Chapter XX: The Suffering Servant (1)

ISAIAH lii. 13-liii.

We are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters, lii. 13-15 and liii. Before we attempt the interpretation of this high and solemn passage of Revelation, let us look at its position in our prophecy, and examine its structure.

The peculiarities of the style and of the vocabulary of ch. lii. 13-liii., along with the fact, that, if it be omitted, the prophecies on either side readily flow together, have led some critics to suppose it to be an insertion, borrowed from an earlier writer.[203] The style--broken, sobbing and recurrent--is certainly a change from the forward, flowing sentences, on which we have been carried up till now, and there are a number of words that we find quite new to us. Yet surely both style and words are fully accounted for by the novel and tragic nature of the subject, to which the prophet has brought us: regret and remorse, though they speak through the same lips as hope and the assurance of salvation, must necessarily do so with a very different accent and set of terms. Criticism surely overreaches itself, when it suggests that a writer, so versatile and dramatic as our prophet, could not have written ch. lii. 13-liii. along with, say, ch. xl. or ch. lii. 1-12 or ch. liv. We might as well be asked to assign to different authors Hamlet's soliloquy, and the King's conversation, in the same play, with the ambassadors from Norway. To aver that if ch. lii. 13-liii. were left out, no one who had not seen it would miss it, so closely does ch. liv. follow on to ch. lii. 12, is to aver what means nothing. In any dramatic work you may leave out the finest passage,--from a Greek tragedy its grandest chorus, or from a play of Shakespeare's the hero's soliloquy,--without seeming, to eyes that have not seen what you have done, to have disturbed the connection of the whole. Observe the juncture in our prophecy at which this last passage on the Servant appears. It is one exactly the same as that at which another great passage on the Servant was inserted (ch. xlix. 1-9), viz., just after a call to the people to seize the redemption achieved for them and to come forth from Babylon. It is the kind of climax or pause in their tale, which dramatic writers of all kinds employ for the solemn utterance of principles lying at the back, or transcending the scope, of the events of which they treat. To say the least, it is surely more probable that our prophet himself employed so natural an opportunity to give expression to his highest truths about the Servant, than that some one else took his work, broke up another already extant work on the Servant and thrust the pieces of the latter into the former. Moreover, we shall find many of the ideas, as well as of the phrases, of ch. lii. 13-liii. to be essentially the same as some we have already encountered in our prophecy.[204]

There is then no evidence that this singular prophecy ever stood apart from its present context, or that it was written by another writer than the prophet, by whom we have hitherto found ourselves conducted. On the contrary, while it has links with what goes before it, we see good reasons, why the prophet should choose just this moment for uttering its unique and transcendent contents, as well as why he should employ in it a style and a vocabulary, so different from his usual.

Turning now to the structure of ch. lii. 13-liii., we observe that, as arranged in the Canon, there are fifteen verses in the prophecy. These fifteen verses fall into five strophes of three verses each, as printed by the Revised English Version. When set in their own original lines, however, the strophes appear, not of equal, but of increasing length. As will be seen from the version given below, the first (ch. lii. 13-15) has nine lines, the second (ch. liii. 1-3) has ten lines, the third (vv. 4-6) has eleven lines, the fourth (vv. 7-9) thirteen lines, the fifth (vv. 10-12) fourteen lines. This increase would be absolutely regular, if, in the fourth strophe, we made either the first two lines one, or the last two one, and if in the fifth again we ran the first two lines together,--changes which the metre allows and some translators have adopted. But, in either case, we perceive a regular increase from strophe to strophe, that is not only one of the many marks with which this most artistic of poems has been elaborated, but gives the reader the very solemn impression of a truth that is ever gathering more of human life into itself, and sweeping forward with fuller and more resistless volume.

Each strophe, it is well to notice, begins with one word or two words which summarise the meaning of the whole strophe and form a title for it. Thus, after the opening exclamation _Behold_, the words _My Servant shall prosper_ form, as we shall see, not only a summary of the first strophe, in which his ultimate exaltation is described, but the theme of the whole prophecy. Strophe ii. begins _Who hath believed_, and accordingly in this strophe the unbelief and thoughtlessness of them who saw the Servant without feeling the meaning of his suffering is confessed. _Surely our sicknesses_ fitly entitles strophe iii., in which the people describe how the Servant in his suffering was their substitute. _Oppressed yet he humbled himself_ is the headline of strophe iv., and that strophe deals with the humility and innocence of the Servant in contrast to the injustice accorded him. While the headline of strophe v., _But Jehovah had purposed_, brings us back to the main theme of the poem, that behind men's treatment of the Servant is God's holy will; which theme is elaborated and brought to its conclusion in strophe v. These opening and entitling words of each strophe are printed, in the following translation, in larger type than the rest.

