Hilton Head Island, SC – December 22, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 53:1-6; 7-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. – Isa. 53:3
This will be a Christmas sermon unlike any other I have ever preached. To my knowledge, in fifty-five years of ministry I have never preached a sermon on the last Sunday of Advent from any scripture passage other than the New Testament. Probably 95+ percent of them have come either from the Christmas stories in Luke and Matthew, and the remainder from the prologue in the Gospel of John or the writings of the apostle Paul.
Today, however, I am going to preach from a text in Isaiah 53. This passage is often used in conjunction with Good Friday, and by extension Easter, but not Christmas. Nevertheless, long before Handel put several verses of Isaiah 53 into the Good Friday section of his oratorio Messiah, the Church had concluded that Isaiah 53 was a prophecy about Jesus.
It was not. It was a prophecy about The Messiah. Isaiah spoke with prophetic boldness about God’s Messiah, but he had no idea when that person might appear in the future history of the people of Israel. First Isaiah, who wrote Chapters 1-39, lived in the eighth century BCE, and Second Isaiah, who wrote from Chapter 40 onward, lived in the sixth century BCE. If either Isaiah knew the Messiah would be someone named Jesus who would live seven and a half centuries or six centuries later, such knowledge could only have been very discouraging to their peers. All of them would be long gone and thus could never experience the joy of seeing God’s Anointed One.
And that brings us to what prophecy is, and what it is not. Prophecy is not prediction, although most people think that is the essence of what the word means. The prophets did make predictions, and sometimes they were clearly right, but sometimes they were clearly wrong. However, true prophecy is essentially the attempt of mortal human beings to speak what they believe to be the word of God, communicated to them by God Himself. Prophecy is directed to other mortal human beings. Prophets might say that if we do such-and-such, things will go well, and if we don’t, things will go badly. But they say that not on the basis of knowing the future, but from observing the past and present. Do right, and good ordinarily follows. Do the wrong, and trouble almost always follows. Those kinds of issues are the basis of prophecy.
Second Isaiah lived in Babylon along with the other people from Judah who were taken there as captives of the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. To whom did he refer when he wrote Chapter 53? Biblical scholars say this chapter is about someone they call “the Suffering Servant.”
But was this prophecy about the Suffering Servant therefore a prophecy about the Messiah? Yes, say many experts, but it certainly wasn’t specifically about Jesus of Nazareth, because Isaiah could have no concept of who Jesus would be, and Nazareth didn’t even exist in his time.
Other experts claim Isaiah 53 is actually about Israel itself. If Second Isaiah intended to suggest to his fellow Jews in Babylon that they were the suffering servants of God who were being mistreated by the Babylonians, he did so in a very cryptic fashion. Throughout history, writers under persecution feel that for their own safety they must write cryptically. In effect, Isaiah may have intended to say that the Jews in Babylon were carrying the burden of imprisonment on behalf of their relatives and friends back in Judah. Punishment had fallen upon the Babylonian exiles, and by their pain the rest of the Jewish people back in the Promised Land were saved from humiliation and oppression.
Poetry is often deliberately ambiguous, and Isaiah 53 represents the epitome of poetic ambiguity. Nevertheless, in the understanding of the Christian Church, this prophecy clearly refers to the death of Jesus on the cross. He bore our griefs; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with the lash stripes on his back are we saved from our own agonizing torture and executions.
This basic notion of the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus was given the most influential proclamation by the apostle Paul. In his letter to the Romans, Paul wrote, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God” (5:8-9).
The holiest day in the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. More Jews attend the synagogues on that day than any other day of the year. Back when the people of Israel were in the forty-year Wilderness Wandering with Moses in the Sinai Desert, they participated in a unique ritual. On Yom Kippur they took a goat out into the desert and tied it up. It was intended to perish there, alone and without any hope of survival. They called it “the scapegoat.” We still use that term today. A scapegoat is anyone who takes punishment upon himself which should have been experienced by the actual perpetrators of sins, crimes, or other wrongdoings.
Thus it was that the New Testament Church, led by Paul, came to believe that on the cross Jesus became the sacrificial scapegoat for all of humanity. He bore all our sins by his death, said Paul. Said Isaiah, “And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?” (53:8)
In the Gospel of John, we are told that Nicodemus, a wealthy Pharisee came to Jesus under the cover of darkness early on in Jesus’ ministry (John 3). The same Nicodemus provided a tomb for Jesus when he was crucified. Isaiah: “And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” (53:9).
Do you see why the early Christians concluded what they did about Isaiah 53? Do you see how they perceived Jesus to be the Suffering Servant whom Isaiah had said God would ultimately send into the world? But Isaiah prophesied that six centuries before the life and death of Jesus! He could not have been thinking specifically about a man named Jesus who would live six hundred years after he lived. By implication, however, Isaiah was hinting that the Messiah would be someone like who Jesus was. The Messiah of both First and Second Isaiah would not be like what most Israelites thought the Messiah would be. They thought the Messiah would be the powerful leader of a victorious army. Indeed Jesus would turn out to be powerful, but his power would be totally spiritual, and not military by any measure. Furthermore, instead of leading Israel to victory over Babylon, Second Isaiah may have obliquely suggested, the Messiah would provide the comfort of God to Israel because of the pain and indignities they had suffered from the Babylonians.
