Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (4) Isaiah 52:13-53:12, The Suffering Servant (Good Friday)

Session 4
Introduction to reading in service
This week at Midhurst I have been offering some Holy Week meditations on the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah. Although their immediate application was to the prophet himself and to the People of God in exile in Babylon at the time, they also helped form Jesus’ understanding of his ministry and mission, and the Gospel writers’ understanding of Jesus. Not only that, through Jesus they have application to our lives.

There are four ‘Servant Songs.’ The first three were the Old Testament readings for Monday to Wednesday in Holy Week, the fourth comes today, Good Friday. It does so, because it is the one most associated with the death of Jesus. We will hear it in a moment, before we hear from the Gospel according to Mark.

If the first Servant Song was about God’s People, Israel, in exile, and the second and third were about this prophet ministering to them, who is this fourth Song about? It’s hard to say exactly who at the time would have fulfilled this description, but we do know it found greater fulfilment in Jesus and his suffering. So it will be the framework for my reflections

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Most of us know what it’s like to be misunderstood. It can be quite innocent, when someone mishears what we have said. Or maybe they just don’t get on our wavelength. These experiences can be frustrating, but we can come through them with a smile.

It’s worse when someone wilfully misunderstands us. Perhaps they are too lazy to make the effort to listen. Worse, it may suit their purposes to misunderstand our words, our actions, or our values. Then it is a malicious misunderstanding, which can be both painful and worrying.

The fourth Servant Song and the life and death of Jesus show us One who was regularly misunderstood. Never was that more apparent than at the Cross. If he was truly the Messiah, then in the eyes of most people, he shouldn’t be suffering the fate of execution.

So we’re going to think about some of the ways the suffering Jesus on the Cross is misunderstood, to find how we might apprehend him more truly, and worship and serve him more faithfully.

The first misunderstanding is about image:

Just as there were many who were appalled at him –
his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
and his form marred beyond human likeness – (52:14)

If you’ve ever watched Mel Gibson’s movie ‘The Passion of the Christ’, you will know that it depicts the suffering and disfigurement of Jesus graphically. From being flogged and having the crown of thorns pushed into his head, through carrying the crossbeam, to having the nails hammered in, and the agonising death by suffocation. The Gospel writers don’t go into that detail, and I’m sure that was because people in their day knew only too well what death by crucifixion entailed. It was specifically meant to be an horrendous form of death, as a sadistic deterrent. That’s why Rome left crosses up around the countryside – to remind people.

This was not the fate of a victor. This was defeat and shame. The Apostle Paul said that it was a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks for the Messiah’s death to be central to faith.

You may know that in Islam the Qu’ran denies that Jesus died on the Cross at all. Muslims cannot accept that this should be the fate of a divine prophet.

Nothing about the Cross fits any image of a glorious, triumphant leader.

No wonder we also read that

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³He 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. (53:2b-3)

He just doesn’t fit our glossy image of a true leader.

Yet our passage began with the words

See, my servant will act wisely;
he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. (52:13)

For what is foolishness to the Greeks and to millions of others is the wisdom of God. On Good Friday, we learn that God has an upside-down, counter-cultural way of transforming lives and changing our world. It isn’t about a gleaming image and power that rolls over others like a tank. Transformation comes as the Son of God, the True Servant, absorbs the darkness and evil of the world for us.

That’s why we also read that

so he will sprinkle many nations,
and kings will shut their mouths because of him.
For what they were not told, they will see,
and what they have not heard, they will understand. (52:15)

May God give us understanding of his ways which are not our ways. May we cast aside our shallow devotion to someone’s image and accept instead the substance of what Jesus accomplishes at the Cross.

The second misunderstanding is about character:

Bluntly, people think that the Servant – or Jesus – is suffering because he deserves to do so. That’s why you end up on a Cross. You have committed a crime. You are sentenced.