As in the rest of Hebrew poetry, so here, the measure is neither regular nor smooth, and does not depend on rhyme. Yet there is an amount of assonance, which at times approaches to rhyme. Much of the meaning of the poem depends on the use of the personal pronouns--_we_ and _he_ stand contrasted to each other--and it is these coming in a lengthened form at the end of many of the lines that suggest to the ear something like rhyme. For instance, in liii. 5, 6, the second and third verses of the third strophe, two of the lines run out on the bisyllable -ênū, two on înu, and two on the word lānū, while the third has ênu, not at the end, but in the middle; in each case, the pronominal suffix of the first person plural. We transcribe these lines to show the effect of this.

W^ehu' m^eholal mipp^esha'ênū
M^edhukka' me`ăwōnōthênū
Mūṣar sh^elōmēnū `alaw
Ubhahăbhurātho nirpa'-lānū
Kullānū kass-ss'on ta`înū
'îsh l^edharko panînū
Wa Jahweh hiphgî`a bô 'eth-`awon kullānū.

This is the strophe in which the assonance comes oftenest to rhyme; but in strophe i. êhū ends two lines, and in strophe ii. it ends three. These and other assonants occur also at the beginning and in the middle of lines. We must remember that in all the cases quoted it is the personal pronouns, which give the assonance,--the personal pronouns on which so much of the meaning of the poem turns; and that, therefore, the parallelism primarily intended by the writer is one rather of meaning than of sound. The pair of lines, parallel in meaning, though not in sound, which forms so large a part of Hebrew poetry, is used throughout this poem; but the use of it is varied and elaborated to a unique degree. The very same words and phrases are repeated, and placed on points, from which they seem to call to each other; as, for instance, the double _many_ in strophe i., the _of us all_ in strophe iii., and _nor opened he his mouth_ in strophe iv. The ideas are very few and very simple; the words _he_, _we_, _his_, _ours_, _see_, _hear_, _know_, _bear_, _sickness_, _strike_, _stroke_, and _many_ form, with prepositions and particles, the bulk of the prophecy. It will be evident how singularly suitable this recurrence is for the expression of reproach, and of sorrowful recollection. It is the nature of grief and remorse to harp upon the one dear form, the one most vivid pain. The finest instance of this repetition is verse 6, with its opening keynote "kullanu"--_of us all like sheep went astray_, with its close on that keynote _guilt of us all_, "kullanu." But throughout notes are repeated, and bars recur, expressive of what was done to the Servant, or what the Servant did for man, which seem in their recurrence to say, You cannot hear too much of me: I am the very Gospel. A peculiar sadness is lent to the music by the letters h and l in "holie" and "hehelie," the word for sickness or ailing (ailing is the English equivalent in sense and sound), which happens so often in the poem. The new words, which have been brought to vary this recurrence of a few simple features, are mostly of a sombre type. The heavier letters throng the lines: grievous _bs_ and _ms_ are multiplied, and syllables with long vowels before _m_ and _w_. But the words sob as well as tramp; and here and there one has a wrench and one a cry in it.

Most wonderful and mysterious of all is the spectral fashion in which the prophecy presents its Hero. He is named only in the first line and once again: elsewhere He is spoken of as He. We never hear or see Himself. But all the more solemnly is He there: a shadow upon countless faces, a grievous memory on the hearts of the speakers. He so haunts all we see and all we hear, that we feel it is not Art, but Conscience, that speaks of Him.

Here is now the prophecy itself, rendered into English quite literally, except for a conjunction here and there, and, as far as possible, in the rhythm of the original. A few necessary notes on difficult words and phrases are given.

I.

lii. 13: _Behold, my Servant shall prosper,_[205]
_Shall rise, be lift up, be exceedingly high._[206]

_Like as they that were astonied before thee were many,_
_--So marred from a man's was his visage,_
_And his form from the children of men!--_
_So shall the nations he startles_[207] _be many,_
_Before him shall kings shut their mouths._
_For that which had never been told them they see,_
_And what they had heard not, they have to consider._

II.

_Who gave believing to that which we heard,_[208]
_And the arm of Jehovah to whom was it bared?_
_For he sprang like a sapling before Him,_[209]
_As a root from the ground that is parched;_
_He had no form nor beauty that we should regard him,_
_Nor aspect that we should desire him._
_Despised and rejected of men,_
_Man of pains and familiar with ailing,_
_And as one we do cover the face from,_
_Despised, and we did not esteem him._

III.

_Surely our ailments he bore,_
_And our pains he did take for his burden._[210]
_But we--we accounted him stricken,_
_Smitten of God and degraded._[211]
_Yet he--he was pierced for crimes that were ours,_[212]
_He was crushed for guilt that was ours,_[212]
_The chastisement of our peace was upon him,_
_By his stripes healing is ours._[212]
_Of us all_[213] _like to sheep went astray,_
_Every man to his way we did turn,_
_And Jehovah made light upon him_
_The guilt of us all._

IV.

_Oppressed, he did humble himself,_
_Nor opened his mouth--_
_As a lamb to the slaughter is led,_
_As a sheep 'fore her shearers is dumb--_
_Nor opened his mouth._
_By tyranny and law was he taken;_[214]
_And of his age who reflected,_
_That he was wrenched_[215] _from the land of the living,_
_For My people's transgressions the stroke was on him?_
_So they made with the wicked his grave,_
_Yea, with the felon_[216] _his tomb._
_Though never harm had he done,_
_Neither was guile in his mouth._

V.

