Think of the most important news
stories in the world right now. I don’t
mean your favorite stories although the most important could be a good,
positive story. What I am getting is the
stories that are significant for humanity.
What issues or stories are the big ones?
Concentrate on the one or two that come to mind. Think on the first one or two stories that
came to mind.
Now, raise your hand if the story
you thought of is negative. If it would
be “bad news,” just raise your hand.
Some that came to my mind as example
of the most significant current events include the following:
-
Race
relations in the United States.
-
The ongoing
war with Isis in Iraq and Syria.
-
The
terrorist murders in France.
-
Climate
change.
-
The
Republican-controlled congress.
-
Immigration
in the United States
-
Same-sex
marriage becoming a norm in American culture.
I wonder if anything that came to my mind would be on your
list. It’s too simple to count every
story as “bad”. Some certainly are. Others are rife with tension because there is
the negative element, but also the potential for hope. These stories and many you have thought of
and stories that we can’t see coming that will dominate headlines tomorrow
collectively make up the narrative of our time.
This is our day. When seen
collectively, the signs of sin wreaking havoc and destroying human life are all
too obvious.
What word does a follower of Jesus Christ speak into this bad
news? To what action is the body of
Christ, His church, called in our day?
We want to live out our faith publically. We want to live as Jesus’ disciples not only
as we carry out our individual lives and our church life, but also as we give a
witness to the goodness of God and claim that God’s goodness, seen in Jesus, it
a truer story than the bad news we hear.
We want to counter the anxiety, hatred, death, and destruction we see in
these stories with a story of the good news of life in Christ. All people are invited to Him and He seeks
the lost and in different ways most of us have times of being lost.
Isaiah, living in Babylon with the Jews who were there as exiles,
spoke the good news of God into a situation in which God’s people felt defeated
an abandoned. They thought themselves
dead and the promises dating to Moses gone, but Isaiah came along to say God is
still all powerful, God is with us, and God will save us.
Isaiah’s words to the exiles are found in Isaiah 40-55. Within that block, there are four passages
called the servant songs. Isaiah 42, 49,
50, and then the most well-known 52-53 are passages in which the prophet speaks
of a special servant of the Lord, or the prophecy is from the perspective of the
Lord’s servant.
Bible scholars have widely debated who specifically was being
discussed in these “servant songs.” Who
is the servant? There have been many
suggestions. The servant is the prophet
himself – Isaiah. The servant is the
nation of Israel, commissioned by God to be a light that shines and allows the
world to see God (Is. 49:6). The the
emperor of Persia when Persia overthrew Babylon and allowed many Jews to return
to Israel, Cyrus, is specifically named in Isaiah. Thus, many think he is the servant. New Testament writers took the prophecies to
be signposts pointing to Jesus.
Isaiah certainly did not know Jesus was coming. He knew God was doing a new thing, but he
expected to see God work in his lifetime and he did. God has always been a God who saves. I don’t think Christians are wrong to read
the “servant songs” and immediately think of Jesus. However, I think there other ways of
identifying the servant are equally appropriate.
Donald Gowan of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary writes, “The
identity of the servant is not the key issue.
… What God accomplishes through the servant is what is important.”[i] Another expert, Norman Gottwald, of New York
Theological Seminary says, “The most promising question is not who is the
servant but what does the servant do?”[ii] When I was in seminary, we would get caught
up in discussions over issues like this, and I have found it extremely
encouraging to read these scholars and hear them express more concern about the
servant’s action and what it says about God.
Most helpful is the perspective of Paul Hanson of Harvard Divinity
School. He says, “The servant is the
description of the human being whom all who love God are challenged to become.”[iii]
Isaiah? Israel? Cyrus?
Maybe the servant image pointed to these, but when we consider the world
around us, and the problems, and when we realize we are called as
Christ-followers to announce the Gospel and the hope it brings to a lost,
hurting, dying world, then the servant is a depiction of who we are called to
be as God’s witnesses. And in Jesus, we
have a perfect example.
Look at Isaiah 42. God
delights in the servant. After Jesus was
baptized a voice from Heaven said, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). In Isaiah 42 God says, “I will put my spirit
upon him.” Luke 4:1 says Jesus was full
of the Spirit and led by the Spirit. Isaiah
42 repeatedly shows the servant to be an agent of God’s justice (v. 2, 3,
4). In his first public sermon Jesus
declared that the Spirit of the Lord anointed him to bring “good news to the
poor, … release to the captives, … recovery of sight to the blind, and …
[freedom] to the oppressed” (Luke 4:18).
In Isaiah 49, the servant is the speaker. “While I was in my mother’s womb, he named
me” he says (49:1). The Angel Gabriel
told Mary, “You will bear a son and name him Jesus” (Luke 1:31). The servant says God made his mouth like a
sharp sword. “He made me a polished
arrow” (49:2). In Revelation, the
resurrected Christ is described as having a two-edged sword coming from his
mouth (1:16). In Isaiah, the servant
says God is glorified in Him. In the
Gospels, God is glorified in Jesus during the transfiguration (Luke
9:28-36). Also in John 12, shortly
before he is arrested, Jesus declares that his action of sacrificing his own
life brings glory to God. Immediately, a
voice from Heaven confirms what Jesus just said. God is glorified in Jesus and in what Jesus’
act of dying on the cross (John 12:27-28).
If the various Bible scholars are correct and the most important
thing to see in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52-53 is what the servant does, then we
can see that Jesus does it better than anyone.
