Read Isaiah 42:1-4
MAN OF SORROWS, lamb led to the slaughter. At the time of their recording in Isaiah 53, there was every possibility that these monikers would remain purely abstract. The Israel addressed in Isaiah is to face judgment, exile, and restoration under Assyrian captivity and Babylonian invasion. To a people under duress, Isaiah’s prophecies helped endow a messianic imagination and a vision of a salvific figure.
But the first suggestion that this figure would not take on the form of a military revolutionary, as some might have hoped, lies in the word servant, from the Hebrew word ebed, used throughout Scripture to variously connote a slave, a vassal king, a subject, and a tributary nation. The word foretells a chosen servant who receives the delight of the Lord and the Spirit, and who brings long-awaited justice to the nations.
Meekness, humility, and modesty characterize Christ from the start, who came into this world as flesh and blood, as an infant in full vulnerability. He is close to the hearts of all those who suffer, including those who face the physical corrosion and psychological turmoil of poverty, disaster, and war. Christ was born into a world that had sought to destroy his infant flesh; the slaughter of the Holy Innocents under Herod’s heinous regime is evidence enough of this earthly brokenness. It is, as the poet Czesław Miłosz describes in his poem “Theodicy,” a world that “lies in iniquity,” where “there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures.” It is a world to which the servant described by Isaiah must bring justice.
Yet this justice is to come through an exquisite tenderness, a strength that lies precisely in gentleness. A reed that is bruised is so frail as to snap at the slightest touch, yet this servant shall not break it. A wick that burns faintly is close to being snuffed, yet this servant shall fan it back into flame. It is Christ who sees possibility and hope for the bruised, for the weary, for the exhausted.
Theologian Eugene Peterson once explained in Eat This Book that a metaphor is “a word that bears a meaning beyond its naming function; the ‘beyond’ extends and brightens our comprehension rather than confusing it.” The metaphors of the reed and the wick help to illuminate an understanding of human difficulty; the actions taken by the servant illustrate how Christ tends to the lowly. It is, as Dane Ortlund describes in Gentle and Lowly, Christ’s most natural instinct to move toward sin and suffering.
This is the Messiah for whom the world waited amid the silence of God—the one we commemorate in the season of Advent, in which each day is suffused with the dark mystery of anticipation.
At the heart of faith is a contradiction: a Savior born to die, an infant whose being prefaces a demise by the cruelest of tortures. Even under such indescribable physical, emotional, and mental duress, this servant will become neither faint nor discouraged. Justice will roll over the earth, not just from the jagged deserts familiar to the lands of ancient Jerusalem but beyond, to the distant coastlands that reach the waters.
It is a victory, a realization of justice that is achieved by servanthood, an obedience to the point of death (Phil. 2:8). It is an example of William Langland’s Pacientes vincunt—the patient are victorious, or perhaps, those who suffer shall win. Or as the imagined voice of Christ cries out in Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
Christ comes into the world as an infant, growing in the obedience and servanthood for which he has been called. Advent brings this swell of anticipation—a cradling of hope—for the arrival of the Savior, by whom justice will be established on earth through the humility of servanthood.
Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. Born in New York, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale.
This article is part of A Time for Wonder, a 4-week devotional to help individuals, small groups, and families journey through the 2024 Advent season. Learn more about this special issue that can be used Advent, or any time of year at http://orderct.com/advent.
