Resonance

A New Commentary on the Second Servant Song: Isaiah 49:1-6

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

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I could see by the knowing smile on my skeptical college friend's face that he was certain he had me cornered. We shared a religion major and thus several courses, such as Theists and Atheists and Asian Religions. When it came to the use of the Christian religion, however, we couldn’t be farther apart. He sought to learn the skills of a university religion professor, while I sought to strengthen my budding personal faith in Jesus.

Excitedly, he said, “You know how the Bible says that Cain was kicked out of the family for killing Abel?” I already knew where this was going, but, being glad that he was reading the Bible, I played along. “Yes,” I said. He continued with that same look of “gotcha.” “Then God told him he would be a restless wanderer on the earth?” “Yes,” I said again. “Well, Cain is afraid of being killed, so God gives him the mark of Cain.” “Yes,” I said for the third time. “Well, where did all the other people he was afraid of come from?” With this, he was sure that he had just disproved the reliability, not only of the Genesis story, but of the whole Bible and of the entire Christian religion. I’m not sure what he expected of me…maybe that I would fall to my knees in anguish, no longer able to believe in Jesus? But, while he was reading the Bible for one reason, I was reading it for another. The meaning we seek when we open our Bibles makes all the difference in what we find.

Many, especially those with university degrees, approach the Bible as skeptics. They have been trained to approach the Scriptures as a coroner approaches a corpse. They teach people to approach the Bible as a body of dead letters from a time long past. Yet these ancient texts must leap the hurdles of modern criticism to be safe. They teach others to distrust past interpretations of Scripture. Stories like Cain and Abel can only be resurrected by slicing and dicing their phrases, weighing each word for consistency, and sorting fact from fiction with often scant archaeological evidence. They stitch whatever remains to the body of knowledge, grafting their own additions here and there to make the message of the Bible in their own image. In their books, the Bible is brought forth as Frankenstein’s monster, supporting the cynicism of readers like my college friend, but lacking any authority to guide the reader through the experience of reminiscence, reflection, or resurrection that they were intended to offer.

The story of Cain, as it resonates down through the rest of the Bible, leads the author of Hebrews to reflect on the true nature of faith.¹ For the author of 1 John, Cain serves as an anti-hero for our own journey with Jesus.² The author of Jude finds in Cain an interpretive key to those who stand against their ministry.³ These Biblical writers lived amidst the continuing influence of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Plato, and Aristotle, with their own critical interpretation of texts. It’s hard to believe that they would not have noticed the point my friend was making. But they weren’t reading these texts with a fear of being duped. They were looking for ancient wisdom that would help them makegoodhappen in their lives.

We find the same issue with our second Servant Song. Long before Jesus, readers of Isaiah noticed that four distinct poetic passages in the Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52-53) focused on the identity, calling, suffering, and ultimate triumph of a mysterious figure known as "the Servant of the LORD.” Later, when Jewish followers of Jesus read these Songs, their words struck “a note on the keyboard of their imagination,” and they saw their Lord Jesus reflected in these words. For example, they read:

Before I was born, the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name. -Isaiah 49: 1b

Those words reminded to them of Jesus’ birth and naming:

…an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” -Matthew 1:20b-21

It worked both ways. When people listened to Jesus, they also found that the power of his words reinforced by the writings of Isaiah:

You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.” -Matthew 15:7-9

These words were strengthened like a sharpened sword in the words describing Isaiah’s servant:

He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver. -Isaiah 42:2

This is the way that great poetry conveys meaning. The words give voice to something the reader has seen and experienced but has never put to words. They also enable them to experience past events in new and more powerful ways.

For example, we have all seen the reflection of the sky in the ocean. But the poet Charles Baudelaire puts it this way:

The ocean, strewn with sliding images of the sky,

Would mingle in a mysterious and solemn way,

Under the wild brief sunset…⁴

After reading this poem, I am empowered by his words to experience the ocean, either in my mind’s eye or in a future visit, in a more powerful way.

It would be a misreading of the passage, a destruction of its power and beauty, if I were to require the poem to specify which ocean is being considered, when his experience occurred, and whether Baudelaire wrote all of it, or a brilliant editor added to its power. These are all beside the point.

Instead, when those who walked with Jesus read:

He said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.” But I said, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all.” -Isaiah 49:3-4a

These poetic verses excited their emotions, reinforcing their faith as they remembered the hardness of heart that Jesus encountered. Stories like the following gained authority and power as they re-read them:

...the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders came to him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you authority to do this?”

Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin? Tell me!”

They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin’ …” (They feared the people, for everyone held that John really was a prophet.)

So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.”

Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

-Mark 11:27b-33

To experience the power of the Servant Songs, we need to approach them, not as critics bent on deconstruction, but through the process that Virginia Woolf describes, expanding on the Wittgenstein quote at the beginning of this post:

…reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme, metre and sound stir the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the sense not the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being a counterpart of the reality within…⁵

With this approach, the resonance between these passages in Isaiah and the life of Jesus becomes even stronger:

Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,
and my reward is with my God. -Isaiah 49:4b

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. -Luke 23:44-46

Then, suddenly, those of us who are Gentiles see the origins of our own faith in this song and, if we listen carefully, we might hear Handel’s Messiah playing in the background:

And now the Lord says— he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength —he says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

-Isaiah 49:5-6

At both the beginning and the end of this Servant Song, our faith is strengthened as we see ourselves as the people for whom this song is written:

Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations…. -Isaiah 49:1

I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6b

The second song of Isaiah seeks, as poetry, to create resonance between our experience of following Jesus and the ministry of the Servant. If we have the ear to hear, this mysterious servant will be unveiled, with sudden recollection, a conviction, a revelation, as the very one whom, by God’s grace, we are honored to love and follow.

This is the experience I long for my college friend, and for all those we know who are like him, to experience. May we one day sing the song of the Servant with full and joyful hearts!

1. Hebrews 11:4, NIVUK.

2. 1 John 3:12, NIVUK.

3. Jude 1:11, NIVUK.

4. Baudelaire, Charles, Flowers of Evil, (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 13.

5. Woolf, Virginia, Street Haunting, (United Kingdom, Penguin Random House, 2022), p. 18.