Who Is The Suffering Servant of Isaiah? Or, “We Shall Overcome”

Transcript of my Sermon 10/20/2024: “We Shall Overcome”

Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 53: 4–12

Gospel Reading: Mark 10:35–45

Isaiah 53 is the most famous of a group of passages in the book of Isaiah about “The Suffering Servant” known as “The Servant Songs.”

Traditionally, Christian theology has seen reflections of Christ in these passages.

References to his passion, his death, and the atoning work of the cross.

But this view is retroactively imposed on the text. The Servant is not the Messiah. At least, not as we tend to think of the Messiah.

As you may know, the prophets of the Bible were writing about 400–500 years before Christ. The author of the Servant Songs, later incorporated into the magnum opus that is the “book of the prophet Isaiah” here is likely writing sometime after the Babylonian Exile, after the Jewish people have returned from captivity and are slowly, painstakingly, trying to rebuild a life, a society, from one that was shattered and broken into pieces.

Isaiah is writing a message of hope, albeit one with his eyes wide open. It’s not a message of wide-eyed, Pollyanna-esque naïvete. It is clear-eyed, it is realistic, it is the song of a…