NOTES for Isa 53:1-12

We can only bow before this pearl of prophetic insight... Before our eyes (and in our ears), stricken and ruined Jerusalem takes on ever deeper and more recognizable features. Through the prophet's sorrowful song emerges the human Face of the One who suffers for the sins of His people and by His wounds heals all the tribes of the earth. Before us is no longer Zion subjected to abuse, but the mysterious Man of sorrows who suffers voluntarily.

Several centuries will pass, and the disciples of the crucified Rabbi from Galilee will recognize in Him, down to the smallest details, their beloved Teacher. Until that happens, Israel can only listen in amazement to the mysterious Word and place its hope in the promised Righteous One.

Today's reading is a messianic hymn of Isaiah of Babylon, well known to every reader of the Bible. It is here that the Old Testament image of the Messiah comes closest of all to the Gospel image. As in another hymn of Isaiah of Babylon, the Messiah here least of all resembles a lawgiving king or a judge. He is barely noticeable (v. 2), and not because He is short in stature, but because Isaiah's Messiah holds no prominent position in society. He is not going to be the leader of a great messianic war. His task is different: He takes upon Himself the sin of the people, being Himself sinless, and thereby delivers the people from sin (vv. 3-5).

Such an image of the Messiah looked somewhat paradoxical against the background of the triumphalism that had seized the people in the first years after their return to the land of their fathers: that return itself seemed an indisputable testimony that all sins had been forgiven and all the people's transgressions forgotten. And now Isaiah spoke of the Messiah as the One who alone can deliver the people from sin. Of course, the full depth of the meanings connected with the person of the Messiah-Christ had only begun to open slightly to the prophet. But even this, one may think, was hard for his contemporaries to take in.

The death of the Messiah, as Isaiah of Babylon describes it, became still less understandable. It should be noted that he alone in the Old Testament has the image of a suffering Messiah. But if the image of the suffering and persecuted Messiah (vv. 6-7) over time nevertheless became part of rabbinic tradition, the image of the Messiah executed and dying (vv. 8-10) remained misunderstood. Apparently this prophecy of Isaiah was viewed more as a kind of prophetic hyperbole, with death understood to mean certain persecutions that would place the Messiah on the verge of death, which He would ultimately still successfully avoid. That is apparently how the closing verses of the hymn (vv. 11-12) were understood: having miraculously escaped death, the Messiah would finally still triumph and then enjoy the fruits of His victory.

Only the first generation of Christians understood that, in speaking of the Messiah's death, Isaiah was by no means exaggerating, although even the apostles understood only after the Resurrection the words about His coming death on the cross that they had heard many times from Jesus Himself. As for the resurrection of the Messiah, the prophet says nothing about it. And no wonder: if even the apostles believed in the resurrection of their Teacher with great difficulty, what could be expected from Isaiah's contemporaries, who lived several centuries before the coming of Christ? And still, it is precisely in Isaiah of Babylon that the image of the Messiah proved closest to the Gospel image. It is no accident that later Christians began to call him the "Old Testament evangelist."

Today, too, it is very important for us to listen and look, to ask the Holy Spirit to open our hearts, ears and eyes. After all, the high priests and scribes who condemned Jesus had read these words of Isaiah. They had read them many times. But they did not recognize Jesus as the Christ: this text was not considered messianic, and the Messiah was expected only as a King. Yet He ‘grew up before Him like a young shoot, like a root out of dry ground’. People regarded Him as Jesus of Nazareth; hardly anyone knew or remembered His birth in Bethlehem. They knew the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, but He was from Nazareth, from bad soil—‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ said the apostle Nathanael—so He could not be the Messiah. ‘He was despised, and we esteemed Him as nothing’: not only did they fail to recognize Him, they mocked Him. We can read the entire passage this way; every word was fulfilled. We read it, are deeply moved, even weep sometimes, but do not think about how it concerns us. After all, it was they, two thousand years ago, who did not recognize Him, did not receive Him, handed Him over to death. They were Jews, and we condemn the Jews; they were Romans, and we denounce Western civilization... But what about us?

