A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
11 December 2022
Isaiah 42.1-9
Our reading this morning is one of the four so-called “Servant Songs”
that we find in the book of Isaiah. [1]
The Christian church has traditionally seen these texts as pointers to Jesus,
which is not a bad move in itself,
unless it becomes a way of distancing ourselves from this scripture.
What I mean by this, is that just because Christians
have read these passages as pointing to Jesus,
this doesn’t mean that they were originally intended to be read in that way.
The book of Isaiah has had a long life outside of its Christian usage,
and we must do justice to that context
if we are to truly get to grips with its message.
And we need to remember that Jesus took part of today’s reading
as his text in the Luke 4 sermon
and even angered some of his congregation
by telling them they were witnessing its coming to pass.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read it through,
but he book of Isaiah is quite a long book, and it contains a series of prophecies.
It has some predictions about the future in it,
some which were fulfilled long before Jesus was born
and some which have been taken to refer to Jesus himself
But prophecy in the Bible is a whole load more than just making predictions,
it is more often the speaking of The Lord’s words into a particular situation.
And this is what most of Isaiah is about:
It gives The Lord’s perspective on what is happening
to the nation of Israel – to the people of God.
What we tend to think of as one book – the ‘Book of Isaiah’
is in actual fact three books,
between them covering a period of about 200 years.
The first book is what we call chapters 1-39
and it was probably written by the real man called Isaiah,
he was a prophet who lived in Jerusalem,
about 750 years before Jesus.
By his time, the nation of Israel had split in two
having previously been united under the reigns of David and his son Solomon
about 200 years before Isaiah
but things had gone downhill badly from then on.
Solomon’s two sons Jeroboam & Rehoboam had divided the kingdom
into north and South
And any similarity between this and a devolved Scottish parliament
is purely accidental!
So Israel was now two countries:
there was the northern kingdom – still called Israel,
and the southern Kingdom - called Judah,
– with its capital in Jerusalem.
During the time of Isaiah
The Northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians.
So Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the south
spent much of his time saying
“aha – see what’s happened in the North
That’s The Lord’s judgment on them
If we don’t clean up our act here in the south
and get back to worshipping The Lord properly
The same thing will happen to us!”
So we can locate first the first 39 chapters of Isaiah
to this period of political instability
around the fall of the northern kingdom to the Assyrians
and the rising threat to the kingdom of Judah.
Then we come to the second part of what we call the book of Isaiah – chs. 40-55
which was written well over a hundred years
after Isaiah the prophet had died
By this time, the Babylonians had stormed into Judah
destroyed Jerusalem
and taken most of the Jews off to Exile in Babylon
The prophet who wrote the second book of Isaiah
was one of these Jews taken into exile
he is writing in Babylon
and he is writing for his fellow exiles.
So in second Isaiah, from which our reading this morning comes,
we find the words of a prophet
written to a group of Jews who were far from home,
exiles in a strange land,
trying hard to keep faithful to The Lord
in a context of religious, political, and economic pressures
to start worship the Babylonian gods
And so our passage and the other chapters around it
reflects this prophet of the exile addressing issues
which were relevant for the Jewish exiles to Babylon.
The third book of Isaiah – chapters 56-66
was written later still
sometime after the Jews had returned to the land of Israel
and it reflects their context of rebuilding Jerusalem and the Temple.
But for today we’re firmly in the time of exile,
a time when all hope was lost,
and the prospects of a better future seemed very bleak.
[the following section is drawn from Juliana Claasens]
Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim
describe prophetic literature as
“meaning-making literature for communities under siege.”
And a prophet like Second-Isaiah
who speaks to exiles still recovering
from the trauma of the Babylonian invasion
can be characterized as
“a map of hope for disoriented and dislocated people
at risk of losing their bearings.” [2]
So how does a prophet go about talking to people
who have been completely traumatized
by seeing their city destroyed,
their family and friends killed or taken away in shackles to a foreign land
and who even feel that God has deserted them?