Think of the dialogue with the two other men who were executed with Jesus. The one who appeals to him, saying ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,’ tells the other prisoner off for scorning Jesus. And he does so by reminding him that the two of them are getting their just desserts. However, he says, Jesus has done no wrong.

Thus, we come to these verses in Isaiah:

⁴Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all. (53:4-6)

‘Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.’ There is the misunderstanding that Jesus had the character of a sinner, that he had done something worthy of the death penalty. The religious leaders thought that was true, because they considered Jesus had committed the sin of blasphemy. Pilate never understood the nature of Jesus’ claim to kingship, only grasping that if he were a king then he was a usurper and a political threat.

But instead of suffering because he was a sinner, Jesus suffered because we are sinners. And he suffered for our sins. He bore our suffering. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. He was punished and wounded for us.

Some people reject the idea that Jesus could have suffered in our place. But there have been examples occasionally in courts of law where a judge has paid the fine he had imposed on someone who was found guilty. Before God, we are guilty. But in Christ he pays the penalty. The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

We need to reject the misunderstanding that Jesus was a sinner. He was not. He was instead our sin-bearer. And in that we find God’s offer to us of forgiveness, freedom, and healing, even of being in the right with him.

The third and final misunderstanding is about martyrdom:

In other words, did God kill Jesus for a good cause?

And if that language shocks you – God killing Jesus – I can assure you there are people who interpret the Cross that way. Some do so in order to make it sound repulsive and have all the more reason to reject Christianity. There are also a few Christians who even say that is what happened.

And it appears to be a misunderstanding that is present in the prophet’s day. Listen again to the closing verses of this Servant Song. You will hear both the misunderstanding and the correction:

¹⁰Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
    and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
¹¹After he has suffered,
    he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
    and he will bear their iniquities.
¹²Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
    and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
    and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
    and made intercession for the transgressors. (53:10-12)

There it was at the beginning: it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer. But what the prophet goes on to show is that this was a partnership between the Servant (Jesus) and God. For God rewards his Servant after his suffering.

And that’s exactly what salvation is at the Cross. We don’t simply speak of Jesus being our substitute, we say more than that. We say that the ‘atonement’ (i.e., what Jesus achieved at the Cross) is God’s self-substitution. God and Jesus are not opposed. They are working together.

It is as the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

God allows the Cross. God gives up his Son to the Cross. (Parents, think about giving up your children in some way.) But God does not kill Jesus, even if for a few hours Jesus feels forsaken by his Father. God and Jesus are in partnership here, bringing reconciliation to the world, to us, to you, to me.

And that is why we are here today. Not to cower before a cruel God, nor conversely to mourn a terrible mistake. But to worship the One Who loved the world so much that he gave up his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

March 29, 2024 0

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (3) Isaiah 50:4-9

Session 3
Isaiah 50:4-9a

Each day so far we’ve had to ask who the servant is in each passage. On Monday, the servant was Israel, the People of God. Yesterday, the servant was the prophet.

Today, it’s fairly easy to see that once again the servant is the prophet who is bringing this message. And so, following the pattern of the last two days, we will consider the relevance of this passage to the prophet, to Jesus, and to ourselves.

We’ve observed that Isaiah 40-55 belongs to the time when Israel was in Babylonian exile. It’s a section of the book that brings hope to a desolate people. It may date to ten or twenty years before they began returning home to Jerusalem and Judah, thanks to the policies of King Cyrus, whose Persian Empire would conquer Babylon.

But even though these chapters bring a message of hope right from the beginning – if you don’t know ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ at the beginning of chapter 40 you will at least know that Handel quotes it in The Messiah – it still takes a while for a positive message to have a healing effect on a discouraged and downcast group of people. They are ‘weary’, we learn in verse 4.

And their Babylonian captors haven’t yet given up all their old tricks, because we read in verse 6 about how the prophet has been beaten, had his beard pulled out, and subjected to mocking and spitting.

What does it take to be a faithful servant when we are surrounded by darkness and people struggle to hear and accept God’s good news? That’s what this ‘Servant Song’ is about.

