The Career of the Servant
Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12
Liz McAlister
September 2008 Kirkridge
This is one of the most loved passages in the Scripture. In it, all the inspired movements come together in a symphony of salvation through the Suffering Servant. Through his suffering radical transformation is placed within our reach and how we long for it. (or do we?)
The end of chapter 52 introduces the song; it begins on a triumphant note of success. Isaiah assumes his readers know the previous Servant Songs (and you have certainly had a fill of them). The passage is structured as an antiphonal dialogue between God and the people and it helps to understand this organization. God speaks in 52:13-15 and 53:11-12; the people speak in 53:1-10; the divine voice concludes with an "I-they" statement.
The people's voice - "we-him" - describes the servant as ugly and undesirable. All are against him. Maybe a "spontaneous historical event" is being described, an event that has both a collective and legal character, which we can discern in the collective voice.
52: 13 See, my servant will act wisely he will be lifted up and highly exalted.
14 Just as there were many who were appalled at him his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any and his form marred beyond human likeness—
15 so will he 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.
53:1 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of God been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by all, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken, smitten and afflicted by God.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
and God has laid on him (or God has permitted us to lay on him) the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was God's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though God makes his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of God will prosper in his hand.
11 After the suffering of his soul, 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.
12 Therefore 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.
There is much that is new in this text. I'd stress the attitude of the servant. No where does he seek revenge. If we reflect on how widespread vengeance was in the Hebrew Scriptures, the nonviolence of the servant is startling. H is conduct is revolutionary nonviolence. God's action in him becomes visible as he reacts to hostility and violence.
The poem may be relating the spontaneous scapegoating of an individual.
Verses 7-10 continue in the people's voice - in a different mode from verses 4-6 - descriptive-reflective. The people see God as responsible for the Servant's suffering: " We thought him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted ," and verse 10: Yet it was the will of God to bruise him.... They reflect an uneasiness about the sacrificial system. Ezekiel had uncovered the horror of sacrifice but continued to ascribe it to God. Maybe the people in this passage of Isaiah 53:1-10 are beginning to reflect that ambiguity.
But it is a different matter with verses 11 and 12 - God's voice: 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. 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 evils of many, and made intercession for them.
"Because he poured out his soul [life] to death": this is key. The Servant willingly gave himself for his people. Did God cause his suffering ? The text makes it clear that oppressors caused the suffering. We hear the voice of God in chapter 54: If any one stirs up strife, it is not from me. (54:15) Strife does not come from God . It comes from within the community (15a) and from external attacks upon it (15b). So the Servant is an object of oppression resulting from this strife. He does not intend to become a sacrifice, and God does not subject him to suffering. The people are steeped in the sacrificial cult.
What we can see happening in the fourth Servant Song is an in depth scrutinizing of the scapegoat ritual - its contempt for the victim, its oppressiveness, the human predicament of those who benefit from the suffering of the scapegoat, and God's approval of the one who is not simply an arbitrary victim but who offers himself when necessary as part of his calling in order to overcome the strife and violence.
The Servant of God depicted in these poems is a paradigm of the victim whose expulsion is integral to his calling. " By oppression and judgment he was taken away . . . he was cut off out of the land of the living." In this role he stands for the whole community. From the standpoint of the community whose theology is rooted in concepts of God's wrath and has no understanding of the innocent victim, it appears that his suffering is imposed by God - and voluntarily accepted by the Servant. The suffering of the innocent victim is always ambiguous - in any society. But the culture and language are permeated with collective violence and sacrifice.
However, Isaiah's insight transcends the view of the chorus that comments on Servant. He sees that it is not the will of God to bruise him; though it is the will of God to use him - to speak through his exclusion, his suffering on behalf of others. In understanding his suffering, in standing with him and not with the persecutors, those who can learn from him, can also begin to transform the structures of sacred violence.
A distinction is made between a "before" and a "now." Before, he was mocked; now he astounds. The despised servant became one before whom kings fall silent. The many who laughed now stand in wonder -- were they violent men and women? The servant says of himself that he offered his back to those who beat him. The actual song of the suffering servant goes further and tells how he was pierced and mistreated, persecuted and beaten, expelled from the land of the living and killed. He was mocked and killed by violent human beings. Then how did this individual, despised and killed, become one who astounds nations? The decisive statements are in 53:4-12 where the people begin to see that the servant suffered for them. They came to know better: Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. These diametrically opposed opinions come from the same people. First they believed the servant had been struck by disaster. Then their eyes were opened to see that he was pierced because of/by their crimes.
