The Suffering Community - Is 53: 1-12

Is this piece of scripture familiar to you? If so, who have you been taught to think that it’s about? Jesus right! Who else “bore the sins of many and made intercessions for their transgressors?” Who “Bore our suffering, though we thought the person was being punished by God?” Who else could it be?

But we have a problem with prophetic pieces of scripture in the Hebrew Bible. We tend to only look at it with Christocentric eyes, which can cause us to over look the reality that prophetic texts are usually not just fulfilled one time. They are made timeless by the fact that the point to truths that manifest themselves time and time again.

So who else could this text be about? In our discussion last week we talked about some of the history of this portion of the book of Isaiah. Let us start answering this question of who else by resuming our discussion there. The elite people of Israel had been captured when the city of Jerusalem fell and were carted off on a three month long trek, by foot, to Babylon. While there, the people were subject to foreign rule and didn’t have a place to worship. Over time, the people who were originally brought to Babylon began to have children of their own. They settled in for the long hull. And they died off, leaving only their children. Their children’s children. And their children’s children’s children. All of these generations of children were born in captivity, in Babylon. They never saw the city of Jerusalem. Yes, they may have heard legends and tales, but they were just that to them – stories. The reality is that their home was in captivity to them. That is all they ever knew. While they might have discounted some of the tales of the grandeur and splendor of Jerusalem, they did hear one message loud and clear from their elders – the Israelites are in captivity because God is punishing them. God is punishing them for the sins of their ancestors. The divine is casting judgment for their own inability to follow the covenant. They deserved whatever God had to dole out because generation after generation they had been wicked people.

So who could this person who bore the suffering of others be? It could be the entire nation of Israel. All of those people in captivity who never knew the city of God. People who truly believed that they were being punished for the sins of their ancestors. Banished from a city they had never set eyes upon, because of a God who punishes them for the sins of people they had never met. They were a people who didn’t look special, but were marked by this oppressive degree of suffering, not for their own inequities but for others. The funny part of their captivity that they would not have known is that they were part of a movement in history that would eventually lead to peace; a peace unlike any other that had ever been experienced.

Which leads us to a second possibility – maybe this scripture was not just communally fulfilled but also by one person. That person being the Persian king during this time period, Cyrus. Cyrus is specifically mentioned during this part of the scripture as the one who is coming from the north to rescue the people. His reign would prove to be one that was totally different then Babylonians. While the Babylonians believed themselves to be the best in all possible ways, Cyrus appreciated the unique gifts each culture he experienced had. While the Babylonians tried to make everyone like them, Cyrus allowed culture to cultivate their own gifts. He returned the foreign Gods who had been captured as a sign of domination by the Babylonians to be returned. He gave money to rebuild buildings that had fallen at the hands of the Babylonians. He let the people of Israel return to Jerusalem for the expressed purpose of rebuilding the city, the temple, and its walls. This was a new type of leadership. His plan was not one of power and majesty, like other empires. Most of the nations he went on to absorb into Persian rule, didn’t even feel threatened by the fact that he could be coming. It took a while for people to recognize exactly what he was doing – exactly why his plan was strategic instead of shameful. And in each new city he took on not only the gifts of the people, but their particular sufferings. He worked to make right what others had marred. He led the crusade and did all of the hard work, and people just rode on the success of the peace Cyrus brought with him.

Another individual who could have been this suffering servant was the prophet himself. Here is a person who is being ruled by the Babylonians and speaking against them. This was not a democracy. For crying out the message of God he would have been put to death. He also was despised by his own people. The majority of the people would not leave Babylon when given the chance by Cyrus a few years later. They didn’t think being captives was so bad, because they knew nothing else. Ever. Here is a prophet who had to fear the foreign government and his own people, and surly suffered for the radical nature of what he was saying. And yet he said it anyway. Abiding by God’s call to speak a radical message caused him to suffer – one could say that God caused him to suffer. But through his suffering something was accomplished – some Israelites caught the vision and decided to return when given the chance. They found truth and hope in what the prophet declared.

Three ways the prophet’s words could have been manifested during the time immediately surrounding when they were spoken. Fast-forward and we believe they were fulfilled in the life and death of our savior, Jesus Christ. The question then becomes could they be fulfilled today? If so, who fulfilled them?

The thought that has flooded my mind this week is how certain people and groups in society are paying for the sins of all of us. We live in a country that still, years later, can’t get its act together enough to acknowledge and fix the problem it exacerbated by a lack of aid and poor structure. The gulf coast is another example of a people who have suffered over the past year because of the greed and lack of accountability surrounding oil. The people of Haiti might have been hit by a natural disaster, but if the rest of the world weren’t ignoring the people’s plight of poverty before and after, maybe things wouldn’t have been as bad.

But the group of people that I see in today’s scripture in light of world aids day, celebrated this Wednesday, are those suffering from HIV and AIDS. The statistic lifted up this past week is that half a million babies were born last year HIV positive. Most of those children will not live beyond the age of two. And yet, we blame the victims of HIV and AIDS. We live in a society that rejects those who suffer. We are scared by the disease they have and have made them into our version of the modern day leaper. We considered those who suffer to be punished by God – if not for their own sin then at least for the sin of someone close to them, dead or alive. One group of people is bearing the weight of our sin of ignorance and fear. And the prophet’s words become fulfilled yet again today. When will people cease to bear the weight of the transgressions of others? When we begin to realize that we a re a community, and we never sin or suffer alone?