Re: Good Friday

Graham, I understand the problem that a lot of people have with the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. I’m not sure what it was in the post that particularly suggested that I was arguing that God did this to the servant - that wasn’t really the point that I was trying to make. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the theology of the passage has as its basic premise that the exile and the state of affairs that accompanied it were the means by which God punished his people for their sin.

There are all sorts of difficult questions regarding the identity of the servant and his relation to Israel, but the point seems to me pretty clear that ‘he’ participated in the suffering that was the consequence of God’s wrath against Israel. I would want to understand that primarily in historical terms: a righteous group within Israel shared undeservingly in the punishment of the nation as a whole, and their faithfulness to the point of death was seen as having redemptive effect. That is also basically the theology of the Maccabean martyrs. It provides a paradigm or metaphor for the New Testament’s understanding of the suffering of Jesus, in the first place, but also of the faithful community that follows him.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. (Is. 53:4-5)

I take your point, however, about this passage. It seems appropriate to distinguish between the intended punishment of sinful Israel and the collateral suffering of the righteous servant. The servant is not himself punished by God. That’s how it appeared to those who rejected him, but he was implicated in the punishment of Israel as a whole. In a sense there is a basic issue of theodicy here: why do the righteous suffer along with the wicked when God judges his people?

We cannot say, however, that his suffering was accidental: ‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief…’ (53:10).

But does this meet your objections? The basic argument would be something like: i) God punishes sinful Israel through political-military catastrophe; ii) the servant is not punished, but by taking upon himself that suffering he makes himself an offering for the sins of many and the means by which the future of Israel is secured; and iii) this is in some way the outworking of the intention of YHWH.