NOTES for Isa 42:1-25

The Servant will not raise his voice, although many speakers too often try to conceal the falsehood and weakness of their speeches with volume and pressure. But the one who comes from the Lord will not go unnoticed because his voice is quiet: spiritually sensitive people remember both that the Lord appeared to Elijah in the gentle whisper of the wind and that what is genuine most often does not impose itself by force or advertise itself by shouting. All the more lasting will be the triumph of victorious truth.

But why, a few phrases later, does the Lord warn that He will cry out? Is there no contradiction here? It seems, however, that this paradoxical form expresses the thought that the moment must inevitably come when everyone will hear the Lord’s voice. It will resemble not the shout of a person insisting on his own way, but a summons that cannot remain unheard, just like the quiet voice of the Servant. The Lord compares His cry to the cry of a woman giving birth, and here we remember that Jesus’ prophetic words about the coming upheavals, “this is the beginning of sorrows” (Matt 24:8), are rendered in the Cassian translation as “the beginning of the pangs of childbirth.” We are accustomed to calling the coming crisis “the end of the world,” but it will become the beginning of new life.