Again, I am picking out three elements. Not three ‘C’s this time, like the commitment, call, and covenant of chapter 42 on Monday, or the call, crisis, and cure of chapter 49 yesterday, though. This time, it’s three ‘H’s.

Firstly, hearing:
Listen again to verses 4 and 5:

⁴The Sovereign Lord has given me a well-instructed tongue,
    to know the word that sustains the weary.
He wakens me morning by morning,
    wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.
⁵The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears;
    I have not been rebellious,
    I have not turned away.

If the prophet is to have a ‘word that sustains the weary’, he must hear from God. He is in communion with God ‘morning by morning’ and it is a listening time: the Sovereign Lord ‘wakens [his] ear’ and ‘opens [his] ears’. God is saying, ‘Listen,’ and so I expect the prophet is silent in the presence of God to hear his word. If the word is to sustain the weary, then it needs to come from heaven.

We know Jesus took time out for prayer. He escaped from the crowds and those who would value him for being busy to spend time with his Father. Often that meant going to solitary places. Sometimes we read that he spent the night in prayer.

For us, I will not dare to suggest that we don’t pray, but I will venture the thought that for many of us prayer is a shopping list and a monologue. It is all us talking. I for one am by no means always good at leaving space and time in silence for God to speak to me during a time of prayer.

And we model the monologue approach to prayer in our Sunday services. If a preacher has a time of silence during prayers, I can assure you some people will feel uncomfortable, and may even tell the preacher afterwards.

If we approach God through Scripture and worship, though, we can tune into him. Yes, the distracting thoughts will still come our way when we are silent – so we take them captive by writing them down and leaving them for another time so we can return to silence.

And then should it be so very surprising if a heavenly Father wants to speak to his children? And should it surprise us also if when he speaks he not only has something for us but also something that will bless others in need?

Secondly, humility:
Babylon may soon be facing military defeat at the hands of Persia, but that doesn’t change its behaviour now for the better:

⁶I offered my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard;
I did not hide my face
from mocking and spitting.

If God’s prophet is mistreated like this, then that too will have a negative effect on captive Israel’s morale. It may even be designed to have that effect.

But the prophet does not fight back. He bears his unjust suffering. He doesn’t even hide from it.

It’s easy to see the parallels in the life of Jesus here, especially in Holy Week, how he didn’t fight his tormentors. Surely indeed he could have called down fire from heaven against them, but he declined to do so.

This is tough for us. If we are attacked with words, we often become defensive. We justify ourselves, and we fight back with our own words. If we are physically attacked, we will resist as much as we can. If we are strong enough, we may overpower and disarm our assailant. Who wants to be hurt?

Into this dilemma let me offer you the words that a friend of mine once said on this subject. John was an Anglican priest from Kenya. He was used to inter-racial and inter-tribal tensions, as well as religious conflict. John said,

‘If I am persecuted for being a black man or for being a member of the Kikuyu tribe, I will fight back. But if I am persecuted for being a Christian, I will not resist. The way of Christ involves suffering for him.’

I wonder what you think of that. Does he have the balance right? Whether he does or not, it is clear that in the face of difficulties for our faith and opposition to it, we are called to a gracious humility in the Name of Jesus.

Thirdly, hope:
God’s people may be short on hope, but the hope which sustains the prophet is not the short-term, quick-fix variety. They’ve had enough of that from false prophets. How I hope our political parties will resist that approach whenever the General Election is called.

The prophet goes in for a longer-term hope that is based on the character of the God in whom he trusts. Listen again to verses 7 to 9:

⁷Because the Sovereign Lord helps me,
    I will not be disgraced.
Therefore have I set my face like flint,
    and I know I will not be put to shame.
⁸He who vindicates me is near.
    Who then will bring charges against me?
    Let us face each other!
Who is my accuser?
    Let him confront me!
⁹It is the Sovereign Lord who helps me.
    Who will condemn me?
They will all wear out like a garment;
    the moths will eat them up.

