Suffering Servants

Among the recurring themes in my posts is that embracing weakness and vulnerability rather than power is spirituality 101.

This is not happenstance, it is nurtured by experience more than hypothesis, practice rather than theory, and a consequent abiding conviction that the spiritual ethics of humility in practice, active justice, and doing compassion & love, is when all is said and done the only game in town.

In my post about Grace-sufficiency, I mentioned the “Suffering Servant” (Isa 52:13-53:12). If you are not familiar with the text here’s a little taste,

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem…” (Isa 53:2-3).

It is not possible to overstate the enormous influence that the writing of Hebrew prophet Isaiah has had on Christianity. Sometimes this text is referred to as the fifth gospel,¹ because it is quoted so often by the writers of the Christian Bible.

Isaiah is prolific in the Christian text.

You could say that Isaiah is prolific in the Christian text, a kind of backstage but ever present Israelite, directing the meta-narrative. And at the very heart of this direction is the counter-cultural, anti-hero image of the suffering servant.

It is unequivocal that the earliest followers of the Galilean, particularly after his horrific crucifixion, found much in Isaiah’s suffering servant imagery that was depictive of their slain leader.

However, there are important contextual issues at play here. The suffering servant was penned by one of the scribes who wrote in the Isaiah tradition, (probably the second of three Isaiah’s),² five centuries before the Galilean’s time.

What we have in the suffering servant is a profound poetic metaphor.

There is no scholarly consensus about actual identity of the suffering servant. It may have been a metaphor for suffering of the exiled Jews in Babylon, the destruction of Israel, Isaiah himself, or another Jewish prophet like Jeremiah.³

It is certainly not a prediction of what would eventually go down for the wandering outlier God man from Galilee, centuries later. But as I say in my book, this is a classic case of if the cap fits wear it.

What we have in the suffering servant is a profound poetic metaphor,⁴ that can indeed be given widespread application. Certainly the wacky out-there Paul did so, donning the suffering servant prophet cap himself, as did the Gospel narrators, in their depiction of the Christ.

But here’s the rub, you’ve got to be some kind of fool to want to try this particular cap on for size. Yet it is precisely this suffering servant cap that is on offer to those who really claim the Christ. If you’re looking for power, prestige and money, you’re at the wrong hat stand in the wrong shop. This cap is a quintessential always on offer deal for fools (more on that in my next post).

1. John F. A. Sawyer,The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). [↩]
2. Marvin E. Tate, “The Book of Isaiah in Recent Study,” in .Forming Prophetic Literature: Essays on Isaiah and the Twelve in Honor of John D. W. Watts, ed. James W. Watts and Paul R. House (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1996),22-56. [↩]
3. Marianne Moyaert, “Who Is the Suffering Servant?: A Comparative Theological Reading Of Isaiah 53 After the Shoah,” in Comparing Faithfully : Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection, ed. Michelle Voss Roberts (Fordham University Press, 2016), 216-237. [↩]
4. Patrick D. Miller, Stewards of the Mysteries of God: Preaching the Old Testament-and the New (Eugene, Or: Cascade, 2013),26. [↩]