The prophet in Second-Isaiah definitely did not have an easy task.
But throughout the chapters of this central part of the book of Isaiah,
the prophet uses some creative imagery
to help people think anew
as to how to live in the midst of the terrible chaos
that unexpectedly broke into their lives.
For instance, in Isaiah 40.10-11,
God is depicted in one breath
as a mighty warrior who will come deliver his people
and then as a shepherd who presses the little lamb tightly to his bosom.
And further on in Isaiah 42.13-14,
the prophet is using yet another unexpected combination of images
when the divine warrior image
is juxtaposed with the image of God as a woman in labour.
In our lectionary text for today, Isaiah 42.1-9,
we encounter for the first time the image of the (suffering) servant of God
that serves as a wonderful example
of the meaning-making nature of the prophetic task
(see also Isaiah 49:1-13; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12).
In Isaiah 42:3, the servant is described
as “a bruised reed” and “a dimly burning wick.”
However, because of God’s spirit that works through him,
the servant will not be broken or quenched,
rather he will faithfully continue his mission
of establishing justice on the earth.
The servant, as Isaiah portrays him, offers a profound example
of power in the midst of vulnerability.
The power that is held up in the servant
is a different kind of power to what you might expect.
It is a power that does not scream or shout (verse 2),
which offers a sharp contrast with the brutal force
executed by the empires of the day.
However, the servant image introduced here in Isaiah 42,
continued in Isaiah 49 and 50,
and culminating in the famous sections of Isaiah 52-53,
encapsulates a life-giving power
that will have an impact far beyond
the narrow confines of Israel.
The book of second Isaiah is characterised
by a number of surprising and radical reversals
such as the appearance of a highway through the desert in Isaiah 40:3-4;
water suddenly found in the wilderness in Isaiah 44:3-4;
the wilderness unexpectedly bursting into flower and becoming like Eden in Isaiah 51:3,
and fertility happening where there was barrenness in Isaiah 54:1-3.
And in perhaps the greatest reversal of them all
the suffering servant is said to give sight to the blind,
bringing light and life to those
who find themselves trapped in dark dungeons (verses 6-7).
The remarkable thing we see in this text
is how the people who have been traumatized
are called to not do that typically human thing
of uniting defensively against a perceived common enemy.
Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and literary theorist,
warned that nationalism quite often tends to arise
as a natural consequence of collective trauma.
It would be so easy to find in these texts from Isaiah
what Said calls “an exaggerated sense of group solidarity,
[and a] passionate hostility to outsiders,
even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you”. [3]
However in Isaiah 42,
the prophet offers a vision of the world
in which an individual or a group of people
in the midst of brokenness, in spite of brokenness,
and maybe even because of the brokenness,
will be a light to the nations.
For people today who all too often find themselves
in a state of chaos and despair,
this powerful depiction of the (suffering) servant in Isaiah 42
may speak in a number of ways:
First, in the midst of those times when chaos is rampant,
when we are weighed down
by the forces that seek to destroy life as we know it,
we need to accept the fact
that we often are no more than “bruised reeds”
and “dimly burning wicks.”
As the Jewish-Canadian songwriter and theologian Leonard Cohen
says so beautifully in his song, “Anthem”:
“Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything,
but that is where the light gets in.”
That is where the light comes in.
God’s grace and power works exactly there where we are broken,
where we are most fragile.
As Paul puts it his second letter to the Corinthian church:
But we have this treasure in clay jars,
so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power
belongs to God and does not come from us.
8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
9 persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
(2 Cor. 4:7-10)
Second, in the midst of these most difficult times,
when we feel helpless and out of control,
we learn from the example of the suffering servant
that we should seek to cultivate the power that we do have
in the midst of our current state of vulnerability.
Even in the midst of the most dire of circumstances,
we still have the power to make a difference
in the lives of the people around us.
As we have seen in the case of the suffering servant,
this power is a remarkable power
— not like the power of the worldly institutions
but a power that grows out of compassion,
out of being concerned with the needs and concerns of the other.