When it comes down to it, the prophet believes in a God of justice who will vindicate the righteous and the innocent, and who will oversee the downfall of the ungodly and unjust. That isn’t a five-minute job, but it is the right long-term hope. And of course, he and his ministry was proved to be right, and also Babylon fell.

Jesus entrusted himself into his Father’s hands at the Cross. He committed his spirit into his Father’s care before he died. And on the third day, he was vindicated like no-one else ever has been.

When we face discouragement, or when those around us cannot drag themselves out of a pit, we too would do well to set aside the hopes in a quick fix and instead base our hopes on the solid truths we know about the character of God. His love. His justice. His grace.

These truths will stand for ever and will strengthen us to stand in hope.

March 27, 2024 0

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (2) Isaiah 49:1-7

Session 2
Isaiah 49:1-7

Yesterday, I said that in each of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ we had to determine who the particular servant was, because it isn’t always the same each time. So yesterday in chapter 42, the servant was Israel, but as well as thinking what the text meant for Israel, we looked at it as applying to Jesus, who perfectly fulfilled the prophecies, and then what it meant for us.

Today, the Servant is clearly the prophet himself. I am not going to say Isaiah, because chapters 40 onwards clearly come from a time two centuries after Isaiah himself lived – although in many ways they carry on Isaiah’s themes. Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century BC, when the people of Judah were still in their own land under a king. Chapters 40 to 55, however, come from the time of the Babylonian exile – perhaps ten to twenty years before God’s people start to go back home.

So our first lens today is the prophet. We shall keep Jesus and ourselves as the second and third lenses through which we view the text.

Yesterday, we looked at commitment, call, and covenant: the mutual commitment between God and his servant, the call God gives the servant, and the covenant whereby God doesn’t give up on a servant who has failed.

Today’s reading is about a crisis in the calling of the servant. Today, I also have three ‘C’s: call, crisis, and cure. We begin by going back to the servant’s original call (which is not quite the same as yesterday, because this is about the prophet, not the people), then the nature of the crisis that engulfed him, and finally the way God brings a cure for that crisis.

Firstly, the call:
Listen to the call of the prophet in verses 1 to 3:

¹Listen to me, you islands;
    hear this, you distant nations:
before I was born the Lord called me;
    from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.
²He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,
    in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me into a polished arrow
    and concealed me in his quiver.
³He said to me, ‘You are my servant,
    Israel, in whom I will display my splendour.’

The prophet’s call was no small, accidental thing, nor was it a coincidence. God had planned it from before his birth, just as he did with Jeremiah. God had prepared the prophet and his words to be effective – ‘like a sharpened sword’ and ‘a polished arrow.’ God had protected the prophet until the right time – ‘in the shadow of his hand he hid me’ and ‘concealed me in his quiver.’ Planned, prepared, protected: three ‘P’s this time! God had gone ahead and done all this before the prophet got to respond to the call with his ‘Yes.’

With his Servant and Son Jesus God also went ahead and prepared him and prepared the way for him to be born ‘when the time was right’, as Paul says in Galatians. There were plans, there were prophecies. People were prepared for their part. All this enabled Jesus to fulfil his call.

And God also goes ahead of us, preparing us and our circumstances for his call upon our lives. As a number of you know, when I thought God was calling me to something but I didn’t know what, I ended up studying Theology at an Anglican theological college. When the calling more clearly became one to pastoral ministry, I didn’t know whether to stay in my native Methodism or go over into the Church of England, for which I was seeing a very good advert.

In the end, I went to see a pastor friend who was neither Methodist nor Anglican. I needed someone neutral! When I explained my predicament, Colin said to me that he was a pastor in his tradition because it was the one in which he had been raised and found faith. And if I believed in the providence of God, then could I see my upbringing as an accident? For this reason and other logical arguments that he added, I offered for the ministry in the tradition in which I too had been raised. And here I am.

