Isaiah - episode 7

As the rain and the snow

In this post we read the last poem of the Servant (Isa 52,13-53,12) and we will conclude the examination of the Book of Isaiah. In the fourth poem of the Servant there are multiple narrating voices; the first is the Lord’s one, summing up the Servant’s story: «Behold, my servant shall deal wisely, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as many were astonished at you (his appearance was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men), so shall he sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they understand». The second voice is a collective “we” of believers, who announce with astonishment the Servant’s paradoxical story, recognizing him as the Lord’s instrument of salvation. «LORD, who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness. When we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and familiar with illness; and as one from whom men hide their face. He was despised, and we did not value him. Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our pains; yet we considered him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, and he was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all». Then takes the word a single voice of that collectivity, maybe Prophet Isaiah himself: «He was oppressed, yet when he was afflicted he did not open his mouth. As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is mute, so he did not open his mouth. He was taken away by oppression and judgment; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living and stricken for the disobedience of my people? They made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death; although he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet the LORD was pleased to crush him and make him ill. When you make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see light and be satisfied». The Lord’s voice, that started the poem, concludes it: «By his knowledge shall my servant, the righteous one, make many righteous, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sins of many, and made intercession for their transgressions».
As I wrote in the last post, it is better to keep a wide-range identification to the mysterious Servant. His figure can fit all the persons called by God who are for the people a living sign of the Lord’s Covenant (even in the moments of their suffering, their apparent defeat and death): of course Jesus, often named «Servant» of God in the New Testament (see Acts 3,13; 3,26; 4,27; 4,30), but even St. Paul (see Acts 9,16: he suffered a lot because of Jesus’ name), and many other saints. The Catholic liturgy reads the fourth poem of the Servant in the Passion of the Lord of the Good Friday.
We conclude our reading of the book with the Second Isaiah’s invitation to trust in the generosity and faithfulness of the Lord and not in the fictitious salvation offered by idols (money, alliances with the political powers of the moment and worship of their gods). His Word is the only stability and the real nourishment: it apparently seems to have no effect, to disappear like the rain or the snow absorbed by the earth, but it is actually fertilizing history. It will bloom, at the proper time, in a new life. «“Come, everyone who thirsts, to the waters! Come, he who has no money, buy, and eat! Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which doesn’t satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat you that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. [...]” “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” says the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn’t return there, but waters the earth, and makes it bring forth and bud, and gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing I sent it to do […]”» (Isa 55,1-2.8-11).



I leave to your reading the Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66), whose themes relate primarily to the several returns home of the exiles, the restoration of Jerusalem as the holy city loved by God, the invitation to recover a genuine religiosity, founded on a holy life rather than on the mere membership to the chosen people or on the performance of empty penitential practices (see for example Isa 56,1-7; 58,1-12).
In the next post we will begin to examine the Book of Prophet Jeremiah.