A Very Influential Text - Reflections on Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12, Good Friday, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Monday, February 17, 2025

         I have participated in about 50 Good Friday celebrations in my liturgical life, some of which I wish I had not done so. I remember one where the congregation was asked to grab a hammer and pound nails into a piece of wood, thereby taking responsibility for the agony of Jesus, all this done while a soloist intoned “Were You There” in an especially weepy voice. This worship experience occurred before that dreadful Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion of the Christ” had appeared, wherein Gibson’s own hands were featured in the crucifixion nailing of Jesus. The implication in both experiences was that “we” killed Jesus, too, though in Gibson’s movie, it was the “nasty Jews” who were most deeply implicated. Surely, Good Friday means more than an emphasis on the horrifying pain of Jesus and our role in that pain’s applications. “Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended?” goes the hymn. We all murdered you anyway, though you were completely innocent. And because of that death, we are all “saved” from sin, though, God knows, we do not deserve it. It is, in my reading, the Green Stamp view of theology; Jesus “paid it all,” and I thus receive a one-way ticket to paradise.

         I just cannot get my head and heart around that understanding of Good Friday. There is no doubt that Jesus dies, and in a horrifying way, but why? Is that death to assuage a furious God, a kind of divine tit for tat? We are evil, Jesus is completely innocent, and his sacrifice is for us, his life for ours, his appalling death the way that assuages God’s fury at us by the sacrifice of God’s own son. I don’t buy it. 

         I am aware that a good bit of this theology arises from a certain reading of Is.52-53, the fourth song of the servant that the poet of the exile of Israel offers to us. Early Christians combed the Greek Old Testament for passages that could shed light on their experiences of Jesus, and could help them understand what his life, ministry, death, and resurrection actually meant for them. Is.53:4-5 spoke directly to their attempts to comprehend what they had witnessed in the death of the one they called Messiah. “Therefore he has borne our infirmities, has carried our sicknesses; we counted him stricken, struck by God, afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our evil; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” Isaiah’s mysterious servant, perhaps a remnant of the Judean exiles in Babylon, is now seen by the prophet as a kind of stand-in for the evils of the Judean community. Though that community imagined that the remnant was really a punching bag for an angry YHWH, in reality they were the reasons that YHWH could never leave Judah alone in exile. That remnant suffered on behalf of all, took the blows for all, were crushed for all of Judah. It was nothing less than a new way to imagine how Israel would continue to thrive in a world where they were merely pawns in the game of the larger empires that surrounded them. They could not fight their way to some sort of victory over the powers; they could instead offer themselves as suffering servants for the life of the community.

         Precisely this view helped the early Christians imagine what Jesus’ death might mean for them and for the world. Jesus “was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth,” says Isaiah 53:7, and Jesus when asked if he were a king says merely “you say it,” or remains silent, refusing a reply of fury or sarcasm. “By a perversion of justice he was lead away…cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people” (Is.53:8). All of these facets of the suffering gift of the servant of YHWH were applied to the reasons for the death of Jesus, and emphasized the traditional “atonement” theology that has been regnant in much popular piety over the past centuries. 

         Though Isaiah may and has been read as the basis for atonement theology, I do not think that is the only way his poetry may be heard. I would suggest that his view of the servant also may be seen to emphasize his refusal to play the game of power over against the powers that would kill him; instead he knew his death may be necessary as a way to demonstrate that deep convictions may not lead to worldly success, but does provide a way to live in the world that focuses on giving and service and profound love for all God’s creatures. The death of Jesus shows us a way, not to gain a heavenly reward, but how to live a life of trust in and service to God, a life of hope and joy not based on cruelty and blood but on the possibility of a future of unity and wholeness among all peoples and creatures, friends and enemies alike. No need to pound nails this year; see this Friday as the beginning of a new life with God now.