NOTES for Isa 42:5-16

Whom is today's prophecy of Isaiah speaking about? From the most ancient times these mysterious words were applied to God's Anointed One, with whose coming peace and justice would be established on earth. But here the prophet also says that the Chosen One will not act by force, "will not lift up His voice," and will be "blind and deaf." Christians have always seen in this Chosen One Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came not with power and glory but in a humbled form, voluntarily renouncing omnipotence and omniscience for our sake.

But besides this, the prophecy also applies to each of us, since now Christ acts through those who believe in Him, through His Body. All these words about meekness and justice must be a guide for us as well, if we want to be one body with Jesus. The Lord says the same thing in the Gospel: learn from Me meekness and humility of heart; be light for the world sitting in darkness.

The Servant will not raise his voice, though many speakers too often try to cover the falseness and emptiness of their speeches with loudness and force. But the one who comes from the Lord will not go unnoticed because of a quiet voice: spiritually sensitive people remember both that the Lord appeared to Elijah in the quiet breath of the wind, and that what is genuine most often does not impose itself by force or advertise itself by shouting. The victory of truth will prove all the more secure.

But why, then, does the Lord warn a few lines later that He will cry out? Is there not a contradiction here? It still seems that this paradoxical way of speaking expresses the thought that the moment must inevitably come when the Lord's voice will be heard by all, and it will be like the cry not of a person insisting on his own way, but of a summons that cannot remain unheard, just like the quiet voice of the Servant.

The Lord compares His cry to the cry of a woman giving birth, and here we remember Jesus' prophetic words about the coming upheavals, "this is the beginning of sorrows" (Matt. 24:8), which according to the Kassian translation sound like "the beginning of birth pangs." We are used to calling the coming crisis "the end of the world," but it will become the beginning of a new life.

The image of the Messiah was revealed to different prophets in different ways. This happened not because one of them was right and another mistaken, but simply because the person of the Messiah was too immense to be grasped in one glance centuries before His coming into the world. This greatness of Christ's person was the reason that He was often revealed to the preexilic prophets as a ruler or high priest: someone like Him could not possibly be an ordinary man.

Yet in these prophecies there was also a revelation of the Kingdom: after all, the Messiah truly is King, only He brought His Kingdom with Him, and it is not arranged according to the laws of the old world. But this is exactly what is hardest for us to imagine, because we know no kingdoms other than those we see on earth. The prophets did not know them either, and therefore the messianic Kingdom often appeared to them in the form of an earthly state (although almost always there was, in this seemingly quite earthly state, something not entirely earthly, something that could not exist without God's direct participation).

And it was to the Babylonian Isaiah that it was first revealed that the Messiah's greatness is not at all like the greatness of an earthly king. By earthly standards there is no greatness in Him. It is no accident that Isaiah calls the Messiah by a Hebrew word that can be translated both as "boy" or "adolescent" and as "slave": in Hebrew society slavery was always patriarchal; slaves lived in the household practically as younger family members, possessing no rights but not being deprived of shelter or food.

Christ, of course, was not a slave, but the point of the prophecy was not to indicate His social position, but to let everyone understand that the Messiah's ministry is not determined by His social position. His Kingdom is not of this world, and to be King He needs neither an army nor a state apparatus. He remains the Messiah while being, from the point of view of this world, no one, and the success of His messianic ministry is in no way connected with victory or defeat in this world. Against the background of messianic expectations that assumed the appearance of the Messiah as an earthly king, the prophecy of the Babylonian Isaiah proved highly relevant. Unfortunately, by the time of Christ's coming it had, if not been forgotten, then not been taken seriously or understood literally. But that is another story.