How do you look at the way God has prepared and ordered aspects of your life as being ways in which he has laid the foundations for your particular calling to be his servant?

Secondly, the crisis:
Despite all this, the prophet, who knows he has been called to be God’s servant, has a crisis of faith. Or perhaps we should call it a crisis of confidence or a crisis of fruitlessness. It comes in verse 4:

But I said, ‘I have laboured in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due to me is in the Lord’s hand,
and my reward is with my God.’

It’s all been a waste of time. I’ve achieved nothing. What’s the point? That’s what he’s saying. Never assume that people who hold lofty callings from God just lurch from one triumph to another victory. And if they tell you they do, you have my permission to disbelieve them. A crisis in the calling to serve God is a common thing.

Later this week, we shall doubtless think about Jesus’ own crisis of confidence in his calling. It happened in Gethsemane. Father, if it is possible, please take this cup of suffering away from me. I know what it is going to involve, and I shudder. Yet not my will but yours be done.

I would guess that most or all of us at some point have had a crisis of confidence in God and in what we are meant to be doing for him. It is not just people like me who live with depression who get those feelings that it’s all pointless and we have wasted our lives.

And when we go through those dark seasons, I commend the Psalms. Some people don’t like the rather bleak and harrowing language that some of the Psalmists use. It’s not very nice, neat, and middle class, is it? But the Psalms give us explicit permission to be open and honest with God, red-raw even. As someone once said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

For when we have our crises, God is the safest place we can go. We can batter our fists on his chest, but we only ever do that while he is holding us in his arms. We are about to see in the third point that he does not have words of condemnation for his servant who is facing his crisis of confidence.

So let’s move on and hear that.

Thirdly, the cure:
The prophet has just said that things are not going well, and God’s response is compassionate, just not in the way we might expect. Is it to give him time off to rest, as he did when Elijah was stressed, running for his life from Jezebel? No: it’s very different. Hear again verses 5 and 6:

⁵And now the Lord says –
    he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
    and gather Israel to himself,
for I am honoured in the eyes of the Lord
    and my God has been my strength –
⁶he says:
‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
    to restore the tribes of Jacob
    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’

God says, don’t put yourself down, because I rate you so highly – ‘honoured in the eyes of the Lord’, even. In fact, although you may not have confidence right now, I have every confidence in you. So much so that I am going to entrust you with even more. I so believe in what you can do with me that no longer is your calling simply to bring my people back to the Promised Land, I’m also commissioning you to reflect my light to all the nations. It’s not so much the adding of a burden as a vote of divine confidence.

Did that happen with Jesus? Well, possibly. Before the Cross his main mission was to God’s people, the Jews. Yes, he commended the faith of the Roman centurion and of the Syrophoenician woman, but he said his main focus was ‘The lost sheep of Israel.’ However, after the Resurrection, he commissions his disciples to take the Gospel of the Kingdom to Jerusalem, Judea, and all the ends of the earth.

Could it be that God might say and do something along those lines with us when we have our crises? Dare we believe that God believes in us more than we believe in ourselves? For he knows better than we do what we can accomplish when he equips us with his Spirit.

I’ll finish with some words of Graham Kendrick that I like. He once said, ‘When the odds get too big, I just remember that me plus God equals an invincible minority.’

March 26, 2024 1

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (1) Isaiah 42:1-9

Some bonus blogs for you over the next few days, since one of my churches here likes to have some Holy Week meditations. The Lectionary Old Testament readings take the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ of Isaiah, and I’m reflecting on them.

I don’t have time for an accompanying video, but here at least is the text I have written.

Introduction to series[i]
Since 1892, when a German Lutheran scholar named Bernhard Duhm published a commentary on Isaiah, the four ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah chapters 42, 49, 50, and 52-53 have been regarded as separate works that belong together in their own right and not in the context where they have been placed in the book.

