Isaiah 53 and a New Understanding of God

Back in the PSA

It’s been a while. I’ve been traveling. And other things keep coming to mind and to hand. But with this post I’m back to PSA: penal substitutionary atonement and its way of (mis)construing the Christian gospel. Somehow writing this paragraph put me in mind of the Beetles parody of the Beach Boys “California Girls”: “Back in the USSR.” Back in the PSA.

In the intervening weeks, the importance of PSA for understanding evangelical theology has not grown less. Underlying PSA is an arbitrary and harsh view of justice that supports the idea that punishment is divine. The God of PSA is a punishing God, and those who hang on tightly to the theology of PSA often seem inordinately fond of punishment—for some people, that is. 

While in Korea I watched a bit of CNN International. They played a video of masked El Salvadorian police, with the complicity of the US government, roughly treating men forcibly deported from the US. The prisoners had their heads shaved. They were chained so that they could not fully stand up. It was clear from the video that the humiliation meted out to the prisoners was not accidental; humiliation was the point. Remains the point.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem recorded a video in front of a group of these prisoners massed behind bars in the infamous El Salvador CECOT prison. These prisoners were not tried in a court of law. They are serving no sentence. They have no release date. They have no way to freedom. They are, in the manner of Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory, being held up as targets for the collective anger of American society. Indeed, back in the USSR.

Good Friday

We also observed Good Friday between the time I last posted on PSA and this present post. We read again the story of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. In that story, as in the story of the deportees, humiliation was the point. And pain. The Romans used crucifixion to intimidate and humiliate the people subject to them. Jesus was mocked, dressed up for the amusement of the state police, and hung to die slowly and publicly. But there’s a difference. The video of prisoners being humiliated in El Salvador tell the story from the point of view of the abusers. Good Friday tells the stories from the point of view of the abused.

Why this pain, this death?

But why? What was the point of this pain, this death, this Good Friday? It’s that question PSA, penal substitutionary atonement, attempts to answer. The PSA answer is that Jesus suffered and died instead of you and me. Someone had to suffer—so goes PSA theology. Someone had to pay the price. Someone had to be punished. God, in PSA, is a punishing god. His justice demands pain. And so, instead of us, Jesus suffers and dies. 

But is that the Christian gospel? And if it is, what does it say about God? If we can forgive without demanding that someone else suffer, why can’t God forgive in that same way? To these questions and others, advocates for PSA say that our ideas about justice or God don’t matter. Regardless of what we might think of this, this what the Bible teaches. It’s those claims that I have been looking at in this series of posts.

In earlier posts, I took up two important PSA claims about the Bible. The first is that PSA is already embedded in the practice and theology of Old Testament animal sacrifice. The second is that PSA is essential to understand Paul’s presentation of the gospel in Romans and at least implicit elsewhere in his writing.

To the first claim—about Old Testament sacrifice—we need to answer two questions: first, what does sacrifice in the Old Testament actually mean and, second, how is the imagery of animal sacrifice used in the New Testament writings? I’ve attempted to answer the first of these questions with the help of a recent and extensive body of biblical and historical research into the Old Testament sacrificial system. This research, compactly presented in Andrew Rillera’s book, Lamb of the Free (2024), concludes that Old Testament sacrifice does many things but it’s not (Rillera would say “never”) penal nor substitutionary. The sacrificial animal does not die instead of the person who sacrifices it. On this, see my earlier post and, at much great length, Rillera’s book. I’ll try to get to the second question—about how the New Testament uses sacrificial imagery—in subsequent posts. 

Another claim of PSA advocates is that PSA is simply what Paul teaches, especially in Romans but implicitly in others of his letters. To that claim I argued in my last PSA post that Paul has long been misread. I’m not alone in this, of course. It is now commonplace to observe that the emphasis in Paul’s theology of the cross is not on substitution but on participation. Jesus’s death was not instead of ours but was in fact our death. We died in Jesus, and we will rise in Jesus. 

