NOTES for Isa 53:1-12

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."