_But Jehovah had purposed to bruise him,_
_Had laid on him sickness;
So_[217] _if his life should offer guilt offering,_
_A seed he should see, he should lengthen his days._
_And the purpose of Jehovah by his hand should prosper,_
_From the travail of his soul shall he see,_[218]
_By his knowledge be satisfied._
_My Servant, the Righteous, righteousness wins he for many,_
_And their guilt he takes for his load._
_Therefore I set him a share with the great,_[219]
_Yea, with the strong shall he share the spoil:_
_Because that he poured out his life unto death,_
_Let himself with transgressors be reckoned;_
_Yea, he the sin of the many hath borne,_
_And for the transgressors he interposes._

Let us now take up the interpretation strophe by strophe.

I. Ch. lii. 13-15. When last our eyes were directed to the Servant, he was in suffering unexplained and unvindicated (ch. l. 4-6). His sufferings seemed to have fallen upon him as the consequence of his fidelity to the Word committed to him; the Prophet had inevitably become the Martyr. Further than this his sufferings were not explained, and the Servant was left in them, calling upon God indeed, and sure that God would hear and vindicate him, but as yet unanswered by word of God or word of man.

It is these words, words both of God and of man, which are given in Isaiah ch. lii. 13-liii. The Sufferer is explained and vindicated, first by God in the first strophe, ch. lii. 13-15, and then by the Conscience of Men, His own people, in the second and third (liii. 1-6); and then, as it appears, the Divine Voice, or the Prophet speaking for it, resumes in strophes iv. and v., and concludes in a strain similar to strophe i.

God's explanation and vindication of the Sufferer is, then, given in the first strophe. It is summed up in the first line, and in one very pregnant word. Jeremiah had said of the Messiah, _He shall reign as a King and deal wisely_ or _prosper_;[220] and so God says here of the Servant, _Behold he shall deal wisely_ or _prosper_. The Hebrew verb does not get full expression in any English one. In rendering it _shall deal wisely_ or _prudently_ our translators undoubtedly touch the quick of it. For it is originally a mental process or quality: _has insight_, _understands_, _is farseeing_. But then it also includes the effect of this--_understands so as to get on_, _deals wisely so as to succeed_, _is practical_ both in his way of working and in being sure of his end. Ewald has found an almost exact equivalent in German, "hat Geschick;" for Geschick means both _skill_ or _address_ and _fate_ or _destiny_. The Hebrew verb is the most practical in the whole language, for this is precisely the point which the prophecy seeks to bring out about the Servant's sufferings. They are practical. He is practical in them. He endures them, not for their own sake, but for some practical end of which he is aware and to which they must assuredly bring him. His failure to convince men by his word, the pain and spite which seem to be his only wage, are not the last of him, but the beginning and the way to what is higher. So _shall he rise and be lift up and be very high_. The suffering, which in ch. l. seemed to be the Servant's misfortune, is here seen as his wisdom which shall issue in his glory.

But of themselves men do not see this, and they need to be convinced. Pain, the blessed means of God, is man's abhorrence and perplexity. All along the history of the world the Sufferer has been the astonishment and stumbling-block of humanity. The barbarian gets rid of him; he is the first difficulty with which every young literature wrestles; to the end he remains the problem of philosophy and the sore test of faith. It is not native to men to see meaning or profit in the Sufferer; they are staggered by him, they see no reason or promise in him. So did men receive this unique Sufferer, this Servant of Jehovah. _The many were astonied at him; his visage was so marred more than men, and his form than the children of men._ But his life is to teach them the opposite of their impressions, and to bring them out of their perplexity into reverence before the revealed purpose of God in the Sufferer. _As they that were astonied at thee were many, so shall the nations he startles be many; kings shall shut their mouths at him, for that which was not told them they see, and that which they have heard not they have to consider_,--viz., the triumph and influence to which the Servant was consciously led through suffering. There may be some reflection here of the way in which the Gentiles regarded the Suffering Israel, but the reference is vague, and perhaps purposely so.

The first strophe, then, gives us just the general theme. In contrast to human experience God reveals in His Servant that suffering is fruitful, that sacrifice is practical. Pain, in God's service, shall lead to glory.

