouble, delivering him and honoring him, satisfying him with long life and show him salvation from the Lord (Psalm 91:15-16). The suggestion that Jeremiah would serve as a model for the nation or for the pious remnant is a strong possibility. I can testify to the experience of studying the biblical texts in an historical way and moving from Jeremiah to later authors in the Babylonian exile, that this explanation makes the most sense.
The idea that II Isaiah predicts the suffering of Jesus is unlikely. At the same time, the idea that the suffering of Jesus intersects with the servant of II Isaiah, just as the intersect with Jeremiah, is a reasonable one. Why, if in the course of its history God intended Israel to play the part of the Suffering Servant here to witness to its God among the nations, it could not see itself again in the picture of the crucified Messiah. Jewish messianic hope oriented itself to an overcoming of the experience of suffering.[3] Jesus saw himself as the servant of the Lord along these lines.[4]
Isaiah 52:13-15 has the Lord speaking. It is the first speech from the Lord in this oracle, where the Lord describes the servant, who will eventually and in a surprising way achieve great things. The divine utterance begins with the end, which is the exaltation and glorification of the servant before all the world. One can comprehend all that happens here only from the perspective of its divine telos or purpose. Only from the event of the glorification does the crucial light fall upon what has preceded it. The text stands between the suffering that belongs to the past and the exaltation that one anticipates.[5] 13 See, my servant shall prosper; the Lord shall exalt and lift him up, and he shall be very high. We need to note the sharp break between verses 13 where the servant of the Lord shall prosper, the Lord shall exalt him and lift him up, and 14, where “the many” (Israelites in contrast to the nations) were astonished at the servant due to his marred appearance beyond human semblance. 14 Just as many were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals— here is the introduction of the theme of the Servant who suffers, bringing physical disfiguration beyond that of any other person. The prophet has already described the Servant as light to the nations in 42:6 and 49:6. 15 Therefore, he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which no one had told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. The servant does not win honor, not just because he is of a humble state, but because of affliction. The wrath of God has touched this person. He receives divine punishment for sin, as the theology went. Job has a similar concern (Job 19:1-22). Job addresses his friends by saying that they torment him and crush him with words. They reproach and attack him. God has wronged him since he has done no wrong. He cries for help and receives no justice. God has blocked his path and he sees no path out of darkness. God has stripped him of honor. God tears him down and removes him from all hope. God treats him like an enemy to the point where the armies of God have laid siege to his life. God alienates him from his family and friends. Relatives and closes friends have forgotten him. They treat him like a foreigner and stranger. His servants do not listen to him. His breath is offensive to his wife. His family loathes him. Children scorn hm. His close friends detest him. He has lost weight to the point of sickliness he asks for pity from friends since the hand of God has struck him. Instead, his friends pursue him as God does. They have taken so much of his flesh and still they are not satisfied. However, the prophet says the Servant may not suffer for his own sins but may take on the sins of others. The curse that lies upon others has become the curse God places on the Servant.
In 53:1-11a, an unidentified speaker expresses shock at the career of the servant. If they are the kings referred to in 52:15, then the servant is Israel, and the nations are stunned that such an insignificant and lowly group turns out to have been so important to the divine plan, as in Deuteronomy 7:7. In what seems more likely to me, the speakers may be Judeans, in which case the servant is either a pious minority, the ideal Israel, or some individual within the Israelite community. Isaiah 53:1 declares the work of salvation is a mysterious and incredible one. It has the form of funeral dirge.[6] Who has believed what we have heard? Moreover, to whom has the Lord revealed the arm of the Lord? Isaiah 53:2-6 see an innocent servant, a fellow Israelite, rescuing other Israelites from suffering by bearing the suffering himself. 2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. The plant referred to does not suggest beauty. The root from dry ground is the scrub growth in the desert. The lack of beauty is the result of mistreatment. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. This reminds us that they considered it dangerous to look upon someone who was the obvious object of divine anger. 3 Others despised and rejected him; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces we despised him, and we held him of no account. In verses 4-6, either the servant suffered on behalf of the speakers, meaning the guilty escape punishment, as in vicarious suffering, or he suffered along with the guilty, as an expression of corporate guilt, even though he did not share in the guilt of his fellow Israelites. 4 Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. “We” were like the friends of Job, looking upon the suffering of Job and considering that God has struck him down. “We” have done this to the servant of the Lord. 5 Instead, we did not realize that the wounds he received were for our transgressions, God crushed him for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises, we receive healing. The notion that the servant may take on himself the suffering of others has been important in understanding the significance of the death of Jesus for others. 