Almost all levels of the Hebrew Scriptures contain the idea that evil redounds on the evildoer. But this text has a different message. The crimes of the many do not fall back on the guilty; an innocent person is struck instead. It is important to ask if the servant was struck because of their crimes, or more by their crimes. Did the evildoers throw their crimes upon the servant? The decisive verse says: ... God laid on him the iniquity of us all .
So it more than suggests that God placed these crimes on the servant charging him with them in a juridical sense. But a different translation is also possible and I've inserted that translation into the text: But God permitted us to throw all our sins upon him. I believe we can do this because Hebrew makes no proper distinction between an active "causing" and a passive "allowing. " This grammatical insight allows us to determine that statements in which it appears that Yahweh acts violently and those that speak about an individual delivered into the hands of the violent can mean the same thing. All the statements about the servant show that the crimes of the many struck the servant in the physical and moral and not merely in the juridical sense. Evildoers really transferred their misdeeds to him.
During the rites of atonement, the guilty (or the priests in the name of the guilty) would unload their sins on the sacrificial animal. It reinforces the impression that the many transferred their crimes to the servant, and did so disdaining him, spitting on him, beating, and killing him. But he offered his back and cheek and thereby caused the misdeeds not to fall back on the evildoers. They were thereby enabled to come to a better understanding. The same interpretation is suggested in Psalms 22 and 118 which describe in a particularly vivid fashion both the distress of the one persecuted and God's assistance for him. Both songs tell (as does Isaiah 53) that evildoers gang together against the just one. Their evil deeds fall on him; he suffers physically and morally.
Through the context and the connection with the rites of atonement and the psalms, we can get the picture that evildoers gang up against him, and load on him their own crimes. How they came to know that the servant bore their sins in their stead is not stated. But the context suggests that it was his nonviolence that opened their eyes. They are amazed that when led to the slaughter he did not open his mouth. Because of the nonviolent way he carried their offenses, he was able to become a light for them all. By empowering his servant to adopt this attitude of nonviolence, God reveals Godself as close to the oppressed in a personal way. Isaiah experiences that closeness. God appears in it as the liberator; again and again he calls out to oppressed people in an intimate way: Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God.
The Suffering Servant Songs combine two insights: one , that the victim was innocent and his persecutors wrong; two , that his victimization was socially beneficial in that his punishment brought the community peace. The text lifts up both the moral offensiveness of the violence and the fact that the violence had beneficial cultural effects. Is the violence morally acceptable because the social harmony it produced was so good? All cultures have had to choose between confronting the truth about their mob violence, on one hand, and enjoying the camaraderie it generates, on the other. What is distinctive about the Bible is that it is the first literature in the history of the world to grapple with the moral dilemma this choice represents .
Isaiah assumes that the victim was allowed to be struck down by God and that God counted his sufferings as atonement for the mob that inflicted them on him. With one important difference, this is a variation on an ancient and universally prevalent myth. The difference is that the speaker in the Suffering Servant Songs sees how morally upright, how wretchedly abused, how pathetic, and how arbitrarily chosen the mob's victim really was. This knowledge is at war with the conclusion of the text, namely, that God was pleased with the results of the violence. The moral and religious solution the text pronounces is unstable because these two forces -- the empathy for victims and the need for rituals of victimization -- are incompatible. Sooner or later, one has to prevail over the other.
The Ethiopian minister in Acts 8:34 is reading this passage from Isaiah when Philip nears his chariot. He poses a this question to Philip: " About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" The Ethiopian is troubled by the text, by the unstable balance between culture's dependence on violence and its growing empathy for the victims of it, an empathy that develops within and is documented by the biblical literature as a whole. " Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news of Jesus ." (Acts 8:35).