II. Ch. liii. 1-3. God never speaks but in man He wakens conscience, and the second strophe of the prophecy (along with the third) is the answer of conscience to God. Penitent men, looking back from the light of the Servant's exaltation to the time when his humiliation was before their eyes, say, "Yes: what God has said is true of us. We were the deaf and the indifferent. We heard, but _who_ of us _believed what we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord_--His purpose, the hand He had in the Servant's sufferings--_revealed_?"[221]

Who are these penitent speakers? Some critics have held them to be the heathen, more have said that they are Israel. But none have pointed out that the writer gives himself no trouble to define them, but seems more anxious to impress us with their consciousness of their moral relation to the Servant. On the whole, it would appear that it is Israel, whom the prophet has in mind as the speakers of vv. 1-6. For, besides the fact that the Old Testament knows nothing of a bearing by Israel of the sins of the Gentiles, it is expressly said in ver. 8, that the sins for which the Servant was stricken were the sins of _my people_; which people must be the same as the speakers, for they own in vv. 4-6 that the Servant bore their sins. For these and other reasons the mass of Christian critics at the present day are probably right when they assume that Israel are the speakers in vv. 1-6;[222] but the reader must beware of allowing his attention to be lost in questions of that kind. The art of the poem seems intentionally to leave vague the national relation of the speakers to the Servant, in order the more impressively to bring out their moral attitude towards him. There is an utter disappearance of all lines of separation between Jew and Gentile,--both in the first strophe, where, although Gentile names are used, Jews may yet be meant to be included, and in the rest of the poem,--as if the writer wished us to feel that all men stood over against that solitary Servant in a common indifference to his suffering and a common conscience of the guilt he bears. In short, it is no historical situation, such as some critics seem anxious to fasten him down upon, that the prophet reflects; but a certain moral situation, ideal in so far as it was not yet realised,--the state of the quickened human conscience over against a certain Human Suffering, in which, having ignored it at the time, that conscience now realises that the purpose of God was at work.

In vv. 2 and 3 the penitent speakers give us the reasons of their disregard of the Servant in the days of his suffering. In these reasons there is nothing peculiar to Israel, and no special experience of Jewish history is reflected by the terms in which they are conveyed. They are the confession, in general language, of an universal human habit,--the habit of letting the eye cheat the heart and conscience, of allowing the aspect of suffering to blind us to its meaning; of forgetting in our sense of the ugliness and helplessness of pain, that it has a motive, a future and a God. It took ages to wean mankind from those native feelings of aversion and resentment, which caused them at first to abandon or destroy their sick. And, even now, scorn for the weak and incredulity in the heroism or in the profitableness of suffering are strong in the best of us. We judge by looks; we are hurried by the physical impression, which the sufferer makes on us, or by our pride that we are not as he is, into peremptory and harsh judgements upon him. Every day we allow the dulness of poverty, the ugliness of disease, the unprofitableness of misfortune, the ludicrousness of failure, to keep back conscience from discovering to us our share of responsibility for them, and to repel our hearts from that sympathy and patience with them, which along with conscience would assuredly discover to us their place in God's Providence and their special significance for ourselves. It is this original sin of man, of which these penitent speakers own themselves guilty.

But no one is ever permitted to rest with a physical or intellectual impression of suffering. The race, the individual, has always been forced by conscience to the task of finding a moral reason for pain; and nothing so marks man's progress as the successive solutions he has attempted to this problem. The speakers, therefore, proceed in the next part of their confession, strophe iii., to tell us what they first falsely accounted the moral reason of the Servant's suffering and what they afterwards found to be the truth.

III. liii. 4-6. The earliest and most common moral judgement, which men pass upon pain, is that which is implied in its name--that it is penal. A man suffers because God is angry with him and has stricken him. So Job's friends judged him, and so these speakers tell us they had at first judged the Servant. _We had accounted him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted_,--_stricken_, that is, with a plague of sickness, as Job was, for the simile of the sick man is still kept up; _smitten of God and degraded_ or _humbled_, for it seemed to them that God's hand was in the Servant's sickness, to punish and disgrace him for his own sins. But now they know they were wrong. The hand of God was indeed upon the Servant, and the reason was sin; yet the sin was not his, but theirs. _Surely our sicknesses he bore, and our pains he took as his burden. He was pierced for iniquities that were ours. He was crushed for crimes that were ours._ Strictly interpreted, these verses mean no more than that the Servant was involved in the consequences of his people's sins. The verbs _bore_ and _made his burden_ are indeed taken by some to mean necessarily, removal or expiation; but in themselves, as is clear from their application to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the whole of the generation of Exile, they mean no more than implication in the reproach and the punishment of the people's sins.[223] Nevertheless, as we have explained in a note below, it is really impossible to separate the suffering of a Servant, who has been announced as practical and prosperous in his suffering, from the end for which it is endured. We cannot separate the Servant's bearing of the people's guilt from his removal of it. And, indeed, this practical end of his passion springs forth, past all doubt, from the rest of the strophe, which declares that the Servant's sufferings are not only vicarious but redemptive. _The discipline of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed._ Translators agree that _discipline of our peace_ must mean discipline which procures our peace. The peace, the healing, is ours, in consequence of the chastisement and the scourging that was his. The next verse gives us the obverse and complement of the same thought. The pain was his in consequence of the sin that was ours. _All we like sheep had gone astray, and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all_,--literally _iniquity_, but inclusive of its guilt and consequences. Nothing could be plainer than these words. The speakers confess, that they know that the Servant's suffering was both vicarious and redemptive.[224]