PSA in your face

But for all this—there is much more to be said about both of those earlier topics—Good Friday does at times seem to smack you in the face with PSA-like language. The passages we read on Good Friday say and say again that Jesus died for us. And what’s to be done with that? Do the Good Friday passages give the lie to my claim that the Bible does not teach PSA?

In answer, we need to do two things. First, make a distinction, one that I will try to work out in more detail as we go along, between what it means for someone to die for someone else rather than instead of someone else. “Dying for” does not necessarily imply substitution nor is it necessarily penal. Martyrs, to take one relevant example, can be said to die for us; they do not necessarily die instead of us. We may have to die, too. 

A second thing we must do in response to the biblical claims of PSA is allow the words of Scripture to speak for themselves—as much as we can, granting that there is much we don’t see or understand. We should not start with PSA or with any other “theory of the atonement.” To do so is to lose the power of the text to challenge us—to our peril. In the remainder of this post, I’ll address one of those Good Friday scriptures, trying to hear what it has to say to us. It is surprising complex and powerful.

The Colossus

The passage I have in mind is one of the Good Friday “smack you in the face” texts eagerly trotted out by the advocates of PSA. It’s a sort of theological colossus, a text not only on which the Old Testament turns but with which the New Testament deeply resonates: the 53^rd chapter of Isaiah.

The poem in Isaiah 53 (the full text includes the last part of chapter 52, thus comprising 52:13-53:12), like much of great poetry, is enigmatic, difficult, and never easy to pin down,  not so as to be difficult but because it is attempting to convey a truth that goes against what we characteristically think. We have to be summoned, jolted, out of our patterns of thought to see the deeper truth. The poem bristles with difficulties: words that seem to be used in ways they are not ordinarily used, passages that seem to have been corrupted in the course of transmission, and other textual difficulties quite apart from what the poem says. But for all that, it calls to us still.

At the center of the poem is an enigma: the identity of “servant of the Lord [Yhwh]” named in the text. Who was or is this servant? The poem connects with three other “servant songs” (Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, and 50:4-9, so named by the late 19^th, early 20^th century German scholar Bernhard Duhm) but much about the other servant songs is not clear including their relationship with the material around them and whether they all speak with the same voice. For example, while the servant in the third song (50:4-9) speaks for himself, Isaiah 53 appears to be retrospective, looking back on the servant after he had died, as if it had been written by a different, later author.

But again, who is this servant? Was it someone whose name we no longer know? A prophet in Babylon, perhaps? Or is it a poetic way to speak of Israel, as a line in the second song seems to suggest: “And he [Yhwh] said to me, ‘You are my servant / Israel, in whom I will be glorified’” (49:3)? Or is the servant, as the Christian tradition has it, just Jesus? Or all of these things?

A strong case can be made for some individual who lived in the 6^th century BCE, probably in Bablyon. Isaiah 53 is not prophecy in the sense that “prophecy” has taken in our culture: that is, it’s not prediction. On a straightforward reading the poem appears to be retrospective—a sad but hopeful recollection of someone known to the poet (but not to us). Someone who died (Isaiah 53:8-9)

But a strong case can also be made for the servant as representing Israel or some group who belonged to Israel. The poet who writes Isaiah 53 is subtle and allusive. Written after the fall of Jerusalem, the poem seems to allude to history of God’s people. It resonates in this way with the biblical book of Job. 

And last, the pattern and theological interpretation of the life and death of the servant in Isaiah 53 fits with Jesus, not because the passage is prediction but because the servant’s truth is God’s truth, and this truth repeats throughout history until it finds its greatest expression in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps, the true enigma of the poem lies not so much in the identity of the servant as in the identity of the God to whom the servant belongs.

But let’s look at the poem directly. 

The Poem

The poem opens in the voice of Yhwh:

Look, my servant does well: / he will rise, he will be raised up, he will be very high.