But this was blown apart in 1983 by a Swedish scholar, Tryggve Mettinger. While Mettinger agreed that there were difficulties interpreting the ‘songs’ in their contexts, that was still less problematic than taking them out of context.

He also said they are not strictly ‘songs.’ Granted, they are poetic – but much of this section of Isaiah is poetic.

Further, they are not the only passages to reference the ‘Servant of the Lord’ in Isaiah. It is a common theme.

Another question to ask is, ‘Who exactly is the Servant?’ Answers vary, and that includes varying from passage to passage. It’s a question we’ll be asking each day in these meditations.

Nevertheless, we can see the influences of the ‘Servant’ passages on Jesus. They inform his identity and his ministry, including his baptism and his healing ministry. Considering the relationship of these readings to Jesus will make them relevant to Holy Week.

And from there we need to make this all relevant to us. So with each reading we shall look at the servant, Jesus, and us.

Session 1
Isaiah 42:1-9

In this case, the servant is almost certainly Israel, following on from references in the previous chapter. So we’ll think here about Israel, Jesus, and us. I’m going to break the themes of these verses down into three ‘C’s: Commitment/Call/Covenant.

Firstly, commitment:
It’s clear from the outset that God is committed to his servant:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him

Uphold, delight, my Spirit. All signs of God’s commitment to the servant.

But verse 1 ends with the suggestion that in response to that the servant is committed to God:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

God is committed to Israel in love and in empowering her for the reason he called her. In response, Israel is committed to God’s cause.

At least, that’s the ideal, and we know Israel didn’t live up to it. And thus when we see this in the light of Jesus, we remember that in the New Testament Jesus fulfils everything that Israel was meant to do. He is the True Israel.

So it’s not surprising that we see the same mutual commitment between God and Jesus. At his baptism, the voice from heaven says that God is delighted in Jesus, and the Spirit comes down on him there, just before he begins his public ministry.

In the light of the way we have rightly deduced the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible, then no wonder the mutual commitment between God and Jesus, involving the work of the Spirit seems logical and even more intense than the relationship between God and Israel. Here is the basis on which Jesus set out on his mission that would eventually lead him to Jerusalem: he is dearly beloved of the Father, and he, even as the Son of God, is also a man empowered by the Holy Spirit.

When we consider ourselves, let us too wonder at the mutuality of the commitment between God and ourselves. We as his servants today are also upheld. God also delights in us – yes, really. Some of us find that hard to believe, but it’s true. He delights in us before we have even done anything for him. His commitment to us is shown in the gift of the Spirit.

Our commitment as servants is only in response to these prior commitments of love by God to us. We do not win God over by his goodness, but we respond to his commitment to us – ultimately seen at the end of this week at the Cross – by committing ourselves to him and the cause of his kingdom.

Secondly, call:
Well, the call is there in that description of our response of commitment:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

But what is that call to bring justice? John Goldingay points out that the Hebrew word mishpat that is translated ‘justice’ here has several shades of meaning: justice, judgment, and decisions[ii].

Therefore Israel was called to bring God’s just decisions to the world. This would not merely mean justice in the terms of condemning sin and sinners, this would also be in declaring what is right, and his grace and mercy, because grace is part of what he has decided and mercy is a part of justice, it is not the opposite of justice.

This was Israel’s calling from the beginning. When God called Abram and began to form a people for himself, it was to bless the nations, not simply enjoy blessing themselves. That Israel failed in this is seen in books like Jonah, which is a satire on Israel’s unwillingness to bless the nations.

Jesus, of course did bring God’s just decisions as he inaugurated the kingdom, taught God’s ways, and offered grace and mercy to sinners.

This becomes the church’s call as God’s servants. While bringing justice will involve declaring to the world what God says is right and wrong, it will not stop at that, or we shall be perceived as harsh and judgmental. It will be accompanied by declaring God’s decision to offer grace and mercy to all who will accept it and respond to him in Christ.

And perhaps we see this note of compassion in the proclamation of justice from the next words in the passage:

²He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
³A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.