But how did they get this knowledge? They do not describe any special means by which it came to them. They state this high and novel truth simply as the last step in a process of their consciousness. At first they were bewildered by the Servant's suffering; then they thought it contemptible, thus passing upon it an intellectual judgement; then, forced to seek a moral reason for it, they accounted it as penal and due to the Servant for his own sins; then they recognised that its penalty was vicarious, that the Servant was suffering for them; and finally, they knew that it was redemptive, the means of their own healing and peace. This is a natural climax, a logical and moral progress of thought. The last two steps are stated simply as facts of experience following on other facts. Now our prophet usually publishes the truths, with which he is charged, as the very words of God, introducing them with a solemn and authoritative _Thus saith Jehovah._ But this novel and supreme truth of vicarious and redemptive suffering, this passion and virtue which crowns the Servant's office, is introduced to us, not by the mouth of God, but by the lips of penitent men; not as an oracle, but as a confession; not as the commission of Divine authority laid beforehand upon the Servant like his other duties, but as the conviction of the human conscience after the Servant has been lifted up before it. In short, by this unusual turn of his art, the prophet seeks to teach us, that vicarious suffering is not a dogmatic, but an experimental truth. The substitution of the Servant for the guilty people, and the redemptive force of that substitution, are no arbitrary doctrine, for which God requires from man a mere intellectual assent; they are no such formal institution of religion as mental indolence and superstition delight to have prepared for their mechanical adherence: but substitutive suffering is a great living fact of human experience, whose outward features are not more evident to men's eyes than its inner meaning is appreciable by their conscience, and of irresistible effect upon their whole moral nature.

Is this lesson of our prophet's art not needed? Men have always been apt to think of vicarious suffering, and of its function in their salvation, as something above and apart from their moral nature, with a value known only to God and not calculable in the terms of conscience or of man's moral experience; nay, rather as something that conflicts with man's ideas of morality and justice. Whereas both the fact and the virtue of vicarious suffering come upon us all, as these speakers describe the vicarious sufferings of the Servant to have come upon them, as a part of inevitable experience. If it be natural, as we saw, for men to be bewildered by the first sight of suffering, to scorn it as futile and to count it the fault of the sufferer himself, it is equally natural and inevitable that these first and hasty theories should be dispelled by the longer experience of life and the more thorough working of conscience. The stricken are not always bearing their own sin. "Suffering is the minister of justice. This is true in part, yet it also is inadequate to explain the facts. Of all the sorrow which befalls humanity, how small a part falls upon the specially guilty; how much seems rather to seek out the good! We might almost ask whether it is not weakness rather than wrong that is punished in this world."[225] In every nation, in every family, the innocent suffer for the guilty. Vicarious suffering is not arbitrary or accidental; it comes with our growth; it is of the very nature of things. It is that part of the Service of Man, to which we are all born, and of the reality of which we daily grow more aware.

But even more than its necessity life teaches us its virtue. Vicarious suffering is not a curse. It is Service--Service for God. It proves a power where every other moral force has failed. By it men are redeemed, on whom justice and their proper punishment have been able to effect nothing. Why this should be is very intelligible. We are not so capable of measuring the physical or moral results of our actions upon our own characters or in our own fortunes as we are upon the lives of others; nor do we so awaken to the guilt and heinousness of our sin as when it reaches and implicates lives, which were not partners with us in it. Moreover, while a man's punishment is apt to give him an excuse for saying, I have expiated my sin myself, and so to leave him self-satisfied and with nothing for which to be grateful or obliged to a higher will; or while it may make him reckless or plunge him into despair; so, on the contrary, when he recognises that others feel the pain of his sin and have come under its weight, then shame is quickly born within him, and pity and every other passion that can melt a hard heart. If, moreover, the others who bear his sin do so voluntarily and for love's sake, then how quickly on the back of shame and pity does gratitude rise, and the sense of debt and of constraint to their will! For all these very intelligible reasons, vicarious suffering has been a powerful redemptive force in the experience of the race. Both the fact of its beneficence and the moral reasons for this are clear enough to lift us above a question, which sometimes gives trouble regarding it,--the question of its justice. Such a question is futile about any service for man, which succeeds as this does where all others have failed, and which proves itself so much in harmony with man's moral nature. But the last shred of objection to the justice of vicarious suffering is surely removed when the sufferer is voluntary as well as vicarious. And, in truth, human experience feels that it has found its highest and its holiest fact in the love that, being innocent itself, stoops to bear its fellows' sins,--not only the anxiety and reproach of them, but even the cost and the curse of them. _Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends_; and greater Service can no man do to man, than to serve them in this way.

