Isaiah 52:13–53:12: The Suffering Servant: "By His Stripes We Are Healed

The fourth Servant Song, which the New Testament reads more than any other passage of Isaiah. God speaks first: his servant, disfigured beyond human likeness, will be lifted up and kings will be silent before him. Then a chorus of people who got him wrong confesses that he carried their sorrows, was pierced for their transgressions, and by his stripes they are healed. He goes to death like a lamb, silent, with the wicked, and God speaks again: he will see his offspring and justify many.

I promised in the Framing to read the Servant first as Isaiah's exiles heard him, and to let the fulfillment be seen as a promise kept rather than a text conscripted. So begin with the shape of the song, because the shape is its first meaning. God speaks at the beginning and the end; in between, a we speaks — and the we are people confessing that they got him wrong. "Yet we considered him stricken by God, struck down and afflicted." That is the sound of a community looking at a sufferer it had despised and realizing, too late, what the suffering was for. The fourth Servant Song is not a doctrine handed down; it is a discovery made by witnesses, and the discovery is the strangest one in the Old Testament: that the pain we attributed to his guilt was carrying ours. "Surely he took on our infirmities and carried our sorrows... he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed." Israel's sacrificial system had no man in it, and where the nations offered human beings it was murder, which the prophets condemned. Isaiah's exiles heard something new: a person who gives himself as the guilt offering (53:10).

Who was he, in their hearing? The song does not say, and the honest reader must sit with that. He is "my servant" — the title the book has been giving to Israel since chapter 41 — and Jewish readers since at least Origen's day, and dominantly since Rashi, have heard in him Israel itself: the people despised among the nations, disfigured by exile, whose suffering the nations would one day recognize as having been borne on their behalf. That reading is not a dodge; it is what the plain grammar of the book supports, and the church has no right to erase it. And yet the song's own details strain against it: the servant is distinguished from "my people" ("he was stricken for the transgression of my people"), he is innocent where Israel has been called a rebel from birth, he is silent where Israel has argued with God in every chapter, and he does something no nation does — he "made intercession for the transgressors." Jewish interpreters have answers to each of these — the "we" may be the astonished kings of 52:15, and "my people" theirs — and the argument is old and honest on both sides. The figure that began as the whole people in 41:8 and was called blind in 42:19 and confessed failure in 49:4 and offered his back in 50:6 has narrowed, song by song, to one who bears what the nation could not bear for itself. The exiles did not know his name. They knew his shape, and they knew that "the arm of the LORD" they had begged to wake up in 51:9 was, in 53:1, being revealed in a man from whom people hid their faces.

Then the fulfillment, from inside the Christian reading this edition takes, and as plainly as the book allows. When an Ethiopian official sitting in a chariot on the Gaza road read this chapter aloud and asked Philip, "Who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" — the question the song leaves open — Philip "began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus." The reading is not simply the church's afterthought; the Gospels record Jesus taking the song as his own — "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many," "this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors.'" A man despised and rejected, silent before his judges, executed by "oppression and judgment" between two criminals and buried in a rich man's tomb, whose followers understood only afterward that the death they had thought was his defeat was carrying their sin: the shape Isaiah's exiles knew got a name. And the thing that makes the reading a promise kept rather than a text conscripted is that the song already contained what no one could have arranged — the servant, after being "cut off from the land of the living," "will see the light of life and be satisfied," will "see his offspring, he will prolong his days." A dead man with descendants and a future: the fourth song ends past the grave, and the church read Easter in it because Easter is where the song was already pointing.

On the hard places. "Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and to cause him to suffer." Read alone, that sentence has bred a picture of a God who needs pain and a victim to supply it, and the rule of love does not permit the picture. Read it inside the song and it changes. The "we" who confess are the ones who did the despising and the hiding of faces; the oppression and the judgment were human; and the servant is not seized but pours out his life (53:12) — the verb is his, active, a self-offering. What God wills is not the cruelty of the crowd but the outcome the servant's willingness makes possible: "the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in his hand," many justified, iniquity borne, intercession made. The church's deepest reading of the chapter has always been that the arm of the LORD revealed in 53:1 is not someone God sent to suffer instead of himself but God's own arm, bared in the sight of the nations (52:10): the One who wills the crushing is the One being crushed. That is the only reading under which "it was the LORD's will" is good news, and it is the one I hold. I hold it beside the Jewish reading rather than over it, because a people who have been the despised servant among the nations for two thousand years, often at the hands of those quoting this chapter, have earned the right to hear it about themselves — and because the book that holds both readings ends, in chapter 66, with the nations and Israel worshiping together at one mountain.