suffering servant
Each day in Holy Week has its own full set of lectionary readings. Tuesday, the Old Testament reading is Isaiah 49:1-7, a Song of the Suffering Servant, one of the four Servant Songs in Isaiah. It may come home to many folks these days.
Listen to me, O coastlands,
pay attention, you peoples from far away!
The Lord called me before I was born,
while I was in my mother's womb he named me.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid me away.
And he said to me, "You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will be glorified."
But I said, "I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my cause is with the Lord,
and my reward with my God."
And now the Lord says,
who formed me in the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him,
and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the sight of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength--
he says,
"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant.
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."
Thus says the Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers,
"Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves,
because of the Lord, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."
We looked at each of the four Servant Songs in our Sunday School class fairly recently. Well, it no longer seems recent, does it, it was back in that other age of life on Earth, wasn't it. And it was different then, a different perspective on things and life, wasn't it, from student to studied. We have changed places. Back then we were looking in, observers finding out about it, looking at the pathetic victim and trying to imagine how miserable it must have been. Now we are Being there, inside the lament, desperately looking out and wishing we were back where we were before. As if we've been apprehended and thrown in prison, we think unjustly, we don't know for what, and we don't know for how long.
The suffering servant didn't know either, but heard promise and had hope. Yet, there's an unsettling element.
A hurricane blows ashore with its wind and tide, does its worst for some hours and is gone. The next day will be beautiful, or maybe even later that afternoon. But this is something else, pestartig, as if the unthinkable, a plague.
The mindset in Jesus' time was that if calamity came down on you, then you or some of your forebears had it coming and this was it, your punishment, or you'd inherited theirs. There was no unfairness, only just desserts. We don't believe that these days, most of us. But we don't believe in plagues either, something about the Middle Ages, and now we are One, each of us hoping for survival. Since Cat5HMichael it's been #850Strong, now it's #EarthStrong.
Is there Hope? There's Hope, but here's an unsettling thing. Unlike how we perceive the Suffering Servant as Jesus, it's more like it was to Isaiah. The Suffering Servant doesn't seem to have been an individual, or even each individual, it was Israel, the nation itself, the body of folk Israel. Here it's the Earth, the body of folk Earthlings. The Earth will make it through. As for us, this is war and we are each soldier. The objective in war is to save the State. Each soldier is vulnerable, and each of us feels it.
I need a picture. Last evening: the osprey who perched on the scaffolding just out of our reach as we sat outside on 7H porch waiting for evening to fall.
T
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/HolyWk/HolyTue_RCL.html