Now in this universal human experience of the inevitableness and the virtue of vicarious suffering, Israel had been deeply baptized. The nation had been _served_ by suffering in all the ways we have just described. Beginning with the belief that all righteousness prospered, Israel had come to see the righteous afflicted in her midst; the best Israelites had set their minds to the problem, and learned to believe, at least, that such affliction was of God's will,--part of His Providence, and not an interruption to it. Israel, too, knew the moral solidarity of a people: that citizens share each other's sorrows, and that one generation rolls over its guilt upon the next. Frequently had the whole nation been spared for a pious remnant's sake; and in the Exile, while all the people were formally afflicted by God, it was but a portion of them whose conscience was quick to the meaning of the chastisement, and of them alone, in their submissive and intelligent sufferance of the Lord's wrath, could the opening gospel of the prophecy be spoken, that they _had accomplished their warfare, and had received of the Lord's hand double for all their sins_. But still more vivid than these collective substitutes for the people were the individuals, who, at different points in Israel's history, had stood forth and taken up as their own the nation's conscience and stooped to bear the nation's curse. Far away back, a Moses had offered himself for destruction, if for his sake God would spare his sinful and thoughtless countrymen. In a psalm of the Exile it is remembered that,

_He said, that He would destroy them,
Had not Moses His chosen stood before Him in the breach,
To turn away His wrath, lest He should destroy._[226]

And Jeremiah, not by a single heroic resolve, but by the slow agony and martyrdom of a long life, had taken Jerusalem's sin upon his own heart, had felt himself forsaken of God, and had voluntarily shared his city's doom, while his generation, unconscious of their guilt and blind to their fate, despised him and esteemed him not. And Ezekiel, who is Jeremiah's far-off reflection, who could only do in symbol what Jeremiah did in reality, was commanded to lie on his side for days, and so _bear the guilt_ of his people.[227]

But in Israel's experience it was not only the human Servant who served the nation by suffering, for God Himself had come down to _carry_ His distressed and accursed people, and _to load Himself with them_. Our prophet uses the same two verbs of Jehovah as are used of the Servant.[228] Like the Servant, too, God _was afflicted in all their affliction_; and His love towards them was expended in passion and agony for their sins. Vicarious suffering was not only human, it was Divine.

Was it very wonderful that a people with such an experience, and with such examples, both human and Divine, should at last be led to the thought of One Sufferer, who would exhibit in Himself all the meaning, and procure for His people all the virtue, of that vicarious reproach and sorrow, which a long line of their martyrs had illustrated, and which God had revealed as the passion of His own love? If they had had every example that could fit them to understand the power of such a sufferer, they had also every reason to feel their need of Him. For the Exile had not healed the nation; it had been for the most of them an illustration of that evil effect of punishment to which we alluded above. Penal servitude in Babylon had but hardened Israel. _God poured on him the fury of anger, and the strength of battle: it set him on fire round about, yet he knew not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart._[229] What the Exile, then, had failed to do, when it brought upon the people their own sins, the Servant, taking these sins upon himself, would surely effect. The people, whom the Exile had only hardened, his vicarious suffering should strike into penitence and lift to peace.

IV. Ch. liii. 7-9. It is probable that with ver. 6 the penitent people have ceased speaking, and that the parable is now taken up by the prophet himself. The voice of God, which uttered the first strophe, does not seem to resume till ver. 11.

If strophe iii. confessed that it was for the people's sins the Servant suffered, strophe iv. declares that he himself was sinless, and yet silently submitted to all which injustice laid upon him.

Now Silence under Suffering is a strange thing in the Old Testament--a thing absolutely new. No other Old Testament personage could stay dumb under pain, but immediately broke into one of two voices,--voice of guilt or voice of doubt. In the Old Testament the sufferer is always either confessing his guilt to God, or, when he feels no guilt, challenging God in argument. David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Job, and the nameless martyred and moribund of the Psalms, all strive and are loud under pain. Why was this Servant the unique and solitary instance of silence under suffering? Because he had a secret which they had not. It had been said of him: _My Servant shall deal wisely_ or _intelligently_, shall know what he is about. He had no guilt of his own, no doubts of his God. But he was conscious of the end God had in his pain, an end not to be served in any other way, and with all his heart he had given himself to it. It was not punishment he was enduring; it was not the throes of the birth into higher experience, which he was feeling: it was a Service he was performing,--a service laid on him by God, a service for man's redemption, a service sure of results and of glory. Therefore _as a lamb to the slaughter is led, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, he opened not his mouth_.

The next two verses (8, 9) describe how the Servant's Passion was fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in ver. 5 to that of a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death. The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of the words being very various. But the sense is clear. The Servant's death was accomplished, not on some far hill top by a stroke out of heaven, but in the forms of human law and by men's hands. It was a judicial murder. _By tyranny and by judgement_,--that is, by a forced and tyrannous judgement,--_he was taken_. To this abuse of law the next verse adds the indifference of public opinion: _and as for his contemporaries, who of them reflected that he was cut off from_, or _cut down in, the land of the living_,--that in spite of the form of law that condemned him he was a murdered man,--that _for the transgression of my people the stroke was his_? So, having conceived him to have been lawfully put to death, they consistently gave him a convict's grave: _they made his grave with the wicked, and he was with the felon in his death_, though--and on this the strophe emphatically ends--he was an innocent man, _he had done no harm, neither was guile in his mouth_.

