Arguably the most astonishing feature of the biblical meta-narrative is Yahweh’s penchant for employing unqualified agents in the execution of his finest work.
Some texts articulate this as the means of assuring that Yahweh alone receives the glory of the outcome, a matter that causes no embarrassment to biblical aesthetics. Others simply record the fact, allowing the reader to configure the motive.
The book of Isaiah’s enigmatic, polyvalent Servant figure is a case in point. No matter how the image is interpreted at any given moment—Zion, a remnant of exiled Israel, chastised Israel herself, an annointed or even messianic figure—the title ‘Servant’ denotes a subservient status and posture. Not only that, the Servant appears to share in Israel’s outsized deficiencies:
Who is blind but my servant,
or deaf like my messenger whom I send?
Who is blind like my dedicated one,
or blind like the servant of the LORD?
Though the book’s preference for irony and reversal may remove some of the sting from this description, the fact remains that Israel’s endemic deafness and blindness—incapacities that have their literary origin in the prophet’s throne-room commission in chapter six—are here cast upon a shadowy figure whose main objective is redemptive and restorative.
This seems remarkably unpromising, yet wholly in line with that instinct for the second-born, the under-dog, the outcast, and the abandoned that sets the Bible apart from all garden-variety religious expression. Yahweh comes off either as deeply careless or profoundly intentional. Ironies abound on more than one plane.
It appears that an instinct for what one might call redemptive solidarity is engraved upon the deep structure of the meta-narrative to which I’ve referred. Salvation in a Yahweh-conceived universe is simply not to be accomplished abstractly or distantly. Time and again, it requires the deepest identification between agent and object.
Whatever or whoever Yahweh’s Servant turns out to be, the figure limps, overlooks, fails to hear, stumbles about unseeing, unknowing, misunderstanding, incapable of inspiring hope in the hearts of desperate, needy onlookers.
Unless Yahweh be with him.
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