The tone is quiet and gentle, not loud and strident. Is that something we can aspire to?

Thirdly, covenant:
In verses 1 to 4 God speaks about the servant. In verses 5 to 9 he speaks to the servant. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You’ve heard what the calling is. Now do you know what it is going to involve?’

He tells Israel that even though he is ‘The Creator of the heavens’ (verse 5) he will take them by the hand (verse 6) – that commitment again – as they set out on their task to

to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. (Verse 7)

And in the midst of that, God also says,

I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles (verse 6b).

Covenant. Light to the Gentiles. Israel had broken her covenant, and failed to be a light to the Gentiles, choosing instead to mimic them.

But God renews the call here. He does not toss his people aside. They have failed, but his grace and mercy is extended to them, too.

When we consider Jesus as the Servant, then of course we are not talking the language of failure to serve God at all, and the work opening blind eyes and freeing captives can be clearly seen in his public ministry. Of course, doing so wound up the authorities and helped bring him to Holy Week and the Cross. But these things were the work of the Servant, the True Israel.

But when it comes to us, we like Israel have failed. We are to be a blessing to the nations, but we are not always. We are to bring healing into society, but we are not consistent in doing so. Perhaps some of us think that God will have lost his patience with us after repeatedly disappointing him. If so, then look again at the renewal of the covenant and the mission here. Maybe as we dwell on Jesus the Servant we will hear God renewing his commitment and call to us, assuring us that he has not broken covenant with us. We often think of Holy Week as being about endings: could it also be about n

[i] John Goldingay, Isaiah (New International Biblical Commentary); Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2001, p237,

[ii] Goldingay, p239.

March 25, 2024 0

Fourth Sunday In Lent: Worship In the Wilderness – A sacrificial Journey

I’m back from my week off. This Sunday, the fourth in Lent, is also observed as Mothering Sunday, but the theme in our series is ‘A Sacrificial Journey’ and uses Isaiah’s passage about the Suffering Servant.

If you’d like some worship material on the third Sunday in Lent from this series, I know other churches are using this material and a quick search of YouTube or Google should find you something.

In the meantime, here is this week’s video and then the text of the talk.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

We come this week to one of the most extraordinary passages in the Old Testament. I can understand why many Christians view this as a direct prophecy of Jesus’ death for the sins of the world. It is the last of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah. It is clear that Jesus used these as models for his ministry. And while many Jews could easily have seen the earlier Servant Songs as ones fulfilled by a prophet, this one blows the doors off that with its talk of a human being (as opposed to an animal sacrifice) taking the sins of the world. Whatever it meant at the time – and it must have meant something to its first hearers – it’s hard not to see its ultimate fulfilment in the life and death of Jesus.

And in fact that’s my first observation here: the Suffering Servant goes against the surrounding culture. Here is not the victorious warrior Messiah that Israel came to believe in. Nor is this the mighty military commander in which Babylon placed so much trust. (This prophecy belongs to the time when Israel was toward the end of her exile in Babylon.)

And nor does it sit comfortably with our culture in some ways. Due to our Christian heritage we may have come to recognise and even applaud those who give at great cost, even the cost of their own lives for the sake of others. In the last year we might think of NHS staff who put themselves at great risk for COVID-19 sufferers, caught the disease themselves, and died. However, even that is slightly different from Christian understandings of vicarious suffering, and we’ll come onto that in a little while.

No, the way in which this challenges our culture is early on in the passage, with the descriptions of Jesus’ appearance:

his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
and his form marred beyond human likeness (52:14b, c)
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (53:2c, d)

The Suffering Servant (ultimately Jesus himself) would not fit into today’s glamorous celebrity culture. The media operators would tell him he had a face for radio, not TV.

There are sections of the Christian church where it seems important for their leaders to be photogenic. All this shows is a surrender to our shallow culture. It’s no coincidence how in those churches the attractive pastors sometimes seem to think they can take advantage of this, and a scandal ensues.

