(Note: Today’s guest blogger is Spiritus member, Courtney Davis. Courtney is a former theo-ethicist scholar, brain injury survivor, lover of furry creatures and being outdoors, who’s preoccupied with justice, the search for meaning, and an insatiable desire to learn. Thank you, Courtney, for this contribution and for your presence in our community!)
Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion: A Reflection
Through various attempts to regain the fidelity of Israel, God levies a series of judgments against the nation including exile. But with each of God’s violent campaigns to redeem Israel, the people reject God’s servants and fail to appropriate the divine teachings of such furious love; hesed. Therefore, it is in the prophetic Book of Isaiah that we see God lay out a remedial lesson plan for the faith-challenged community. Israel experiences what prophetic scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls the “radical, powerful, inscrutable resolve of God to do something new.” The revelation of this new thing shuts mouths and opens eyes. Biblical scholar, Paul Hanson, explains.
The final divine announcement is that the Servant will prosper, but the path that leads to exaltation is the path of a suffering unto death for the sake of sinners that was so terrible that it caused observers to be appalled. Yet the reason that nations and their kings are startled into wonder is not just, or even primarily, the severity of the suffering; it is the unprecedented nature, the absolute novelty of what they are seeing that drives them to silence.
This fourth song of the Suffering Servant is not simply a story about suffering and the humiliation of ostracism. Though these elements certainly play a significant role in the context of the narrative, it is instead a parable of sorts about the theological decision one has to make to break free from psychological colonization by social conventions of power. The confounding parable about the enigmatic Servant of God, who suffered for a sinful community, presents to the Babylonian exiles an option of hope (where none previously existed), which springs forth from the awakening of new possibilities for a Jerusalem rooted in an alternative consciousness of God’s unfailing power and presence in a sinful world.
This is the example of the Suffering Servant, who like Israel, was cast out and exiled from the place he knew as home. The exception to this comparison, however, being that the Servant, unlike Israel, was unblemished in his faith. Despite the hostile and downright violent circumstances by which he was confronted, this anonymous, but nonetheless obedient, Servant never turned aside from his relationship with God, and therefore, was never estranged from God. Though the temple (symbolized by the Servant’s deformed and abused body) had been destroyed, it did not diminish nor did it negate God’s fidelity to the faithful Servant. To the contrary, and to the absolute astonishment of the sinful nation, the exiled became the exulted. The enigmatic Suffering Servant, a novel revelation of power, provided the obstinate Israelites the means by which to finally make sense of their own exile and long-suffering in Babylon.
Millenia after God’s faithful Servant surrendered himself to death as an unblemished offering for sin, the Isaianic parable of fidelity remains deeply resonant still today. As human beings, we are ever at the ready to cast judgments based upon one’s appearance. In the case of the Suffering Servant, his community assumed his affliction was an outward sign of a profane and weakened state. Rather, the glaring affliction was the external manifestation of a morally deformed nation riddled by apostasy, and its own sin.
The suffering of God’s faithful Servant – sanctified not by social conventions of beauty or ability, but divine obedience – was merely the ugly, but nonetheless true reflection of a rebellious people. Ironically, the more horrific the Servant became in his carriage of Israel’s sin, the more he prospered. It is quite stunning to contemplate, especially in an able-bodied world obsessed with beauty and power.
But despite our collective confession of faith, the Suffering Servant by another name – the voiceless, the impoverished, the infirmed, the differently-abled, the othered, the environment – continues to bear our sins. Even more stunning to contemplate is the thought that the Epistle to the Hebrews raises. If exile was the penalty for rejecting God’s servants, how much worse the penalty for those who reject the source of eternal salvation! Let us instead hold fast to our confession and confidently approach the throne of grace to receive Christ’s mercy.