Premature sickness and the miscarriage of justice,--these to Orientals are the two outstanding misfortunes of the individual's life. Take the Psalter, set aside its complaints of the horrors of war and of invasion, and you will find almost all the rest of its sighs rising either from sickness or from the sense of injustice. These were the classic forms of individual suffering in the age and civilisation to which our prophet belonged, and it was natural, therefore, that when he was describing an Ideal or Representative Sufferer, he should fill in his picture with both of them. If we remember this,[230] we shall feel no incongruity in the sudden change of the hero from a sick man to a convict, and back again in ver. 10 from a convict to a sick man. Nor, if we remember this, shall we feel disposed to listen to those interpreters, who hold that the basis of this prophecy was the account of an actual historical martyrdom. Had such been the case the prophet would surely have held throughout to one or the other of the two forms of suffering. His sufferer would have been either a leper or a convict, but hardly both. No doubt the details in vv. 8 and 9 are so realistic that they might well be the features of an actual miscarriage of justice; but the like happened too frequently in the Ancient East for such verses to be necessarily any one man's portrait. Perverted justice was the curse of the individual's life,--perverted justice and that stolid, fatalistic apathy of Oriental public opinion, which would probably regard such a sufferer as suffering for his sins the just vengeance of heaven, though the minister of this vengeance was a tyrant and its means were perjury and murder. _Who of his generation reflected that for the transgression of my people the stroke was on him!_

V. Ch. liii. 10-12. We have heard the awful tragedy. The innocent Servant was put to a violent and premature death. Public apathy closed over him and the unmarked earth of a felon's grave. It is so utter a perversion of justice, so signal a triumph of wrong over right, so final a disappearance into oblivion of the fairest life that ever lived, that men might be tempted to say, God has forsaken His own. On the contrary--so strophe v. begins--God's own will and pleasure have been in this tragedy: _Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him_. The line as it thus stands in our English version has a grim, repulsive sound. But the Hebrew word has no necessary meaning of pleasure or enjoyment. All it says is, God so willed it. His purpose was in this tragedy. Deus vult! It is the one message which can render any pain tolerable or light up with meaning a mystery so cruel as this: _The LORD_ Himself _had purposed to bruise_ His Servant, _the LORD Himself had laid on him sickness_ (the figure of disease is resumed).

God's purpose in putting the Servant to death is explained in the rest of the verse. It was in order that _through his soul making a guilt-offering, he might see a seed, prolong his days, and that the pleasure of the Lord might prosper by his hand_.

What is a guilt-offering? The term originally meant guilt, and is so used by a prophet contemporary to our own.[231] In the legislation, however, both in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel, it is applied to legal and sacrificial forms of restitution or reparation for guilt. It is only named in Ezekiel along with other sacrifices.[232] Both Numbers and Leviticus define it, but define it differently. In Numbers (v. 7, 8) it is the payment, which a transgressor has to make to the human person offended, of the amount to which he has harmed that person's property: it is what we call damages. But in Leviticus it is the ram, exacted over and above damages to the injured party (v. 14-16; vi. 1-7), or in cases where no damages were asked for (v. 17-19), by the priest, the representative of God, for satisfaction to His law; and it was required even where the offender had been an unwitting one. By this guilt-offering _the priest made atonement_ for the sinner and _he was forgiven_. It was for this purpose of reparation to the Deity that the plagued Philistines sent a guilt-offering back with the ark of Jehovah, which they had stolen.[233] But there is another historical passage, which though the term _guilt-offering_ is not used in it, admirably illustrates the idea.[234] A famine in David's time was revealed to be due to the murder of certain Gibeonites by the house of Saul. David asked the Gibeonites what reparation he could make. They said it was not a matter of damages. But both parties felt that before the law of God could be satisfied and the land relieved of its curse, some atonement, some guilt-offering, must be made to the Divine Law. It was a wild kind of satisfaction that was paid. Seven men of Saul's house were hung up before the Lord in Gibeon. But the instinct, though satisfied in so murderous a fashion, was a true and a grand instinct,--the conscience of a law above all human laws and rights, to which homage must be paid before the sinner could come into true relations with God, or the Divine curse be lifted off.

It is in this sense that the word is used of the Servant of Jehovah, the Ideal, Representative Sufferer. Innocent as he is, he gives his life as satisfaction to the Divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice.[235] By his death the Servant did homage to the law of God. By dying for it He made men feel that the supreme end of man was to own that law and be in a right relation to it, and that the supreme service was to help others to a right relation. As it is said a little farther down, _My Servant, righteous himself, wins righteousness for many, and makes their iniquities his load_.

It surely cannot be difficult for any one, who knows what sin is, and what a part vicarious suffering plays both in the bearing of the sin and in the redemption of the sinner, to perceive that at this point the Servant's service for God and man reaches its crown. Compare his death and its sad meaning, with the brilliant energies of his earlier career. It is a heavy and an honourable thing to come from God to men, laden with God's truth for your charge and responsibility; but it is a far heavier to stoop and take upon your heart as your business and burden men's suffering and sin. It is a needful and a lovely thing to assist the feeble aspirations of men, to put yourself on the side of whatever in them is upward and living,--to be the shelter, as the Servant was, of the bruised reed and the fading wick; but it is more indispensable, and it is infinitely heavier, to seek to lift the deadness of men, to take their guilt upon your heart, to attempt to rouse them to it, to attempt to deliver them from it. It is a useful and a glorious thing to establish order and justice among men, to create a social conscience, to inspire the exercise of love and the habits of service, and this the Servant did when _he set Law on the Earth, and the Isles waited for his teaching_; but after all man's supreme and controlling relation is his relation to God, and to this their _righteousness_ the Servant restored guilty men by his death.