But before we get smug, we should realise how we cave in to this vacuous approach as well. I have certainly known circuits where people openly went more to church when there was a good-looking preacher. And I don’t say that out of sour grapes because the preacher in question wasn’t me! It genuinely concerns me. How prepared are we to get beyond style and appearance to substance?

My second observation, though, is this: the Suffering Servant comes alongside the culture.

Really? Yes, because despite what I’ve just said Jesus still has compassion for a sinful and suffering world.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. (53:3a, b)

‘A man of suffering, and familiar with pain.’ In older translations we may know the words ‘A man of suffering’ as ‘A man of sorrows’, as in the great hymn, ‘Man of Sorrows.’

Jesus, the man who enjoyed dinner parties and weddings became the man of suffering and sorrows. He always knew it would be so. He identified with human sin and suffering right through to an ignominious and tortuous death on the Cross.

Before I met and married Debbie, some of you know I had a broken engagement. When that happened, two friends of mine turned up on my doorstep one lunchtime and said they were taking me out to lunch. It turned out that one of them had also had a broken engagement before she met her husband. That identification and experience meant more to me than those who simply, like Job’s comforters, came up with their clever theological explanations of the hurt I was feeling.

When we suffer, Jesus, the very Son of God, knows. That’s a basis for comfort. When the world suffers, Jesus knows. That’s a basis for commending him to others.

And with him, it is more than ‘I understand what you’re going through,’ because Jesus the Suffering Servant has come through the worst of suffering to resurrection.

In our world there has been a lot of talk about the need for hope over the last year. We have placed our hope in science, and of course we are being blessed by the fruits of scientific labour in the vaccination programme. We rightly laud the scientific teams, the companies, and the universities that have produced the vaccines.

But ultimately our hope isn’t in anything human like science. It’s in the Suffering Servant risen from the dead. Science is a gift of God, but it isn’t itself divine. It will do a lot of wonderful things for us, but it can’t always save us.

On the other hand, if as we believe Jesus went through that unimaginable suffering and was raised from death, then faith in him gives us an indestructible hope. What a message we have for a troubled world!

My third and final observation is that the Suffering Servant transforms the culture.

⁴Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

Israel knew where her transgressions and iniquities had landed her: in exile in Babylon. And she had no peace with God. Away from Jerusalem and the Temple which gave their lives meaning and significance, they were in a place of despair.

There is a sense in which all people are in exile from God’s presence due to our transgressions and iniquities. Some like to pretend it’s not true. Others just don’t realise. But Jesus the Suffering Servant invites us to hear the voice of his Father calling the prodigals home, because Jesus in his death has dealt with that which has sent us away from the Father’s presence.

It is what Martin Luther called ‘the divine exchange’. In terms of this passage, Jesus takes our pain, suffering, punishment, and affliction, and we receive his peace and healing. Why would anyone turn down an exchange like that?

More than once I have heard a psychiatrist say that if only their patients or clients could know they were forgiven, then many beds would be released on psychiatric wards. What Jesus offers through his suffering is totally and utterly transforming.

Imagine if that were extended across our society and we were no longer a culture where we talked about other people’s ‘unforgivable’ actions. Imagine our politics and our media having healthy disagreements without having to demonise the other side. Imagine a world where those who make honest failures are not turned into social pariahs or media villains. Imagine a nation where a broken and hurting royal family didn’t have to deal with their differences and pain through television interviews and press releases. Imagine more marriages staying together, because the forgiveness of one spouse prompts change in the other.

All this and more is why I say that Jesus the Suffering Servant can transform a culture. It begins with the forgiveness he brings us through his suffering, and as we receive that we offer it to others not just as a message but in our own actions.

This is the journey of Jesus that we mark during Lent. It’s a suffering journey. But it’s one which brings substance, hope, and transformation to the world.

How are we going to travel on that journey with him?

March 14, 2021 0

Tag: Servant Songs