He grew up like a sapling before him, like a shoot from the parched earth; there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him. He was spurned and avoided by people, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, one of those from whom people hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way; but the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all. Though he was harshly treated, he submitted and opened not his mouth; like a lamb led to the slaughter or a sheep before the shearers, he was silent and opened not his mouth. Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away, and who would have thought any more of his destiny?
When he was cut off from the land of the living, and smitten for the sin of his people, a grave was assigned him among the wicked and a burial place with evildoers, though he had done no wrong nor spoken any falsehood. But the LORD was pleased to crush him in infirmity.
If he gives his life as an offering for sin, he shall see his descendants in a long life, and the will of the LORD shall be accomplished through him. Because of his affliction he shall see the light in fullness of days; through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear. Therefore, I will give him his portion among the great, and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty, because he surrendered himself to death and was counted among the wicked; and he shall take away the sins of many and win pardon for their offenses. (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12)
Isaiah’s words were interpreted by Christians long ago as prophecy and formed the basis for much of our understanding about Jesus Christ, for example, “…through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear…” and “…But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.” Today is Good Friday when we read and hear these words again, followed by the Passion according to John.
I always struggle with these passages and their interpretation. I suspect I’m not the only one. Therefore, on this Good Friday I include below a rather long, but excellent article found at the “Working Preacher” website (www.workingpreacher.org). It was written by Brennan Breed, Associate Professor of Old Testament and Theologian-in-Residence at the First Presbyterian Church in Marietta Georgia. He wrote:
For millennia, Christians have interpreted Isaiah 52:13-53:12 as a prophecy of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (see also Matthew 8:17; Acts 8:32-35; 1 Peter 2:22). This interpretation is important—especially on Good Friday—but it does not entirely deplete the hermeneutical potential of this text. As Frederick Buechner once preached about Jesus at the supper at Emmaus: “No sooner did they know who he was than he vanished from their sight… They could not nail him down. And that is how he always is. We can never nail him down, not even if the nails we use are real ones and the thing we nail him to is a cross.”1 Like Jesus, the songs of the Suffering Servant evade our simplistic and narrow understandings: they are complex, containing multitudes. We cannot nail them down.
Some verses in Isaiah 40-66 clearly refer to the remnants of Judah and Israel as “my servant” (Isaiah 41:8-9; 44:1-2; 21; 49:3), suggesting that the community of survivors have undergone excruciating suffering on behalf of the world—and this hermeneutical potential forms the core of the Jewish interpretive tradition on these texts. Yet other verses suggest that the recurring figure of the servant is an individual person who has a mission to help Israel (Isaiah 49:6), suggesting that the servant is either a prophet who suffers for delivering YHWH’s message, like Jeremiah or Moses (see also Jeremiah 11:18-20), or a future savior—which has most often been identified as Jesus by Christian interpreters. In Isaiah 53:4-6, the speaker shifts from YHWH (“my servant,” 52:13) to an anonymous group who claims that the servant suffered on their behalf (“he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed from our iniquities,” verse 5). God is named as the active agent inflicting the servant’s pain (verses 4, 10) and also the servant’s exaltation (verse 12).
Vicarious suffering is an important element in ancient Israelite theology, especially in dealing with the trauma of the Exile. If the Suffering Servant is the collective body of the survivors of the Exile, then the text suggests that their suffering was necessary for the future survival of the people of Judah. This should strike us as dangerous theology, to say the least. In its ancient setting, in the midst of the communal disaster of the Exile, Kathleen O’Connor shows that the biblical tendency to self-assign “guilt, shame, and burden of responsibility… gives structure and meaning to chaotic and vacuous experiences.”2 As O’Connor explains, scholars working in modern trauma and disaster studies have learned that assigning blame to oneself in the wake of a disaster can be beneficial, but only when exercised with one’s own agency, and only as a temporary step on a longer road of healing. Scholars such as Delores Williams have pointed out that, throughout Christian history, vicarious suffering has most often been used by the powerful as a tool to manipulate and oppress others.3 Instead of using blame as a temporary step to finding individual and communal wholeness, Christians have more often determined that the Jewish community must suffer; Christian men have often decided that women must suffer; white Christians have often proclaimed the necessity of Black suffering, or immigrant suffering, or non-Christian suffering, as a way to deny our own responsibility and culpability for the suffering in the world.
Perhaps especially in the mainline Church in the United States, we can find another way to read the Suffering Servant poems today. Jeremy Schipper, for example, has demonstrated that the language of Isaiah 53 precludes an atonement setting; the description of a “marred” servant (Isaiah 52:14) explicitly disqualifies him/them from serving as a sacrifice (see also Leviticus 22:25), and the word for “slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7) is used exclusively for butchering and cooking animals, not offering them as sacrifices.4 As in Jeremiah 11:19, the imagery of a lamb being led to slaughter describes the communal abuse of an individual—our transgressions pierced him (Isaiah 53:5)—and the disfigured body of the suffering one is a living testimony, “lifting up the sins of the many” for all to see (Isaiah 53:12).
As James Cone argues in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Americans in particular need to reckon with our history of white supremacist violence when we engage with the story of the crucifixion. When we think of Jesus’ cross, we must see its deep connection to the lynching tree.5 As Cone once wrote, “God in Christ became the Suffering Servant and thus took the humiliation and suffering of the oppressed into God’s own history.”6 In his understanding of the cross, God participates willingly in suffering to form solidarity with the oppressed—not because suffering is in itself good or healing or necessary. Like Mamie Till-Mobley, who demanded a public viewing for the disfigured corpse of her 13-your old son, Emmett Till, God “wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” The transformative effect of Till’s lynching (“we were sitting in for Emmett Till,” John Lewis said of the activism that followed) might resonate with the stunned self-reflection of the speakers in Isaiah 53:4-6.7
Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador once preached a sermon in memory of a fellow Salvadoran priest, Rutilio Grande, who had been killed by Salvadoran soldiers for organizing impoverished farmers. The Old Testament text for the day was Isaiah 53. Romero told the farmers gathered at the mass: “You are the image of the divine victim, ‘pierced for our offenses.’”8 Romero was not telling the farmers that they, or Grande, deserved their sufferings, or that it was just that they had to bear them, or that the suffering was redemptive in and of itself. Rather, Romero recognized that God was present with them in the midst of their unjust and undeserved sufferings.
We continue to live in a world shaped by violence, oppression, and injustice. There are many individuals, often ignored by those of us who have the privilege and the means to look elsewhere, who bear the sins of the many, etched indelibly into their bodies. The Coronavirus pandemic, the movements for racial justice in the wake of the murder of Black Americans, and the white supremacist riot in the United States Capitol building have all in different ways revealed the injustices that are present all around us. As we meditate on the horrific abuse and state sanctioned murder of Jesus on Good Friday, may we recognize his image in the victims we try so hard to ignore today, and may we—like the speakers of Isaiah 53:4-6—recognize our own culpability and be filled with a passion for God’s mission to “bring good news to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:18-19).
Notes
1. Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (HarperOne: 1985).
2. See Kathleen O’Connor, “Surviving Disaster in the Book of Jeremiah,” Word & World, 22 (2002): 369-377.
3. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 161-190.
4. Jeremy Schipper, “Interpreting the Lamb Imagery in Isaiah 53,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 132 (2013): 315-325.
5. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011).
6. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 161.
7. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 65-72.
8. Jon Sobrino, Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 28-31.
Perhaps all of us, or at least most of us, can see the wisdom of Brennan especially that which he says in his last paragraph.
Deacon David Pierce
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