From the time this exchange was recorded, Christians interpreted the Christ event in light of the suffering servant songs, especially this song. Is this correct? We must understand that the Hebrew Scriptures do not acquire their truth from the New Testament; taken in their integrity, they are not predictions concerning Christ. And prediction is not the meaning of Acts 8:34-35. Philip doesn't say: "This word is fulfilled in Jesus!" Nor does he exclaim, "The servant of God in Isaiah is Jesus!" No! Philip takes Isaiah as the starting point for his proclamation but moves beyond it. Philip's sermon about Christ can best be described as a continuation of Isaiah. The Christ event and the suffering servant bring to light the same subject matter. Both testaments speak of the same God. The songs can articulate the Christ event - but mainly because they are about God's work in Israel and in the world. God's work is manifest in a particular form. So when Isaiah 53 is interpreted from the end of a complex shaping of the tradition, no violence is imposed on the text. Both testaments share the view that the suffering and death of the righteous do not end in failure and senselessness. The New Testament comprehends the significance of Jesus' death by interpreting it according to the biblical type of a literary and life horizon held in common by both Testaments.
What is distinctive about the Bible is its empathy for victims. Ask ten people what they think of the Hebrew Scriptures and eight will tell you that they are put off by its violence. The world over which myth presides with its majestic poise is no less violent. Its violence is simply better veiled or suffused with grandeur. As a gentile, the Ethiopian was accustomed to official tribal violence shrouded in an aura of myth. But he was haunted by the crude specter of mob violence he felt from the passage in Isaiah. Since he was still bound up in mythological thought patterns and the primitive religious cosmology, he hadn't a clue to the meaning of Isaiah. Philip, on the other hand, knew the passion story. He was exposed to the history of righteous violence in which an innocent victim died forgiving his murderers, realizing that "they know not what they do." With that story as his interpretive key, the few mythological vestiges that survive in the Isaiah text offer no serious impediment to Philip's interpretation of it. The mob was wrong and its sense of righteousness was delusion. It is the victim who is the chosen of God, the agent of God's revelation to the world. So what happened in Acts was that the Ethiopian underwent a profound change when someone who understood the larger implications of the crucifixion was able to point out the text's deeper meaning. Philip's interpretation focused the illuminating power of the Cross on a biblical account of mob violence.
In John's Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that they will do greater things than he. One wonders. But... we are called upon to do something more audacious than what Philip did, for Philip brought the revelation of the Cross to bear on the passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that most closely resembles it. It is precisely this resemblance between the crucifixion and the Suffering Servant Songs that provided the first Christians with an important clue for understanding the crucifixion. In fact, because the early Christians weren't able to eliminate entirely the implications of sacrificial atonement found in these Servant Songs, institutional Christianity perpetuated the idea of placating divine wrath, a notion that is squarely at odds with the God revealed by Jesus' life and death. To say that we are challenged to do something more audacious than Philip, therefore, means two things. First , it means that, as beneficiaries of Gospel revelation, we are better able to distinguish the New Testament revelation from its sacrificial antecedents, and we have a responsibility to do so. Secondly , it means that we are challenged to focus the interpretive power of the Cross on texts and on personal and historical experiences which, in contrast to the Servant songs in Isaiah, seem to bear no relationship to the New Testament whatsoever.
As heirs to Philip's task, we will not encounter a eunuch returning home and reading with incomprehension a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures. We will more likely encounter a modern commuter returning home reading about fierce ethnic violence in foreign lands, or savage violence in urban America. If we are to offer bewildered moderns what Philip offered the Ethiopian, we have to bring the Christian revelation to bear on contemporary bewilderment. We will have to comment as decisively on the stories that are such a source of consternation to moderns as the Suffering Servant Songs were to the Ethiopian.
Let us reflect on the fourth song of the Servant in the light of the story of the Passion. The structure of the passage is very simple: It opens with a prologue, spoken by God; there follows a long piece in which the crowd reflects on what has happened and draws its own conclusions, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy; it closes with God taking up the word again and delivering his final verdict.
The event is such that it cannot be properly understood except in the light of its final outcome; this is why God anticipates from the beginning the end result: "See, my servant will prosper. He shall be lifted up, exalted, rise to great heights." We hear of crowds who marvel, of kings struck speechless: The horizon widens to a universality that no narrative of history, not even the Gospels, can convey, constrained as they are within space and time.
A nameless crowd starts talking. First, as if to excuse their own blindness, they give reasons why they could not recognize the servant. " Without beauty, without majesty, we saw him, with no looks to attract our eyes": How then could we have known that we were looking on "the power of God"? A thing despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, a man to make people screen their faces, he was despised and we took no account of him.
But see, here comes the revelation! We witness the blossoming of faith in its nascent state.
And yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. But we, we thought of him as someone punished, struck by God and brought low. Yet he was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins.