Even if we find ourselves in a completely hopeless situation,
we can nurture compassion’s power
that means that even in the most disturbing of days,
we have the ability to do good things,
to look beyond our own problems,
and to direct our focus to the other.
And it is this capacity to hope against hopelessness,
that shapes the people of God to be the light to the nations
that Isaiah speaks of in his prophecy.
[Rebecca Wright:]
From a biblical perspective, light is a fascinating subject.
It is used metaphorically in both the Old and New Testaments [4]
and in many cases the metaphor is used
with the sense of the insiders being light for others.
Although a metaphor, it has a basic, easily-grasped meaning.
And yet there is a deeper meaning too,
because light is in at least one dimension different from other quantities.
If we are in a small heated room in a large cold building
we will want to take care that the door remains closed,
lest the heat leak out into the hallway and dissipate
to the point of no longer being useful to those of us in the room.
Imagine that someone in the cold hallway knocks on the door
and asks that we keep it open so that they can share the heat.
That would be a foolish thing to agree to.
We would do better to invite the person into the room to share its warmth.
Now change the story slightly.
Imagine that temperature is no longer the issue.
Imagine that our room is the only one in the building with working lights.
Now if someone asks us to open the door
to share the light out into the hallway,
we would have no need to hesitate.
Whatever light is in the room will not diminish perceptibly
by throwing the door open.
(There may be instruments sensitive enough
to measure a difference in the room’s remaining light.
But I do not think that anyone in the room
could tell the difference with the naked eye.)
Unlike heat or air-conditioned air
or food or money or nearly anything else,
light can be shared with no diminution to those doing the sharing.
Another property of light is important
to the Bible’s use of it as metaphor:
light does not exist for its own sake alone.
That is, the point of turning on a light in a dark room
is not so that everyone may stare at the light fixture.
Rather, the light makes it possible for people to see other things
that would be invisible to them otherwise.
So how do these two properties affect our reading of Isaiah?
It is not clear whether the “you” in verses 5-9
is the same as “my servant” in the preceding section,
although clearly Jesus reads them that way
in his inaugural sermon in Luke 4.
In addition to its other layers of meaning,
God is calling the people of God to be a light to the nations.
And no matter how enthusiastically we live that calling,
it will not cause us to end up in darkness.
Whatever light we have
will not be dangerously diminished by our sharing of it.
And the results of that sharing
will be allowing the possibilities of other things
than people staring at us.
Light-bringers and light-givers are often noticed individually,
but the larger point is the light itself and what it makes possible.
The work of building justice
can be compared to shining a light on a situation.
It begins with our willingness to look, to see, and to understand
where injustice lies
and what the causes of injustice are.
The prophecy of Isaiah tells us that the servant of God
‘will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth’,
and this same prophecy says that the people of God
are called to be, ‘a light to the nations’.
The light we are called to bear in the world
is the light that gives rise to justice,
by shining on oppression
and highlighting God’s intolerance
of those who harm both nature and other humans.
And so we speak out:
we speak out about the injustices we see in our city,
and we speak out about the injustices we see internationally,
from the streets of Palestine to the streets of the West End,
our calling is to bear the light of the world
who comes into the world in Bethlehem,
and who continues to come into the world through us.
And as we approach Christmas,
let us hear the again the words of Jesus,
the suffering servant of God,
who said:
"I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness
but will have the light of life." (Jn. 8:12)
[1] This sermon draws extensively from the commentaries on Isaiah 42.1-9 by Rebecca Abts Wright https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/light-to-the-nations-2/commentary-on-isaiah-421-9-8 and Juliana Claasens https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/light-to-the-nations/commentary-on-isaiah-421-9
[2] Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim, You Are My People (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), 22.
[3] “Reflections of Exile,” 178
[4] Jesus to followers about them: Matthew 5:14. Jesus about himself: John 8:12 and 9:5, Luke 2:32.
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