[Dialogue] spong 10-2-08 more bible

[KroegerD at aol.com]

October 2, 2008 
The Origins of the  Bible, Part XIII: 
II Isaiah — The Figure of the "Servant" 
If I were to ask an ordinary group of people, even church people, to tell me  
about the message of the prophet we call II Isaiah, I suspect I would be 
greeted  by a glassy-eyed stare. Yet if I were to ask the same group if they had 
ever  heard or even sung in a production of Handel's Oratorio, entitled 
"Messiah,"  almost every hand would go up. The sad fact about our educational system, 
both  secular and ecclesiastical, is that few people seem to know that 
Handel's  Messiah is in large measure a musical rendition of II Isaiah and that the  
"expected" one about whom II Isaiah writes in this work is not Jesus, but a  
mythical figure that we know simply as the "Servant," sometimes called the  
"Suffering Servant." It is about this "Servant," not Jesus, that Handel sets to  
music II Isaiah's words to form a magnificent contralto solo: "He was 
despised,  rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." The confusion of 
the  "Servant" with Jesus should not be surprising, since the earliest gospel, 
Mark,  drew heavily upon II Isaiah to compose his narrative of the crucifixion. 
People  are accustomed to reading the Good Friday story as if it were a 
historical  recollection of Jesus' death. It is not. It is, rather, an interpretive 
portrait  of Jesus' death drawn not from eyewitnesses on the scene, but from 
II Isaiah. It  is II Isaiah, not history, that supplied such familiar details 
in the  crucifixion story as Jesus' silence before his accusers (Isa. 55:7), 
the  presence of the thieves on either side of him during his crucifixion (Isa. 
 55:12) and the narrative of the rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, providing a 
tomb  for his burial (Isa. 53:9). The interpretation of Jesus' death as an act 
of  vicarious suffering also originates in II Isaiah, as does the way the 
gospels  and even St. Paul interpreted the meaning of the death of Jesus as one of 
 vicarious suffering. It was the "Servant" who was punished in place of the  
guilty. It was about the "Servant" that II Isaiah wrote: "Surely he has borne  
our griefs, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted; but 
he  was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, 
the  chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed 
(Isa.  53:4, 5 KJV)."  
Over the years, however, these words have been so deeply associated with  
Jesus in our memories that most people think they were actually written about  
him. The familiar Protestant interpretation of the cross, "Jesus died for my  
sins," comes directly from II Isaiah. The Catholic understanding of the Mass as  
a sacrifice, in which Jesus paid the price of Adam's fall to bring about  
salvation, is also drawn from II Isaiah. The words of II Isaiah have shaped  
Christianity so deeply that we have, by a process of religious osmosis, absorbed  
much of II Isaiah into our conscious and unconscious minds. When these words  
then got literalized in Christian history as doctrine and dogma, the 
significant  distortions that mark the Christian faith today, that focus on blood, 
sacrifice,  guilt and atonement, began to take shape. That was, however, not the 
original  meaning of these words. What then was? And who is the "Servant?" To 
answer these  questions we must undertake an historical analysis of II Isaiah, 
which is, I  believe the most influential of all the Jewish prophetic works.  
The book we call II Isaiah is made up of the words written by an unknown  
Jewish person who lived during the time that the Babylonian Exile was coming to  
an end, roughly between 550 and 500 BCE. The thing that brought that exile to 
an  end was the rise to power of the Persians (roughly modern day Iran) which  
challenged the hegemony of the Babylonians (roughly modern day Iraq). Cyrus, 
the  king who led the Persian onslaught, awakened such hope among the captive 
Jews  that II Isaiah described him with these words: "How beautiful upon the 
mountain  are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth 
peace, that  bringeth tidings of good that publisheth salvation, that saith unto 
Zion, thy  God reigneth (Isa. 52:7 KJV)." Cyrus was well known for his policy of 
allowing  conquered peoples to return to their homeland and in this 
reputation the Jews  vested their hopes. These exiled people, who were to be the 
beneficiaries of  Cyrus' policy, were by now the grandchildren and great 
grandchildren of those  who had originally been taken from their homes by the conquering 
Babylonian army  some 50-60 years earlier. Thus they saw Cyrus as God's 
instrument, who would  enable them to go home. The beauty of Jerusalem, the glory 
and grandeur of the  land of the Jews, had been passed on by those who died in 
captivity to these  second and third generation descendents who had never set a 
foot upon the land  of the Jews. The fantasies accompanying their desire to 
return to that "promised  land" clearly grew as they always do in the absence 
of reality. They were  thrilled at the prospect of going "home." It was for 
this purpose that they kept  themselves intact as an identifiable people. If they 
were going to reclaim what  they believed was their national destiny, to be 
the "people through whom all the  nations of the world would be blessed," they 
then had to restore their nation.  That destiny would only come from a revived 
people who had reclaimed their place  of honor among the nations and 
re-established the city of Jerusalem as the  center of the world, even as the place 
where heaven and earth touched. Those  were the thoughts that motivated their 
yearning to return to the land of their  ancestors. The defeated Babylonians 
were no longer their conquerors and so the  migration back to their ancestral 
home began.  
These exiles, however, were not prepared for the sight that greeted them when 
 they reached the land of which they had dreamed for so long. Judah was a  
wasteland and Jerusalem a pile of rubble. It took only one glimpse of this  
devastation to put an end to their dreams and their hopes. There was no way a  
nation so defeated and so downtrodden could ever aspire to become "a light to  
enlighten the Gentiles." They saw no way that they could ever be "a blessing to  
the nations of the world."  
The unknown writer we call II Isaiah, seeing this, sank into a period of  
intense depression and darkness. He had to walk through his own "dark night of  
the soul." When he finally emerged, however, he took his quill in hand and 
began  to sketch out a new role and a new vocation for the Jewish people based on 
the  now established fact that never again would they be powerful, never again 
could  they dream about being rulers and never again would they be listed 
among the  respected peoples of the world. In his dramatic words he personified 
the Jewish  nation under a literary symbol that he simply called the "Servant." 
That is the  context in which this mythical figure emerged in Jewish history. 
 
