NOTES for Isa 42:1-25
The Servant will not raise his voice, though many speakers too often try to cover the falseness and emptiness of their speeches with loudness and force. But the one who comes from the Lord will not go unnoticed because of a quiet voice: spiritually sensitive people remember both that the Lord appeared to Elijah in the quiet breath of the wind, and that what is genuine most often does not impose itself by force or advertise itself by shouting. The victory of truth will prove all the more secure.
But why, then, does the Lord warn a few lines later that He will cry out? Is there not a contradiction here? It still seems that this paradoxical way of speaking expresses the thought that the moment must inevitably come when the Lord's voice will be heard by all, and it will be like the cry not of a person insisting on his own way, but of 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 Jesus' prophetic words about the coming upheavals, "this is the beginning of sorrows" (Matt. 24:8), which according to the Kassian translation sound like "the beginning of birth pangs." We are used to calling the coming crisis "the end of the world," but it will become the beginning of a new life.