A military Messiah can only guarantee yet more military activity, but a comforting and consoling and vicarious Messiah can bring peace on earth, and good will to all peoples. As we see in the verses of Isaiah 53 however, the Bible does not clarify all mysteries. Sometimes, instead it magnifies the mysteries. The Bible may prompt more questions than it provides answers. It also may turn the glorious into the mysterious.
The Isaiah of Jerusalem was reflecting the universal Jewish concepts of his time in the eighth century BCE regarding the Messiah. Two centuries later, when Second Isaiah wrote Isaiah 53, did the Isaiah of Babylon see the Messiah in a very different light, precisely because of the Babylonian Captivity? Do people under great stress perceive reality quite differently from those living in peace and prosperity?
To the Jews of the first century of the Common Era, Rome represented the greatest threat to their temporal and spiritual security. Thus they reinterpreted the messianic prophecies of Isaiah in the altered light of the Roman occupation. Most first-century Jews still longed for a warrior Messiah to free them from Roman domination, but for Christian Jews, such as the twelve disciples, Paul, Silas, Barnabas, and Timothy, the Messiah was authenticated by Isaiah 53 even more than by Isaiah 7, 9, or 11. “Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief; when he makes himself an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days” (Isaiah 53:10).
The Christian Church became the offspring of Jesus Christ. His days, cut short by the crucifixion, have been prolonged through hundreds of millions of his followers ever since then.
Faith is a malleable benefit to acquire. The notion that God willed the crucifixion of Jesus is anathema to some Christians, but it is essential to others. The idea that the Messiah must display physical and political power is not negotiable to some Christians, but such an idea makes no sense to other Christians. The concepts of the Messiah are not all of one piece in the Bible. What warms the heart of one person by some of those concepts inflames the mind of another person.
It is not easy to sort all this out. Some of you may wonder why the differences should even be examined. “I was quite content as I was,” you might say; “why I should I be subjected to all these unanswered inquiries and uncertainties?” The purpose of a sermon such as this is certainly not to sow discord, but rather to provide openings by which various kinds of people can find access to the Jesus of history who can then become the Christ of faith. It is an attempt to make Christmas the Christ-mass, the worshipful celebration of the birth of the one believed to be the Messiah.
Many people say that Christmas has become far too commercialized. This sermon is not an attempt to sell anything. Instead it is an attempt at a proclamation that God seeks to give all of us the gift of faith, and that He provides many avenues toward that life-changing gift. As Isaiah presents many varied portraits of the Messiah, so I hope these words are means by which you can attach yourself to the Gospel of Christmas.
Last week’s Time Magazine was its annual issue in which it named its “Person of the Year.” In 2019 that was Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old prophet of the adverse and dangerous effects of climate-change. Before its long explanation of the Swedish girl’s remarkable actions over the last two years, Time also listed several 2019 heroes in the news. One was the football and track coach of the Parkrose High School in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, a mentally-disturbed student came into the school, armed with a shotgun. When Keanon Lowe saw the boy, without hesitating a moment, the coach lunged at him, grabbing the gun, which he quickly passed on to another teacher.
Instead of forcefully subduing the student, however, Keanon Lowe hugged him. Afterward, when asked about what had happened, Coach Lowe told the reporters, “I didn’t see an evil kid; I saw a kid who was going through a lot. What he needed was a shoulder to cry on and someone to hug him. I told him I cared about him, and that I was there to save him.”
For Angel Granados-Diaz, Keanon Lowe saved him from possible death and almost certain imprisonment. The student pleaded guilty to being in public with a loaded weapon, and he was sentenced to three years of probation, along with mental health treatment. According to prosecutors, the boy had only one round in the gun, intended for himself. Keanon Lowe said it was evident to him that Angel was “fighting demons.” In him the young coach saw not a demon, but an angel, as befits his name.
Messiah Jesus cast out demons and befriended sinners and misfits. He was compassionate toward prostitutes, and showed deference to hated tax collectors, to violators of religious laws, and to disabled people who were thought to be in that condition because they had been cursed by God.
What Keanon Lowe did could be perceived as messianic, but we believe what Jesus did was done because he was The Messiah. The term “Messiah” means different things to different people. Jesus is the Messiah for a wide variety of reasons to a wide variety of people. Second Isaiah may have imagined that the Messiah would be “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” That is a painfully accurate description of Jesus, but by no means is it the only fitting description of Jesus. He also is king of kings, and Lord of lords. And he shall reign forever and ever. Praise be to Yeshua Mesheach, and praise also to Georg Friedrich Handel’s Messiah.