On him lies a punishment that brings us peace, and through his wounds we are healed.
To understand what was happening among the crowd at this moment, let's remember what happened when the prophecy was fulfilled. For a while, after the death of Christ, the only thing people were sure of was that he had died on the cross; that he was "accursed of God," because it is written, "cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree" (Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13). Then the Holy Spirit came to "convince the world of sin" (John 16:8), and the paschal faith of the Church bloomed forth.
No one else can be cast in the role of the Servant; on the one side he stands alone, and on the other, all of us -
all gone astray like sheep, each taking his own way, and God burdened him with the sins of all of us.
The Bible gives the key by which we can tell true prophecy from false: its fulfillment. A prophecy that in fact comes about is true, and one that is not fulfilled is false (Deuteronomy 18:21f.; Jeremiah 28:9). But where, or when, or in whom did the things come about that are said of this Servant of God?
We cannot imagine that the prophet is speaking of himself, or of some personage of the past, without reducing the whole song of the Servant to a string of pitiful exaggerations. In what unknown figure of the time did this "something never heard" come about? Where are the crowds justified by him, and where the kings who stood speechless? Of whom, other than Christ, have millions upon millions over the course of 20 centuries exclaimed, without hesitation: "He is my salvation! By his wounds I am healed"?
It is God's turn to speak again, and deliver the final verdict. His soul's anguish over, he shall see the light and be content. By his sufferings shall my servant justify many, taking their faults upon himself. In the whole of the story, the most surprising thing is not that the Servant should not cry to God for justice and revenge. The great new thing is that not even God intends to vindicate the Servant. The justice God sees done for the Servant consists not in punishing his persecutors but in saving them; not in giving evildoers what they deserve, but in making them just! " My Servant will justify many ." This is the unheard of thing that leaves kings and peoples speechless.
There remains a cloud of obscurity over the way God goes about his work. " God has been pleased to crush him with suffering." We shudder at the thought of a God who would "be pleased" to cause any creature to suffer. Was God really "pleased"? What was it that pleased him? It was not the means that gave him pleasure, but the end! Not the Servant's suffering, but the salvation of the many. This is what pleased God, what it was that gave him the greatest joy to do.
The passion of Christ, described prophetically in the Isaiah text and historically in the Gospels, has a special message for our times. The message is: no violence! All the violence of the world was turned upon him but the Servant committed no violence. Through all they did to him, he threatened no revenge, offering himself and interceded for those who were killing him. He overcame violence not by undergoing it, revealing the naked reality of all its injustice and futility. He brought about a new kind of victory -- one that St. Augustine summed up in three words: victor because victim.
The violence that assails and scandalizes us today comes in new and fearsome forms, senseless and cruel, and invades even those areas that ought to be a remedy for violence: sport, art, family life. We recoil from the idea that one might resort to violence and kill in the name of God. We need to know that "it was not like this from the beginning." The first chapter of Genesis shows a world where the very idea of violence was unthinkable, not only in regard to relationships among humans, but even in regard to animals. It was not permissible to kill, not even to avenge the death of Abel. What God really thinks is shown in the commandment, "You shall not kill," not in the exceptions that the law makes - concessions to the people's hardness of heart.
Jesus proclaimed from the mountain: "You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say to you: do not repay evil with evil. You have heard how it was said: You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you". God in Christ pronounces a definitive "No" to violence, and substitutes nonviolence, forgiveness, meekness, gentleness. The true sermon on the mountain was not the one Jesus preached on a hillside in Galilee but the one he preached on Calvary.
Today violence cannot claim to be of God; it cannot cloak itself with God's authority. To do that is to drive the idea of God back to its primitive stages. Better not to believe in god than to believe in a god who would order us to kill innocents. Nor is it possible to justify violence in the name of progress. What results from wars is injustice and evils worse than before. Yet it is precisely in this that we see how disordered our world is: that it is necessary to have recourse to violence to redress evil; that we cannot achieve what is good without doing what is bad. Violence is midwife of further violence. Reflecting on the events that in 1989 led without bloodshed to the fall of totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe, John Paul II in the encyclical "Centesimus Annus" saw the change as the result of men and women who knew how and when to give testimony of the truth without recourse to violence. He ended by expressing a wish that, at the distance of 15 years, resounds today more urgently than ever: "May humankind learn to fight for justice without recourse to violence."