Isaiah 50:4-9 Commentary

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America loves winners.  We like it when our teams win. We celebrate the victors.  We talk about our children’s successes in our Christmas cards and humble brag about promotions on social media.  America celebrates winners.  And the American church has, largely, followed suit. Of course, it’s obvious in the health-and-wealth “gospel” scene but we’ve adopted the mindset in a lot of other ways too.  Books, conferences, and speakers were dedicated to the church growth movement in the 1990s and early 2000s. Celebrity pastors, Bible teachers and worship leaders take center stage. Meanwhile, podcasters and “Christian influencers” compete for social media influence. Inasmuch as Christian Nationalism has a hold on our congregation’s imaginations, it’s an overwhelming desire to win. Win influence and power. Win the next election. Win whatever culture war is raging at the moment. All we want to do is win, win, win.

Which is a mighty strange way for the followers of a beaten and crucified Savior to behave.  Maybe, instead of being so concerned about winning, we could spare a moment this Holy Week to consider that the cost of discipleship, the weight of a cross has more to do with losing than with winning. That the discipleship of the American Church is always going to be more than few degrees away from Christlikeness when it sets its trajectory toward winning. Indeed, it might be headed in the opposite direction altogether.

Commentary

Would the Real Suffering Servant Please Stand Up?

As Christian readers of Hebrew Scriptures, we know (or we think we know) what these suffering servant chapters are about.  The Lectionary perpetuates the way we think about these passages by placing one at the heart of our Liturgy of the Passion readings for this coming Sunday. Isn’t Isaiah 50, with its imagery of a hero persisting in his godly obedience even to the cost of a scourged back, a plucked beard, mocking, and spitting an obvious allusion to Christ’s own suffering and death on the cross? Well, yes. That is certainly the comparison that the Lectionary, in concert with most of the Christian tradition, is hoping to make.

But it’s complicated.  Because even when Christian readers see Christ in the Old Testament, it’s wise to pause and see what the original audience would have thought.  Is Isaiah 50, for Jews, a prophecy of a coming Messiah? Or is it something else? Even Robert Alter, a Jewish commentator, has to acknowledge the overwhelming weight of Christian commentary on this passage.  He makes this observation on verse 6, “There is a long tradition of Christian interpretation that refers this entire verse to Christ.” But Alter has already stated his presupposition about the text in a comment on verse 4. “The prophet now speaks autobiographically.” He similarly concludes this about verse 7, “The prophet, knowing that he speaks for God and is supported by God, does not feel really shamed even in the midst of public humiliation, and he can set his face hard as flint even as it is spat upon and his beard torn.”

Jewish commentaries, then, don’t uniformly recognize Isaiah 50 as a Messianic prophecy.  Even some Christian commentators suggest something else might be happening in Isaiah’s “suffering servant” texts (42:1-9, 49:1-13, 50:4-11, 52:13-53:12). Speaking about chapter 42 specifically but mentioning the others, the CEB Study Bible suggests, “Christian tradition tended to read this and other servant passages in Second Isaiah (40-55) as predictions of Jesus. The context of these passages shows that the servant was a model for returning Israel for Second Isaiah’s earliest readers.” In other words, the kind of perseverance under persecution, persistence in the face of great trial, resistance and loss is a model that all who hope to follow God should look to for themselves.  That said, The CEB Study Bible goes on to assert, “Since Jesus also lived as a model Israelite in his time, it makes sense to understand him in terms of these passages without excluding the earlier understanding of the prophet’s readers.”

Yes, this passage tells us something about Jesus, particularly his suffering and death.  But it may also serve as an elaboration of Jesus’ command that we might all take up our crosses and follow Him. Discipleship is a losing proposition.

God on Behalf of the Suffering

There is an additional benefit of taking a “yes, and” approach to this text of Scripture. Yes, for Christian interpreters, this is necessarily a vision and a foreshadowing of Christ for us. AND it is a reminder that we are to follow in the way of a crucified Savior.  The benefit is that God, who empowered Christ to set his face toward the cross, to endure suffering and hardship for us is the same God empowering us to do the hard work of losing, when we’d all really rather be winners.  According to The CEB Study Bible, when “Suffering Israel speaks again” he praises the “divine support promised to Israel in earlier chapters. Here he emphasizes that God sustains him even in conflict and crisis”

In fact, verse 4 reminds us that we awake in the morning to a new word and fresh mercies.  It is a linguistic parallel, “Echoing the confidence expressed in Lamentations 3:22-23 that God’s love and mercy are renewed every morning…emphasis is on learning from God’s voice. Attending to God’s instruction prepares the speaker to stand strong in the midst of inter human conflict and harassment.” Robert Alter agrees with this assessment of the text when he writes, “The prophet, knowing that he speaks for God and is supported by God, does not feel really shamed even in the midst of public humiliation, and he can set his face hard as flint even as it is spat upon and his beard is torn.”

As the Sunday that ushers us into Holy Week, that invites us to journey with Christ to the Cross, perhaps this year it is an invitation to acknowledge what Christ alone accomplishes: our forgiveness, reconciliation with and restoration to God.  And, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Thus, the Holy Week journey toward the cross is also an opportunity to consider what it means to walk in the path of discipleship behind a Suffering Servant.