 Keep this opening mind. It frames what comes later in the poem. “Does well” translates a Hebrew verb that can mean both “prosper,” as the NRSV takes it, and “be wise,” as the NIV takes it. By translating it, “does well,” I’m attempting to capture both meanings. The poem is about what it means to do well, including both living wisely and prospering. But in the life of the servant these things are radically redefined. What it means to live well challenges the idea of living well in the ancient culture for which the poem was written and also in our own culture. It’s what Paul says of the cross of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 1:25: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s strength is stronger than human strength” (NRSVue). 

This utterly confounds “the many” (52:14). Think of “the many” in this passage as the dominant culture in any age. Us, as we embody the assumptions and values of the culture. The servant, marred by pain and suffering, scarcely looks human to the people of the day. They are jarred by seeing what they were not prepared for (15). Yhwh’s says in the opening speech that “the many”—most people—simply don’t get what the poem is talking about. If you are to grasp the truth of the servant, you will have to reconsider what you know. We are fairly warned.

We the People

The voice then shifts, from Yhwh to “us.” There are scholarly debates about who “we” are in this poem, just as there are debates about who “the many” are. We need not engage those debates. It’s best to take the “we” and “the many” in the broadest sense. The poet’s use of “we” and “us” is an invitation to all who read the poem to ponder the mystery of the servant. “We” are, well, we. We the people.

And so it’s we who begin by asking, “Who has believed our report?” Not just our report but, underlying our report, the question: “To whom has the arm of the Lord [Yhwh] been revealed?” This is a theological challenge. Who really understands what God is doing? “Arm of the Lord” names what God is doing in the world. Don’t be too sure you know what God is  up to.

No one saw the servant as the “arm of God”: “He grew up before him [perhaps better, emending the text slightly, “us”] like a nursing child, like a root from dry ground / no shape or splendor that we should notice him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (53:2). We simply didn’t see him. And when we did, we thought of him as a loser: “Despised he was, set apart from human contact, a person of pain, acquainted with disease” (3). He’s not “us,” we thought. 

And then the surprising conclusion to which the “we” of the poem comes: but in fact he was “us,” is “us”: “It was our disease that he carried, our pain he bore” (53:4). We saw only him only as “afflicted, stuck down by God [and deservedly so], degraded” (4). But, “He was wounded by our transgressions, smashed by our wrongs. The penalty of our wellbeing was on him, and by his whippings we were healed” (53:5).

These last lines appear almost or, perhaps, entirely Girardian. The philosopher Rene Girard proposed that human societies have built-in a failsafe mechanism. Societies after a while become unbearably contentious, threatening disintegration and violence. This built-up, diffuse anger needs to go somewhere, and so it goes against those who cannot defend themselves. The Christians in pagan Rome. The Jews in the pogroms. Those accused of being witches in Salem. The anger of society is poured out on scapegoats whose fault is only that they are different enough to identify and weak enough to attack with impunity. Undocumented immigrants in the present situation serve the purpose. The servant was such a scapegoat: “by his whippings, we were healed.” 

To Whom Is the Arm of the Lord Revealed?

But where is Yhwh in this? All in, it would appear, at least in the tradition of our English translations, which give verse 6 as “All we like sheep have gone astray; / we have all turned to our own way, / and the Lord has laid on him / the iniquity of us all” (NRSVue, following the KJV). Not only do our English Bibles have “laid on him the iniquity of us all,” but so does Handel in Messiah, in one of my and perhaps your favorite choruses. Isn’t this PSA? When we sing Handel’s Messiah, are we not singing PSA?

Perhaps, but it’s not what the Hebrew says. The crucial verb in verse 6 is not “laid on him the iniquities of us all” in the PSA sense: the whole legal apparatus of assigning guilt to another. The verb, rarely used in the Hebrew Bible, returns at the end of the poem—it’s literally the last word—where it means something like “plead.” The NRSVue has “made intercession”: “[the servant] made intercession for the transgressors” (12). But if we step away from PSA, “laying on” may still work. In the just-quoted verse 12, perhaps it has the sense of “laying” something on God: laying prayers for sinners on God. We have another instance of the verb in Jeremiah 36:25, when three of Jeremiah’s friends go to the king to plead with him not to burn Jeremiah’s writings—to no avail, as it turns out. They are “laying” their hopes on the king. So, what is “laid on him”—the servant— by Yhwh in verse 6? It would seem to be the desire of Yhwh that the servant take on the suffering of the world.

