Of all the prophets, the image of the suffering Messiah appears only in Babylonian Isaiah. To his contemporaries these words sounded strange: for them the image of the Messiah was least of all associated with any kind of suffering. For them the Messiah was a righteous King, who would live like a king. What suffering could there be?

Meanwhile, in the prophet's words there sounds a revelation concerning the fundamental laws of spiritual life. After all, he does not say by accident that the Messiah suffers not for His own sins, but for the sins of other people, for the sins of the whole people of God. And He suffers voluntarily. This means that the Messiah takes upon Himself responsibility for the people's sins, somewhat as even today one person can repay another person's debts by paying his creditors for him. True, when a crime is involved, the transfer of responsibility to another person is impossible in our day. Today each person answers for himself before the law. But in ancient times it was possible to stand surety even for a criminal, taking upon oneself responsibility for the crime he had committed and bearing the corresponding punishment. In such a case it was presumed that the surety knew well the one for whom he was vouching and was so confident in him that he was ready to free him from the consequences of what had been done. The surety's motives did not matter here. He was required only to take upon himself the consequences of the crime committed by the offender.

This is exactly what the Messiah does before God in Isaiah: He takes upon Himself responsibility for the sins committed by the people and bears all the consequences of those sins. After this, the people are freed from responsibility and receive a chance to begin a new life from a clean slate. This was the only chance, because one cannot enter the Kingdom together with the burden of the consequences produced by sin committed consciously and voluntarily, and there were many such sins in the history of the people. Someone had to take them upon himself, giving the rest the possibility of entering the Kingdom unburdened by a load too heavy for new life. And the Messiah does this just as voluntarily and consciously as the people once sinned quite consciously and voluntarily, thereby opening the road to the Kingdom for the people and becoming the Redeemer.

This prediction about Christ and salvation that He brought into the world does not lose its actuality even today, two thousand years after it was fulfilled. The problem is that man is not capable of imagining what is salvation about and what the Christ fulfills for him exactly. Death on the cross of the Rescuer was inconceivable and impossible for the antique world; the Hellenic and the Jews, the believers and the heathen were seduced and found as madness the assumption that the Son of God can die for us. Today it is as well for us inconceivable that it is exactly in this Christ's death that is concluded His victory on sin and death. People in all time wait for something else. Mostly we wait for a king, who will lead us into eternal life with iron hand, without thinking that such an eternal life would be an eternal concentration camp. Sometimes we wait for a Teacher, who will teach us life, forgetting that eternal life lies in God Himself, and not in the fulfillment of certain norms and rules. But we do not wait for the One, Who will take our humiliation, our suffering and our painful punishment. It is too horrible, that people could invent such thing. And that’s why the prophet speaks of sprinkle, with which people contemplate on the foot of the Cross.

Even if we did not know the traditional reading of these lines, it would still be impossible not to compare them with the Gospel passages that preserve the sufferings and humiliations of Christ; Isaiah is therefore quite rightly called “the Old Testament Evangelist.” Yet we know that several centuries later, many of those who knew and constantly reread the Book of Isaiah did not recognize in Jesus the One of whom the prophet spoke. The prophecy remained misunderstood.

Should we Christians exalt ourselves above the ancient Jews on the grounds that we understand the prophetic words more correctly? Are we always ready to see the image of God in someone who does not conform to our ideas of prosperity, giftedness, and success? A “theology of success” is still popular among some Christians, seeking to declare life’s good fortunes a reward from above—which is possible, but far from true in every case—and misfortunes evidence of God’s disfavor...

But every seductive attempt to adapt doctrine to earthly interests and pragmatic notions was rejected beforehand both by Isaiah’s prophecy and, all the more, by the One of whom the prophet spoke.