"The Lord God has given me a trained tongue,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious;
I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting." (Isaiah 50:4-6)
In the end, the way God defeats the powers of evil is not to play at their own game--using the tactics, the cruelty, and the violence of those powers in the name of fighting them. No, in the end, God's way of overcoming evil is to endure its worst attacks and respond with good.
That may be difficult for us to hear--and even harder for us to practice in our own lives--but it is definitely what prophets like Isaiah had come to understand, and certainly what Jesus embodies. The way of God is ultimately to exhaust evil of its ammunition, to outlast its fury, and to refuse to retaliate in kind, rather than to perpetuate its rottenness. God--and God's Chosen One--will not succumb to becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.
These verses come from a reading that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday on the celebration of Palm Sunday, and I'll admit that they don't seem particularly cheery. Basically, the voice of the one speaking says he has been trained by God to listen for God's message and then to speak it for those who are "weary," and that this faithful serving has landed him in trouble. Despite his obedient listening to God (or maybe because of it), he has become the target of enemies who do him harm, both in physical assault and cruel insult. The prophet may be thinking of his own rejection by unwilling listeners, including the powerbrokers like the king who regularly lashed out against God's messengers. Or he may be looking forward to some person coming in the future--we often group this passage from Isaiah among the so-called "Servant Songs" which describe a figure who would be chosen or anointed (Hebrew "messiah") by God to serve God's purposes precisely through innocent suffering rather than violent retaliation. It is also possible, since this is all poetry, that the author intends to allow both interpretations to stand at the same time. Maybe the point is precisely that: no matter the specific person is that God is working through, God's chosen way of dealing with evil is with good, God's intended way of responding to cruelty is with compassion, and God's strategy for answering violence is with persistent self-giving love. The prophet may have felt that call in the way he responded to hostile opponents in his time, just as he may have envisioned God's Chosen One doing the same in a new way some day in the future, just as he may also direct us to the same kind of non-retaliatory love in response to the evil in our own lives and world today.
If that's anywhere close to being in the right ballpark, then this passage's imagery of not running away (or hitting back) in response to those who lobbed insults and spitting is not just meant as a one-time quirky outlier, but a pattern for how we respond to violence and evil in our own day and time. In the face of such rottenness, the Chosen One of God doesn't say, "We've got to fight fire with fire--we've gotta GET them before they GET us!" Being God's peculiar people in the world will mean that we make the conscious, intentional choice not to answer evil with more evil, or violence with more violence, or cruelty with more cruelty. Isaiah 50 seems to be telling us that our way of serving God's purposes might look foolish to the world or naively weak in the eyes of "conventional wisdom," but this is in fact what God is training us for. Our way of dealing with the meanness, violence, and rottenness in the world is to listen for God's message, to faithfully tell it to the world despite the costs, and to commit to answering evil with good when we meet with hostility. This is our witness to the world, and this is our way of pointing to God's counter-cultural work in the world. Our way of being "holy" is ultimately our refusal to use the world's tactics of petty insult, cruel hostility, and brutal violence for our own benefit, because we have seen the alternative in the way God's Chosen One responds to the evil in the world. The prophet of Isaiah 50 might not have known the name Jesus, but we see the connections between his vision and the way of the Crucified One who also taught us to love our enemies and not to answer evil with more evil. And once we see the common thread through the centuries between Isaiah 50 and the way of Jesus, we know, too, that there is no way we can ever designate a war as "holy" or claim God's blessing on the same kind of cruelty and violence that the world uses.
As we enter again into the story of Holy Week and the brutality inflicted on Jesus, it is worth remembering that the mere fact of suffering and pain are not what make this week "holy." It is that Jesus embodies God's holy otherness by enduring suffering rather than inflicting it on others--even in the name of a "righteous cause." The cross is not beautiful to Christians merely because it involved an immense amount of pain inflicted on the crucified one; rather it is because we have come to recognize that God is the One on the cross, and that God's way of dealing with the world's hateful evil and cruel violence is to absorb and endure it rather than to turn it back on us in kind. These words from the prophet in Isaiah 50 train us to see that the One who "gave his back to those who struck him," the same One who pled for forgiveness for his executioners as he bled out from the cross, is the Creator of the universe--and this is God's way of healing the wounds of the world.
That is how God defeats evil--and that is the way we are called to share in as well, if we dare to be servants in God's purposes in the world, too.
Do we dare?
Lord Jesus, train us to respond to evil in the world with your kind of self-giving suffering love; keep us from becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.
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