But Why?

This is where the theological mystery of the servant centers. Why could Yhwh do this? We are facing full on the theological question put to the people of Israel in the destruction of Jerusalem: Why? Why would Yhwh allow Jerusalem to be put to flames? The question comes back in the 20^th century Holocaust. Again, why would Yhwh allow this? It’s the question that for Christians is centered in the cross of Jesus Christ. Why would the Father allow this to happen?

The answer in Isaiah 53 is not as clear as it might be because the text of the poem is so difficult. The difficulty in part is textual and grammatical. Claus Westerman says of parts of the poem that they are “untranslatable.” But that’s not all of it. The difficulty may lie not only in trying to sort out the language but in the concept itself. In order to get at what seems to be going on in this poem, let me back up some.

Let’s go back to the fall of Jerusalem. There were many in Israel at the time (early 6^th century BCE) who believed that Yhwh would never let Jerusalem fall. Yhwh lived there, in the temple built by Solomon. Yhwh’s ministers—the ancient priesthood of Israel—served there. Yhwh’s people, Israel, resided in Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. So, when Jerusalem fell, the temple destroyed, and much of the ruling class of Israel led off into exile, it seemed that either Yhwh was a fraud, incapable of defending Jerusalem, or that Yhwh had abandoned Israel. The prophets chose the latter explanation. In Ezekiel, for example, Yhwh is represented as mounting the divine chariot and soaring off out of the temple and away (Ezekiel 10), not soon to return.

This sort of faith identifies success or at least viability as the mark of divine favor. This is the seed of the most popular form of religion still today: the prosperity gospel. Those who prosper are divinely favored. But what if this is not true? What if divine favor rests not on billionaires but on those who suffer? What if in the destruction of Jerusalem God was not walking away from Israel but standing with those who suffered? Standing with Israel in its peril and poverty and apparent weakness? What if God was “in” these events not to punish Israel but to join them in their suffering? And what if in this way God resets the relationship between God and humanity in which God, through God’s servant, is not the one who inflicts pain but the one who absorbs it? And what if this means that God is not judgment but love? And what if in this way God calls us out of ourselves and into a new way of life?

Perhaps these ideas are familiar to you from the New Testament and the life and death of Jesus, but here in this ancient poem they are broached for what seems to be the first time. PSA misses all this by turning God from the God of the suffering servant back into a tyrant, who rewards those he favors and punishes those he doesn’t. Paul D. Hanson captures the place of this poem in biblical theology:

The tone of the fourth Servant Song is urgent, passionate, even desperate. It aims to arrest the attention of the listeners by introducing something so startling that it causes nations and kings to shut their mouths. It presents an alternative to the pattern of crime and commensurate punishment of the guilty party, an alternative so new that is has never been heard or even thought of. (Isaiah 40-66. Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 1995:157-58)

Read the poem with this in mind. See if it makes sense for you. If I had more space, I would read it with you line-by-line, but already this post is far longer than blog posts should be. The essential point is that God does not walk away from the servant. The servant’s suffering is not God putting the servant away: “Look,” God says in the first line of the poem, “My servant does well.”

We are always in danger of losing the insight of this poem and with it, the meaning not only of Isaiah 53, but of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. When we do, we miss the direction—the arrow—of God’s saving power. In PSA, humanity, in Jesus, serves the justice of God; God must be satisfied. In Isaiah 53 and in the cross, God enters the suffering of humanity and says, I stand with those who suffer. Which of these theological directions you choose makes all the difference.

What’s Next

Enough for now. I’ll be traveling for a couple weeks. I may not get to the New Testament texts claimed by PSA until I get back. At least one of them, read straightforwardly, is an astounding affirmation of universal salvation. I look forward to reading them with you.

Until then,

Clay