THE MYSTERIOUS SUFFERING SERVANT
These past few weeks we have been studying images of Christ on the cross from an OT perspective. We have seen how God foreshadowed long ago the saving event that would deliver the world from sin and death. Some of the images have been obscure and needed interpretation. Isaiah 53, in comparison, so clearly refers to the person of Jesus that it hardly needs explanation. That wasn’t always the case, however.
Who is the suffering servant of Isaiah 53? In Isaiah’s day, some thought Isaiah was talking about himself. Shortly after Israel’s fall and captivity, many Jews thought it was talking about themselves and their plight in Babylon.
But in Acts 8, we read the account of a treasury official who was reading Isaiah 53 on the way home from a religious festival. He is struggling with the text and can’t figure it out. While engrossed in the scripture, a man named Philip appears who hears him reading Isaiah 53. “Do you understand what you are reading?” he asks the treasury agent. “How can I unless someone guides me?” the agent responds. So, Philip climbs into a seat beside the man and the man asks who this person is who is led like a lamb to the slaughter. Who is Isaiah talking about?
Without hesitation, Philip takes this passage and begins to tell the man about the good news of Jesus (8:35). The Christian church is barely a few years old at this time and already Isaiah 53 is commonly accepted among Christians as a prophecy about Jesus.
Isaiah’s prophecy gives us the richest understanding of the work of Christ in the OT. This text takes us to the heart of the human problem and the heart of the divine mind. It offers a bold and daring answer to the question, “How is God going to deal with sin and forgive humankind without offending his holy character?” His answer is the Suffering Servant who submits to God’s purposes and takes on the sins of humanity even though he was innocent of any himself.
Isaiah’s portrait of Jesus is not pretty. It shatters the American image of a man with a commanding presence or a blue-eyed attractive hippy with rippling muscles. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah will leave you speechless. Is this the Jesus you have come to know?
Would you believe it?
The Servant Song (as it is known) begins at 52:13 and speaks of his marred appearance. He is so mutilated that he barely resembles a human being. The picture is shocking.
Isaiah asks, “Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?” (1). What Israel wanted and needed in the time of Isaiah was a king who would deliver them from the threats of the surrounding nations. They needed a hero.
What Isaiah described was a zero. It was so shocking a revelation of human disfigurement that those who would see him would step back in horror not only saying, “Is this the servant?” but is this human?
Who would believe this? The arm of the LORD is a reference to the power and strength of God. This is not anyone’s idea of power and strength.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem to the shouts of “Hosanna” he came riding on a donkey. That should have been a clue that something was amiss in their perceptions. A warrior king comes on a white horse, not a merchant’s animal. Their deliverer entered the Holy City with no sword, no army, and no visible advantage of power.
Jesus himself said as he entered, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes,” (Luke 19:41-42). If anyone should have recognized the Messiah it would be those who possessed the knowledge of the scriptures, of Isaiah 53. But their eyes were blind to “the arm of the LORD.”
He was nothing to look at…
This may offend your perceptions of Jesus, but he was nothing to look at. I know that this is hard to swallow, but listen to what Isaiah says, “For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground;” (2a).
Isaiah implies that the Servant had an unimpressive birth. His pedigree was common and unremarkable. A “young plant” pictures a tender shoot, a wisp of a plant that grows in a place where nothing should grow at all. You may think “Ok, but it’s Jesus.” No, you don’t get it, this is a green little nothing compared to an oak tree.
Forget the romanticized Christmas cards of stables and animals and angel glory. Jesus was born in the muck of animal dwellings instead of in a palace. He was born to peasants whose only claim to nobility was a long-dead dynasty. When Jesus began his ministry and teaching, his hometown buddies sneered, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother Mary? Aren’t his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?” (Mt. 13:55). Who is this guy? And one of his own potential followers, Nathaniel, when he heard where Jesus was from laughed, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn. 1:46).
Isaiah said they would apply the usual tests to the Servant: “…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him,” (53:2b). Was he good looking (beauty)? Did he have an impressive personality (majesty)? What impression did he make? According to Isaiah, he would fail on all accounts.