It would be the role of the "Servant," wrote II Isaiah, to bear affliction,  
to endure the pain of being among the world's outcasts. The "Servant," 
however,  must never respond to hatred with hatred or to hostility with hostility. 
The  "Servant" must, rather, absorb these attacks upon his dignity and return 
them as  kindness. The "Servant" would thus drain the world of its anger and, in 
the  process, transform that anger into love and thus create wholeness. The 
"Servant"  would pay the price of the dis-ease of others by allowing that 
dis-ease to  become his own without seeking to get even. In so doing the "Servant" 
would  bring life to the world: "by his stripes we are healed." This new 
vocation for  the "chosen people" of God was not popular. No one is drawn to the 
masochistic  possibility of perpetual suffering. The human desire is always to 
get even, to  act in self-protective ways and to achieve survival through the 
use of power. So  II Isaiah's vicarious image of the "Servant," who suffered 
for others,  languished. Yet the words of this unknown visionary Jew of the 
Exile were  written into the blank space remaining on the scroll of the Prophet 
Isaiah. This  meant that over the years his incredible words would be read 
periodically in the  Synagogue and they would be endowed with the authority of the 
name Isaiah. In  this way the words of II Isaiah, along with his portrait of a 
radically  different role for the Jews in human history became, almost 
inadvertently, part  of the scriptures of the Jewish people.  
In the first century the disciples of a Jewish man named Jesus found in II  
Isaiah's portrait of the "Servant" a way that enabled them to understand and to 
 interpret the meaning of their experience with the one who had taught them 
that  love must embrace even their enemies and who himself was crucified for 
his  efforts. They saw Jesus as the embodiment of the "Servant" role, that is, 
as one  who would absorb the world's anger and hatred, transform it and give it 
back to  them as love. So they leaped on this image and used it to tell the 
Jesus story.  
Quite apart from this later Christian interpretation of II Isaiah, what we  
have in this remarkable book is the picture of a new breakthrough in human  
consciousness. Here in the words of this unknown 6th century BCE person, we see  
a portrait of human life that has finally transcended the survival mentality 
of  our evolutionary past. If the "survival of the fittest," so natural to all  
living things in the jungle called life, is allowed in self-conscious human  
beings to become the purpose of living, then finally human life will grind 
down  to a single survivor, upon whose death the grand experiment with 
self-conscious  life will disappear from the face of the earth. As Gandhi once observed, 
if an  eye for an eye is followed consistently enough, everyone becomes 
blind. We have  arrived atop the world's food chain, but if we cannot evolve beyond 
that,  genocide is our human destiny. Only a new consciousness can break this 
cycle. In  II Isaiah a portrait of a human life that has transcended the 
survival mentality  emerges, suggesting that life is a gift that is meant to be 
given in love for  another. How amazing it is that an unknown Jew some 2600 
years ago grasped this  idea and portrayed it so eloquently, creating in the 
process the holiest part of  Jewish religious history, carrying in his words hope 
for a human future. II  Isaiah's inclusion in the Bible is one of the reasons 
we call that book "Holy  Scripture."  
–John Shelby Spong
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Shari Shari Miller of Denver, Colorado, writes: 
Why is the current Catholic Church position on transsexualism so dreadful,  
so lacking in compassion? 
Dear Shari 
Why is the current Catholic Church position on transsexualism so dreadful, so 
 lacking in compassion?
 
____________________________________



 
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