He perfectly filled the role of the servant described by Isaiah, and the
servant is the key figure in God’s salvation of Israel and in turn the world.
Now recall again the problems we face – racism in our country; war
in Syria; terrorism on a global scale; an immigration system that is completely
broken and affects millions of people in our country; pollution which leads to
climate change. As Jesus’ disciples, we
are called to respond to the bad news of terror, war, and death by sharing the
good news of life in Christ.
How do Isaiah’s prophecies and Jesus’ ideal modeling of those
visions help us? Consider what we
are. Paul writes in 1st
Corinthians 12, “You are the body of Christ” (v. 27). He also says, “In the one spirit we were all
baptized … and we were all made to drink of the one Spirit” (v.13). After Jesus rose from death, he breathed the
Holy Spirit into his disciples (John 20) and after his ascended, the Holy
Spirit filled hundreds of Christ-followers at Pentecost. Jesus is as present and as active as when he
walked the earth but not bodily. He is
present in spirit and in the church, us.
We act as the body of Christ.
What did Professor Hanson say about the “servant songs?” If we are people who love God, then we strive
to live into the role of God’s servant.
Thus we look at the same verses from Isaiah Jesus fulfilled and see if
those depictions can continue to be descriptive of the church in the world
today.
In Isaiah 42 it says God delights in the servant and in Luke 3, at
his baptism, God calls Jesus his beloved.
Isaiah tells us that God puts his spirit upon the servant, and Luke 4:1
says Jesus was full of the Spirit and led by the Spirit. What about today? Paul writes in Romans 5, “God’s love has been
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us”
(5:5). As the servant is beloved of God
and endowed with God’s spirit, so too are when we receive forgiveness and give
our lives to Christ.
Last week we talked about seeing God above the problems of the
world, as over everything. We see God
for God is. This morning, we add to
that, our perception of ourselves. In
Christ, we are sons and daughters of God.
When we find ourselves tempted to dwell on problems, our own personal
struggles or the evils that threaten people around the globe, a helpful
spiritual discipline is to remember that in Christ we are sons and daughters of
God.
Isaiah 42 shows that God’s servant works for justice (v. 2, 3, 4),
and Luke 4 among many other Gospel passages shows Jesus’ concern for people who
suffered injustice. We are living into
the life of God’s servants when we identify the most vulnerable people in
society and we work to help them. Most
often, these are those who are victims of injustice. We see it, name it, and work to counteract
injustice. This will be our theme next
week, but here we’ll simply say that the Lord’s servant speaks and works for
the justice the Lord demands. When we
act out of compassion to help those in need, we are living into the role of
God’s servant.
Isaiah 49 also showed us some things about the servant including
that God knew him before his birth. And
the Angel Gabriel told Mary she would have a son and would call him Jesus. Does the Lord pay such careful attention to
us even before we are born? Luke 12 and
Matthew 6 are both places where Jesus talks about the intimate, detailed care
God has for us. Like the servant, we too
are loved.
Isaiah 49 also tells us that the servant speaks the piercing truth
so that his words are like a sword, and we see the same of Jesus throughout the
gospels and the sword metaphor used in Revelation 1. The servant says God made his mouth like a
sharp sword. If we as individual
disciples and collectively as the body of Christ want to answer God’s call and
live as God’s servant, we have to speak the truth of the word of God. We don’t need to go out of our way to try to
step on the toes of people in our lives.
We don’t need to quote scripture all the time. But our words must laced with, colored by,
and washed in the truths of the Bible.
When they are we end up pointing people to God.
That’s not always comfortable or easy. It doesn’t always feel good. But, speaking truth in all occasion with love
and compassion and tact indicates that we are living on God’s terms for God’s
purpose. We have given up our lives to
Him that he would use us as His instruments of healing in the world.
Finally, in Isaiah, the servant says God is glorified in Him. In the Gospels, God is glorified in Jesus. When we love, when we show compassion and
work for peace and justice, when we welcome all people, and when we realize
that because of Christ we are God’s offspring as well as his creation and all
this determines how we speak and how we live, then God is glorified in our
lives.
The servant songs become a 21st century word that
speaks to the world around us as we see ourselves for who we are in Christ and
set our lives so that all that we say, think, and do reveals our complete
God-orientation and Holy Spirit dependence.
Now, again, recall the opening question.
What are the stories of today, the big issues? Which one troubles you most? It could be a national current like
terrorism. It could be something
local. Maybe what troubles you most is
something in your own neighborhood or your own family.
We are God’s servants – loved, Spirit-equipped, armed with the
truth we have in the word, and commission to work for justice, show compassion,
and point people to Jesus. We are going
to take a few moments now for silent reflection. Consider what you find most troubling in the
world today. Ask God how you, as His
servant, and how we, His church, are to speak and give his hope and peace and
love to the people suffering from that trouble God has put on your heart. Take a few moments to think and pray about it
silence, the problem, and the word of God we, His servants, are to bring to the
people who suffer.
After we have this reflection time, we will sing, you will be
invited to come for prayer if you would like to come.
AMEN
[i]
Gowan (1998), Theology of the Prophetic
Books: The Death & Resurrection of Israel, Westminster John Knox Press
(Louisville), p.159.
[ii]
Gottwald (1985), The Hebrew Bible: A
Socio-Literary Introduction,Fortress Press (Philadelphia), p.497.
[iii]
Hanson (1989), Interpretation: A Bible
Commentary for Teaching and Preachign: Isaiah 40-66, John Knox Press
(Louisville), p.44.