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. The prophet returns to a refined concept of collective responsibility. Some scholars would say that Ezekiel 18 and 33 seems to reject this notion. The prophet shows the solidarity of the race. The prophet admits the righteous suffer, and that God offers salvation through the righteous one who suffers. The suffering of the unrighteous is justice. This passage had an enormous influence on primitive Christian ideas of the vicarious expiatory meaning of the death of Jesus “for many,” but in each case, we still must seek the material basis for this kind of understanding in the distinctive constellation of the event itself. Jesus died as one rejected by his people. In the Jewish tradition, one can find support for the understanding of his death as an expiation for his people only in this passage. The circumstances of the death of Jesus provided a reason to go back to this prophetic passage since his people despised and rejected Jesus while God justified him with his resurrection.[7] Isaiah 53:7-10 may represent the judgment of the Lord, the innocent sufferer being perverted judgment. The verses may also refer to the perversion of justice in human courts. 7 Enemies oppressed him and afflicted him, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb, that someone leads to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. For Christians, Christ is the true witness. Yet, we read here that the Servant shall not open his mouth. In this song, the nations shall look upon the suffering of the servant and express astonishment. Kings shall be silent, due to the suffering of the servant. Does the servant become a silent witness? In any case, this silent witness is in sharp contrast to the wordiness and noisiness of humanity and the church of Jesus Christ, in their tireless attempts at self-communication and self-expression in their various legitimate and urgent affairs, and Jesus Christ and the Proclaimer of the reconciliation accomplished in Christ. This passage invites us to ponder the power of words on the one side and the impotence of words on the other. We may well judge ourselves as Christians in this judgment, in that we want to articulate as much possible, but all Christ has is the sigh from the cross.[8] 8 By a perversion of justice, authorities took him 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, for condemned criminals did not receive an honorable burial. In addition, his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. The debate here is whether these lines describe the literal death of the servant or the typical exaggerated description of the plight of the servant such as we find in Psalm 18:4-5, 30:3, or Jonah 2:2, 8, where one can poetically refer to the situation one is in as in Sheol. 10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. In verses 10b-11a, the servant receives vindication. 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. These verses show the suffering of the Servant ending in death, whether by illness or violence. Someone may have charged him with the crimes of the wicked. Authorities bury him with them, showing the low regard with which others held him. To go through all of this, the Servant has learned that he could endure any of the tragedies and horrors of a human life, as long as he remained clear on the reason or “why” of his life.[9] Isaiah 53: 11-12 show the paradox of resurrection, the earliest reference to it. The Lord becomes the speaker. 11aOut of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. It could mean the servant is saved from a fate like death. It could also refer to resurrection in the sense of a metaphor for the renewal of the nation similar that which we find in Ezekiel 37. The recovery and wellbeing of the servant is significant. The dramatic movement of the oem is to move into the abyss and then out of it into wellbeing and triumph. Such a movement is adaptable for to the Christian message.
In verses 11b-12, the Lord offers a concluding speech, describing the vindication of the servant, confirming the themes of the speech of the unknown speaker. 11bThe righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. We note the sudden shift from mourning to exaltation. It compares the death of the Servant to the victim of an atonement sacrifice, as the guilt offering. The Lord delivers the Servant from death and from the charge of guilt because he made himself a guilt-offering. He takes on himself the guilt of others and accepts the treatment due the guilty. 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 others numbered him with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. “The many” and “the rebellious” appear to be Israelites, although the ambiguity of this context as the expiatory efficacy being either for all the Jewish people or for all humanity.[10] Philippians 2:5-11 and its notion of self-emptying contains an allusion to this passage, and hence to denote the giving up of a life of equality with God to death.[11] The prophet believes the Servant cannot end in the total defeat death brings. In the closing verses, the Servant delivers by "knowledge," meaning the will of the Lord. He will restore Israel as an enduring reality. The prophet envisions the Servant surviving and experiencing vindication and success. It is not easy to think of resurrection here. The revival of Israel would suit the text, but there are problems here as well.
[1]
[2] The research of Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney Levy is helpful here.
[3] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, 314.
[4] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 335.
[5]
[6]
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 423, 425.
[8] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3 [70.1] 408.
[9] Victor Frankel Man's Search for Meaning
[10] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 425.
[11] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 375.
[12] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 [57.2] 29-30.
[13] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 [59.1] 172.
[14] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3 [69.2] 58.
[15] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.3] 675.
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