‘A shoot out of dry ground’—dry, barren ground. A foreigner from the disreputable town of Nazareth... How do we treat foreigners, emigrants, refugees? Each of them is Christ, even the dirtiest, with ‘neither form nor majesty’, just like Jesus carrying the Cross. How do we treat the dirty homeless wanderers in the metro? They too, like Christ, have ‘neither form nor majesty’. Sometimes they smell, and we turn away, just as people did then: ‘we turned our faces away from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him as nothing’. How do we treat those who, we think, are certainly more sinful than we are—murderers, thieves? Do we judge them? Yet Christ is in them too; they simply do not receive Him, do not know Him. But He waits for them to turn to Him and let Him touch and heal them. He has already suffered for them; He has already died for them. We are all created in His image and likeness; we all resemble Him. Every suffering person, even the most despised and dirty, is He, is Christ. And we walk past, do not stop, turn away. How are we better than the Pharisees? How are we better than Pilate? It is we, we ourselves, who kill Him again with every sin of ours, with our coldness, our inattention, our indifference, our unwillingness to see and hear, our unwillingness to live.

Even if we did not know the traditional reading of these lines, it would still be impossible not to compare them with the Gospel passages that preserve the sufferings and humiliations of Christ; Isaiah is therefore quite rightly called “the Old Testament Evangelist.” Yet we know that several centuries later, many of those who knew and constantly reread the Book of Isaiah did not recognize in Jesus the One of whom the prophet spoke. The prophecy remained misunderstood.

Should we Christians exalt ourselves above the ancient Jews on the grounds that we understand the prophetic words more correctly? Are we always ready to see the image of God in someone who does not conform to our ideas of prosperity, giftedness, and success? A “theology of success” is still popular among some Christians, seeking to declare life’s good fortunes a reward from above—which is possible, but far from true in every case—and misfortunes evidence of God’s disfavor...

But every seductive attempt to adapt doctrine to earthly interests and pragmatic notions was rejected beforehand both by Isaiah’s prophecy and, all the more, by the One of whom the prophet spoke.

Of all the prophets, the image of the suffering Messiah appears only in Babylonian Isaiah. To his contemporaries these words sounded strange: for them the image of the Messiah was least of all associated with any kind of suffering. For them the Messiah was a righteous King, who would live like a king. What suffering could there be?

Meanwhile, in the prophet's words there sounds a revelation concerning the fundamental laws of spiritual life. After all, he does not say by accident that the Messiah suffers not for His own sins, but for the sins of other people, for the sins of the whole people of God. And He suffers voluntarily. This means that the Messiah takes upon Himself responsibility for the people's sins, somewhat as even today one person can repay another person's debts by paying his creditors for him. True, when a crime is involved, the transfer of responsibility to another person is impossible in our day. Today each person answers for himself before the law. But in ancient times it was possible to stand surety even for a criminal, taking upon oneself responsibility for the crime he had committed and bearing the corresponding punishment. In such a case it was presumed that the surety knew well the one for whom he was vouching and was so confident in him that he was ready to free him from the consequences of what had been done. The surety's motives did not matter here. He was required only to take upon himself the consequences of the crime committed by the offender.

This is exactly what the Messiah does before God in Isaiah: He takes upon Himself responsibility for the sins committed by the people and bears all the consequences of those sins. After this, the people are freed from responsibility and receive a chance to begin a new life from a clean slate. This was the only chance, because one cannot enter the Kingdom together with the burden of the consequences produced by sin committed consciously and voluntarily, and there were many such sins in the history of the people. Someone had to take them upon himself, giving the rest the possibility of entering the Kingdom unburdened by a load too heavy for new life. And the Messiah does this just as voluntarily and consciously as the people once sinned quite consciously and voluntarily, thereby opening the road to the Kingdom for the people and becoming the Redeemer.

The words of the prophet Isaiah testify with horrifying clarity that Jesus was tormented though innocent, voluntarily going to His death. In those rare moments when we draw near to this mystery, the heart is pierced by pain at the injustice done to the Innocent One and by reverence for His meekness in this voluntary self-surrender.

He went to the most terrible death known to humanity for our sake — for all the people who have lived on earth and for those who are yet to be born. And the most terrible — and most beautiful — thing is that I am among those people... For my sake He endured these sufferings, to redeem my sin through His sacrifice; and through this He grants life, because “He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him” (Heb 5:9).