The Suffering Servant

Isaiah 53:1-12 (NRSV)

Who has believed what we have heard?
   And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
   and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
   nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 
He was despised and rejected by others;
   a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
   he was despised, and we held him of no account. 

Surely he has borne our infirmities
   and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
   struck down by God, and afflicted. 
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed. 
All we like sheep have gone astray;
   we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
   the iniquity of us all. 

As Christians, this passage from Isaiah is one we are familiar with from Holy Week. The Man of Sorrows, or the Suffering Servant, seems as clear a indicator of Jesus as we can come up with.

In Judiasm, the Man of Sorrows is Israel itself, as a nation that suffered unspeakable pain through captivity and exile and humiliation.  And as Isaiah is a prophetic text, it is easy to see how even modern Jews can read into it the further suffering of the Jews that came even after the exile: suffering under ancient Greece and Rome, the destruction of the temple, persecutions in the Middle ages in Europe and Nazi Germany.

Does this reading take away from our Christian understanding?  I don't think so.

More than anything, all of Scripture - the Bible - is a book of faith.  We can not project ourselves into the minds and hearts of those who wrote it, nor can we force only our reading onto it.  Instead, as a book of faith, scripture opens our minds and hearts into relationship with God.  One of the problems for me with a so-called literal interpretation of the Bible is its ignoring just how scripture works on different hearts and minds to build relationship between God and God's people.

This passage has helped me to understand Jesus and the suffering of the cross more than some other passages.  That it was perhaps written initially about Israel primarily does not take away from that.  Jesus was the suffering servant and in this passage is everything we need to point to him as such.  That my Jewish friends and neighbors find comfort in it in another way does not diminish that. 

Both of us through it are brought into deeper relationship with God as a result of Isaiah's words of faith.

God of ages, thank you for the gift of your word, both your word in the pages of scripture and your Holy Word in the form of our savior.  Let us remember that your word binds, heals, connects, builds and carries throughout the centuries to bring us into everlasting relationship with you. Amen