The Isaiah Project: Chapter 50, or, The Suffering Servant

Hello again--we are nearing the home stretch here. Below is chapter 50, which comes as always with a short essay and my blessing to you all.

1. So says God: ‘where is this writ of divorce for your mother, recording how I cast her out? Did I sell you out to my investors? Which one? Look: you were sold for your own evil, and your mother was cast out for your own rebellion.

2. Why was no one there when I came? I called out, but no one answered — is my hand cut short? Too short to vindicate? Is there no strength left in me to rescue? Look! At one harsh word from me the ocean runs dry, and I turn rivers into deserts. The fish rot without water: they die of thirst.

3. I clothe the heavens in darkness, and make burlap their covering.

4. My Master, God, has given to me the tongue of those taught to talk to the weary — to know the right time to sustain and proclaim. He wakes me up morning by morning; he wakes up my ear to hear like those who are taught.

5. My Master, God, opened my ear for me, and I didn’t rebel. I didn’t turn away.

6. I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who tore out my hair; I didn’t hide my face from their scorn and their spitting.

7. But my Master, God, will give me help. And so I am not scorned; and so I set my face like flint — I know I won’t be put to shame.

8. He is close beside me; he justifies me — who will accuse me? Let us stand together — who is my prosecutor? Let’s see him come near me.

9. Look: My master, God, will give me help. Who’s going to condemn me? Who is he? Look: all of them will wear out like old clothes. Moths will eat them.

10. Who among you fears God? Who hears his servant’s voice? Though walks in the pitch black dark, though no radiance shines on him, yet let him rely on God’s name, and lean on his god.

11. Look, all of you: you light fires; you strap on chains of flame. Go, in the light of your fires, with the flames you set alight. From my hand, this is what you’ll get: you’ll lie down to sleep in anguish.

Isaiah met God in Jerusalem's temple. Back in Chapter 6, he told the story of how he was ordained a prophet: with fire and chants of 'holy, holy,' in the midst of a mighty sanctuary.

But Isaiah, like the human race, was unclean. And he knew it, which is why for years afterward he foresaw the blood and devastation of exile in Babylon. When it came, the Jewish people would not meet God in opulence and splendor. They would meet him on the banks of foreign rivers, torn from their home and their family, living in places where it seemed impossible that he should be.

Perhaps in some perfect world where we did everything right, God really could dwell immovably in a temple made of stone, at the center of a human city that would never fall. But we do not live in that world and so neither--by his grace--does God. Isaiah could see visions of the savior in the wilderness because he realized that God, rather than insist upon perfection in huamnity, would follow us into the depths of our depravity and pain.

So he built another temple of sorts, where God could be worshipped in spirit and in truth. That temple is this prophecy itself, all 66 chapters of it, and the Scripture into which it is folded. The great reformer Martin Luther wrote that the Bible is the cradle which holds the infant Christ. This vessel of words proved, at the last, to be the only thing God's fallen people could carry with them everywhere. If the Jews could not take their temple into exile, they could take the words of their holy texts, written onto their hearts.

Today we are approaching something like the inner sanctuary of Isaiah's temple, the burning and bleeding heart of his prophecy. There are four passages in Isaiah which we call the 'suffering servant songs'--works of poetry in which a messenger of God takes on the anguish of the human race. Two of them we have already read: 42:1–4 and 49:1–6. One, 52:13–53:12, is still to come. The other is here, in verses 4-7 of Chapter 50.

'I gave my back to those who beat me...I didn't hide my face from their scorn and their spitting. But my Master, God, will give me help. And so I am not scorned.' The servant in this passage lets himself be abased as deeply as this world is capable of abasing anybody. Yet he insists--as Christ would one day insist--that in the only world which matters, he is royalty.

I can imagine that this hope burned in the hearts of the Jewish people when they lost all the wealth, status, and power they had in the world. I know that it has burned likewise in the hearts of faithful generations who suffered persecution for their faith. I know it burns even now in places like North Korea, where disciples of Christ huddle in the darkness as the state hunts them down. These lost, these scorned, these hungry and despised people: the Messiah proclaims, they are exalted in God's eyes.

It has been a lengthy and profound journey for us through this temple of Isaiah's words. I began translating this text three years ago, and ever since I have been sharing it--along with my reflections on it--to more and more people around the world. Every now and then along the way someone tells me something that stops me in my tracks, something about how these verses have been there when everything else fell to pieces. At the death of a child, or the loss of a job. This is not a glamorous or exalted kind of faith, not a gauzy or naïve hope. It is the real kind, the kind that lives in blood and dehydration, in the moment when your eyes are dry from sorrow beyond tears.

I do not know what is in my future or yours. I hope it's not despair or heartbreak. I hope it's not the ruination of our homes or our families. But I know that for others like us in the past, it has been so. And this too, I know: those who have carried the words of Scripture with them into the valley of death have found that God was there too. He has always been there, suffering under the same blows as us. And when we meet him, bleeding at the heart of Isaiah's temple, we are more fearsomely and finally blessed than we can possibly yet know.