Isaiah 52:13-53:12
New Catholic Bible
Humiliation and Triumph of the Lord’s Servant[a]
13 Behold, my servant will prosper;
he will be exalted and raised to great heights.
14 Just as many people recoiled at the sight of him—
he was so disfigured
that he no longer appeared to be human—
15 so will he startle many nations,
and kings will be speechless before him.
For they will see what they had not been told,
and they will contemplate
what they had not previously heard.
Chapter 53
1 Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a sapling,
like a shoot in arid ground.
He had no beauty or majesty
that would cause us to look at him;
nothing in his appearance would attract us to him.
3 He was despised and shunned by others,
a man of sorrows who was no stranger to suffering.
We loathed him and regarded him as of no account,
as one from whom men avert their gaze.
4 Although it was our afflictions that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
we thought of him as stricken,
as struck down by God and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our offenses
and crushed for our iniquity;
the punishment that made us whole fell upon him,
and by his bruises we have been healed.
6 We had all gone astray like sheep,
each of us following his own way,
but the Lord laid upon him
the guilt of us all.
7 Although harshly treated and afflicted,
he did not open his mouth.
Like a lamb led to the slaughter
and like a sheep that keeps silent before its shearers,
he did not open his mouth.
8 Unjustly condemned, he was taken away,
and who gave any thought to his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living
and stricken for the sins of his people.
9 They assigned him a grave with the wicked
and a burial place with evildoers,
even though he had done no act of violence
nor had he ever spoken deceitfully.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord
to crush him with pain.
For if he gives his life as a sacrifice for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his life,
and through him the will of the Lord will be accomplished.
11 As a result of his anguish
my servant will behold the light and be content.
Through his humiliation he will justify many,
and their guilt he will bear.
12 Therefore, I will allot him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the mighty,
because he exposed himself to death
and was counted among the transgressors,
even though he bore the sins of many
and interceded for the transgressors.
Footnotes
- Isaiah 52:13 The song turns into a kind of dialogue in which two divine oracles frame the reflections of people astounded by what happens to the Servant.
But who is this suffering Servant? We have already seen his mysterious face in three other poetic compositions (Isa 42:1-7; 49:19a; 50:4-11). We think spontaneously of a wise man or a prophet, a man of God who disagrees with his compatriots on their very ideas of God’s plan. For the Servant, the success of God’s plan means something quite different from political success. But the people could not tolerate this criticism of their all too human hopes. The prophet was mistreated and condemned to death (Isa 53:7-8).
But the Servant is also Israel, whose destiny the prophet embodies. The chosen people, contaminated by pagan forms of worship, was almost eradicated by the Exile. But it carries out its mission as a people that bears witness to God who chose it and is bringing it back to life; in the radiance of its resurrection, pagans will be able to recognize that the Lord of Israel is the living God who loves his people without ever changing his mind, the Savior of the human race.
The experience of the suffering Just One, whether prophet or people of God, highlights the fundamental law governing the history of salvation and every spiritual life: the power of God is manifested in human weakness. What a paradox: the Servant succeeds where Cyrus failed, because salvation comes not from battles but from martyrdom!
