Introduction | Song 1, Part 1 | Song 1, Part 2 | Song 2, Part 1 | Song 2, Part 2 | Song 2, Part 3 | Song 3 | Song 4, Part 1
The second section of Song 4 (Is 53.1-3) begins with the famous line “Who hath believed our report?”—which is to say, “What I’m about to tell you sounds unbelievable, I admit, but it’s true.”
We tend to imagine the display of God’s power as being flashy, and sometimes it is. Sometimes there’s thunder and lightning, and sometimes there are earthquakes, and sometimes Mount Saint Helens explodes into a devastating pyroclastic flow with a deafening roar. Sometimes the fountains of the great deep are broken up, and water covers the whole earth, and the Himalayas are thrust up to deoxygenated elevations.
God can do that.
But sometimes he speaks with a still, small voice. Sometimes the decayed acorn yields a tiny sprout that grows into a mighty oak whose roots split boulders, but silently and over decades.
Sometimes—no, most of the time—when God is working, hardly anybody notices.
And Isaiah, wonder in his voice, speaks of a time when God will show his power—reveal his mighty arm (Is 53.1)—through somebody who doesn’t look at all like what everybody’s expecting.
He’s just a tiny sprout, a root out of a dry ground (Is 53.2).
Dry ground isn’t supposed to sprout. But it will.
Earlier Isaiah has used a similar metaphor for this unbelievable development. He has spoken of “a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch … out of his roots” (Is 11.1), “a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people” (Is 11.10). There’s this old tree stump, see, that was cut down long ago, dry and visibly dead. And out of the middle of it will emerge a little green shoot: there was life in the old stump!
In his book Isaiah predicts that the kings of his day will be overturned, and their lines will end. That happens to Israel, the Northern Kingdom, in 722 BC when Assyria takes their leaders into exile, and to Judah, the Southern Kingdom, in 586 BC, when Babylon destroys Jerusalem, including the Temple, and takes its leadership captive as well. There’s eventually a return, but Judah has no king but Cyrus.
And then, for four centuries, God becomes mute. The heavens are silent. A series of foreigners rule the land—Persians, then Greeks, then Ptolemies, then Seleucids. And then Hasmoneans, who are Jews, but nowhere near competent or godly. And then, Romans.
But in the days of Caesar Augustus, when Cyrenius was governor of Syria, there was a carpenter or stonemason in Nazareth—can anything good come out of Nazareth?—who adopted the virgin-born (yes, miraculously virgin-born, but very quietly so) son of his fiancée and in so doing set in motion the renewal of the stump of Jesse, which had been cut off.
This boy grows up. As an adult he tells his home-town crowd who he really is, and nobody believes him. “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Mt 13.55). “He hath no form nor comeliness” (Is 53.2).
And it gets even more unbelievable. “He is despised and rejected of men” (Is 53.3); the religious leaders, the most knowledgeable and respected men of our people, say he breaks the Law of Moses, and they have him arrested, and they beat him, and they turn him over to the Romans for execution.
There’s nothing about him to find admirable; in fact, as he is led out to execution, he is shockingly disfigured, grotesque, too horrible even to look at. (Remember Servant Song 3?)
Who would believe it?
Next time: Why?
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
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