And so it was at this point, according to our prophecy, that the Servant, though brought so low, was nearest his exaltation; though in death, yet nearest life, nearest the highest kind of life, _the seeing of a seed_, the finding of himself in others; though despised, rejected and forgotten of men, most certain of finding a place among the great and notable forces of life,--_therefore do I divide him a share with the great, and the spoil he shall share with the strong_. Not because as a prophet he was a sharp sword in the hand of the Lord, or a light flashing to the ends of the earth, but in that--as the prophecy concludes, and it is the prophet's last and highest word concerning him--in that _he bare the sin of the many, and interposed for the transgressors_.

* * * * *

We have seen that the most striking thing about this prophecy is the spectral appearance of the Servant. He haunts, rather than is present in, the chapter. We hear of him, but he himself does not speak. We see faces that he startles, lips that the sight of him shuts, lips that the memory of him, after he has passed in silence, opens to bitter confession of neglect and misunderstanding; but himself we see not. His aspect and his bearing, his work for God and his influence on men, are shown to us, through the recollection and conscience of the speakers, with a vividness and a truth that draw the consciences of us who hear into the current of the confession, and take our hearts captive. But when we ask, Who was he then? What was his name among men? Where shall we find himself? Has he come, or do you still look for him?--neither the speakers, whose conscience he so smote, nor God, whose chief purpose he was, give us here any answer. In some verses he and his work seem already to have happened upon earth, but again we are made to feel that he is still future to the prophet, and that the voices, which the prophet quotes as speaking of having seen him and found him to be the Saviour, are voices of a day not yet born, while the prophet writes.

But about five hundred and fifty years after this prophecy was written, a Man came forward among the sons of men,--among this very nation from whom the prophecy had arisen; and in every essential of consciousness and of experience He was the counterpart, embodiment and fulfilment of this Suffering Servant and his Service. Jesus Christ answers the questions, which the prophecy raises and leaves unanswered. In the prophecy we see one, who is only a spectre, a dream, a conscience without a voice, without a name, without a place in history. But in Jesus Christ of Nazareth the dream becomes a reality; He, whom we have seen in this chapter only as the purpose of God, only through the eyes and consciences of a generation yet unborn,--He comes forward in flesh and blood; He speaks, He explains Himself, He accomplishes almost to the last detail the work, the patience and the death that are here described as Ideal and Representative.

The correspondence of details between Christ's life and this prophecy, published five hundred and fifty years before He came, is striking; if we encountered it for the first time, it would be more than striking, it would be staggering. But do not let us do what so many have done--so fondly exaggerate it as to lose in the details of external resemblance the moral and spiritual identity.

For the external correspondence between this prophecy and the life of Jesus Christ is by no means perfect. Every wound that is set down in the fifty-third of Isaiah was not reproduced or fulfilled in the sufferings of Jesus. For instance, Christ was not the sick, plague-stricken man, whom the Servant is at first represented to be. The English translators have masked the leprous figure, that stands out so clearly in the original Hebrew,--for _acquainted with grief, bearing our griefs, put him to grief_, we should in each case read _sickness_. Now Christ was no Job. As Matthew points out, the only way He could be said _to bear our sicknesses and to carry our pains_ was by healing them, not by sharing them.

And again, exactly as the judicial murder of the Servant, and the entire absence from his contemporaries of any idea that he suffered a vicarious death, suit the case of Christ, the next stage in the Servant's fate was not true of the Victim of Pilate and the Pharisees. Christ's grave was not with the wicked. He suffered as a felon without the walls on the common place of execution, but friends received the body and gave it an honourable burial in a friend's grave. Or take the clause, _with the rich in his death_. It is doubtful whether the word is really _rich_, and ought not to be a closer synonym of _wicked_ in the previous clause; but if it be _rich_, it is simply another name for _the wicked_, who in the East, in cases of miscarried justice, are so often coupled with the evildoers. It cannot possibly denote such a man as Joseph of Arimathea; nor, is it to be observed, do the Evangelists in describing Christ's burial in that rich and pious man's tomb take any notice of this line about the Suffering Servant.

But the absence of a complete incidental correspondence only renders more striking the moral and spiritual correspondence, the essential likeness between the Service set forth in ch. liii. and the work of our Lord.

The speakers of ch. liii. set the Servant over against themselves, and in solitariness of character and office. They count him alone sinless where all they have sinned, and him alone the agent of salvation and healing where their whole duty is to look on and believe. But this is precisely the relation which Christ assumed between Himself and the nation. He was on one side, all they on the other. Against their strong effort to make Him the First among them, it was, as we have said before, the constant aim of our Lord to assert and to explain Himself as The Only.