The suffering servant poem of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is set in the middle of prophecies about the restoration of oppressed and disgraced Israel. Immediately preceding it is the announcement to Zion that ‘your God reigns’, that the wretched exiles will be brought back,1 that God has acted to redeem Jerusalem ‘before the eyes of all the nations’, that there will be singing and rejoicing because God has comforted his people (52:7-10). Immediately after is the exultant address to the barren, desolate wife: the time of suffering, shame, reproach, when God in his anger hid his face from her, is over, and her many children ‘will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities’ (54:3). In both instances the promise is that desolate, humiliated Israel will be restored and will prosper.
The servant, therefore, who is righteous Jacob, ideal Israel, does not stand apart from the historical experience of the nation; he must live it with them. Like exiled Israel, punished by God because of its sins, he had no beauty in his appearance, he was despised and rejected, he shared the pain and grief of exile, the humiliation of a defeated people. But by sharing in their affliction the righteous servant made possible the transformation from humiliation to rejoicing, from exile to the restoration of Zion. His suffering was, metaphorically at least, an atonement for the chronic disobedience of the nation.
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. 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. (53:4-6)
But because he was made an ‘offering for guilt’, he will see his offspring flourish, he will prolong his days, he will prosper, he will be exalted; the nations, not least Israel’s enemies, will be astonished (52:13; 53:10); the barren one will have many children. So in the prophet’s mind this is the lived redemptive moment on which the surrounding narrative of judgment and restoration hinges.
The story is told again in the New Testament. Indeed, it is acted out by Jesus, who anticipates the ignominious punishment of Israel in his own flesh by suffering the brutal fate of an insurrectionary on the cross, who gives his life as a ransom for many, who is raised by God so that he may be the ‘firstborn among many brothers’ (Rom. 8:29). Again, this is the redemptive narrative around which the fate of God’s people hinges. At the heart of the transformation, unavoidably, is the part played by the righteous servant who makes himself an offering for sin and lives to see the prosperity of his offspring.
So in celebrating that story today, I want to remember, among other things, that if the living God is present in our midst to be worshipped and served, it is because Jesus took upon himself the final punishment of Israel, that he was stricken for the transgression of his people so that many might be accounted righteous.
- 1. Motyer argues that it is not the return from Babylon that is in view here but the call to leave behind ‘the whole setting and ambience of the old sinful life’ (J.A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 421).
Re: Good Friday
Andrew, I really think that you’re misreading Isaiah 53, quite significantly. Unusually for you, it seems like you’re giving the traditional reading too much credit. ;-)
I don’t think the text implies that God does this to the servant. In fact, I think it criticises the very idea: ‘yet we considered him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted’.
I think that what “Isaiah’s” saying is that we thought he was being punished/rejected by God, but we were wrong…
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.
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.