Do you ever notice when a victim of a tragedy (a murder or some horrific event) is shown on the news what reaction people have based on appearance? They show a picture, and we go, “Oh, she was so pretty. What a shame.” Because it’s not a shame when less attractive people die…
No one wanted him around…
The portrait of the Suffering Servant descends even further. Partly because of his unimpressive pedigree and appearance, but also because of the nature of his ministry, he is totally rejected. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from who men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not,” (53:3).
Twice the word “despised” is used. We often wonder at the choice of the Twelve disciples as lowly men, with minimum wage jobs and no leadership skills. I think that those who we deem better candidates didn’t want the job of following Jesus. The “better” types despised the uncredentialed rabbi. Until they saw the miracles. But then his teaching turned crowds away. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me,”(Lk 9:23), was not an attractive invitation.
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief…Jesus could have come into our world as some kind of superman, untouched by human weakness, never tiring, hungering, thirsting, immune to trials and temptations. Would you have related to that? Jesus knew pain, hunger, weariness. He knew rejection, betrayal, and exasperation. He even knew grief when his good friend Lazarus passed away.
Jesus’ greatest sorrow was experienced on the cross, bearing the sins of the world. But this was only the culmination of his grief over the lostness of the people around him, people who didn’t understand God. What a delight for Jesus when the eyes of the woman at the well grew large at the revelation that Messiah stood before her. She got it. As a teacher I can tell you that nothing thrills me more than seeing a student suddenly “get it.” Otherwise, ignorance is grievous.
He looked cursed…
Jesus was a man of sorrows and griefs, but they were our sorrows and griefs. Note the tone of verse 4, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” (53:4). The words “griefs” and “sorrows” are the same as the Hebrew words in verse 3. The Hebrew word “bore” means “to carry, to lift up.” And “carried” means “to bear, carry, drag along a burden, to shoulder.” That sounds heavy.
A common cliché we use when someone carries a lot of responsibility is that they “are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.” Who but Jesus fits this image better? He carried our sorrows, our griefs…Here I ask you to recall the image of the scapegoat. Remember in Leviticus 16 how the priest laid his hand on the head of the “surviving” goat and symbolically transferred all Israel’s sins to that goat? The scapegoat image fits well in Isaiah’s description. All our griefs and sorrows are put on him.
“…yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted,” (53:4b). Isaiah commented that when the onlookers, those observing the Suffering Servant, gazed on this wasted life of a man, they concluded that God was punishing this man for his sin. The common understanding among the Jews was that if someone suffered, they must have sinned. Yeah, we’re not too far off on that one. But it’s wrong.
Jesus was hung on a cross, a tree. Deuteronomy 21:23 says that a hanged man is cursed by God. Anyone who witnessed a man dying on a cross would be justified in saying that man was cursed. It normally takes nine days for a person to die on a cross. Jesus died in six hours.
Yet he was punished for us…
If there is any misunderstanding about the suffering of this man, if anyone should begin to think he was cursed by God and that is why he endured such agony, Isaiah clears this up:
“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed,” (53:5).
This piece explains what really happened and why. It was not the punishment of God against him. It was not his own sins that put him on the cross. It was our sins. It was our rebellion. It was our wandering. As Isaiah says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all,” (53:6; there’s the scapegoat motif again).
Sin as failure would receive nothing more than pity; sin as a moral defect is troublesome but it may be argued that what cannot be helped cannot be blameworthy; but sin as willfulness is the thing God cannot overlook. It is the very heart of sinfulness that we sin because we want to. The wandering sheep who is intent on feeding its stomach ignores the shepherd’s call to come back. We all like sheep are enticed by the allure of greener grass over the hilltop. We all like sheep inch forward ignoring the warning that wolves lay in wait behind the bushes. We keep pressing the issue of our independence.
And that is why the Suffering Servant is pierced, is crushed, is rejected, is despised, is deformed by the scourge of whips and nails and crown of thorns. We are the reason for the suffering of the Servant.
But as long as we see that our need of forgiveness remains our deepest need, we can rejoice in this tragic image of a man so disfigured. Because Jesus died for us, the rest of our problems can be dealt with precisely because sin and forgiveness are core issues. We can bring our sins to the cross and leave them there; we can bring our pains, our griefs, and our sorrows to the cross and leave them there too. We need not hang on to them. The Servant suffers both for our rebellion and for our pain and suffering. (J. Goldingay – paraphrased).
“This is real love – not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins,” 1 John 4:10.
AMEN
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