THE SERVANT PROBLEM

“You just can’t find good servants these days.” When you hear those words you might think of a rather old-fashioned upper-class lady, “of gentle breeding” as they used to say, complaining to another lady of the same station about the difficulty of finding a woman to clean, cook, and do the other household chores. Or you might think of God.

God has trouble finding good servants. That’s what humanity was supposed to be. In the Second Chapter of Genesis God placed Adam in the garden “to till it and keep it” in a common translation. But a more literal translation would say, “to serve it and keep it” – the Hebrew word there is the one from which “servant” in our First Lesson comes. Humanity was to be God’s representative in caring for creation. But Adam and Eve – which is to say, we–messed up. People didn’t choose to be servants. We wanted to be “like God.”

And in that reading from Second Isaiah, God will try again.

You won’t find “Second Isaiah” in your Bible’s table of contents. That’s the way biblical scholars refer to part of the Book of Isaiah that was written perhaps 150 years after the first part. It was directed to the Jews who had been exiled in Babylon for a long time after the destruction of their nation and Temple and virtually everything they had counted on. A prophet whose name we don’t know (so we just call him “Second Isaiah”) proclaims to them that God will bring them back home and restore his people.

In that section of Isaiah are four texts called the Servant Songs because they speak of the calling and mission of a servant of the Lord. They’re in chapters 42, 49, 50, and the end of 52 and all of 53. The first is our Old Testament reading for today, and next week we’ll hear the second of them. Today God speaks, introducing the servant: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights.”

Who is this servant? What did the prophet have in mind when he spoke of that figure? Biblical scholars have debated that at length. Is the servant and individual person? Or is it a corporate figure, a group represented as a single person? Next week Israel will be addressed as God’s servant, but we’ll also hear that the servant has a mission to Israel. Both ideas seem to be in view. It’s a bit confusing.

A key part of the servant’s task is set out today when God says, “I have given you as a covenant to the peoples, a light to the nations.” Those words will be repeated next week. The servant is to be a light to the nations, the illumination of the whole world, to lead people out of darkness into the light of God. But the way will not always be bright for the servant himself. The Third Servant Song is read on Wednesday of Holy Week with those words that are familiar from Handel’s Messiah; “I gave my back to the smiters.” And following that God says to us, “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the voice of his servant, who walks in darkness and has no light, and yet trusts in the name of the LORD and relies upon his God?” And then we read the last of the servant songs on Good Friday.

You can probably see where this is going – at least part of the way. And it’s probably no surprise. The servant is Jesus Christ. He is the one in whom those hopes expressed by the prophet in Babylon five and a half centuries before are finally realized. There is an echo of opening verse of the first song in the words addressed to Jesus at his baptism: Compare “My servant ... in whom my soul delights” with “My Son, the Beloved.” (It helps to know that the Greek word for servant can also mean “child” or “son.”)

When Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “I am the light of the world,” he’s saying that he is carrying out the servant’s mission. He’s the one who has to walk in darkness and trust in God. Jesus is the one “despised and rejected by others” who has “borne our infirmities and carried our diseases” as the fourth servant song says on Good Friday. And – he is also the one who, as that song says, is vindicated: “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.” In one of the old German lectionaries half of that song is appointed for Good Friday and the second half for Easter.

This is a very traditional Christian interpretation – Jesus is the servant and his baptism is his commissioning, his installation in that office. The Israelite Jesus is the one in whom the mission of Israel is focused and embodied. But it doesn’t end there. To be the light of the world is the mission of Israel and of Jesus. But where else do we hear those words?

It’s in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says there to his disciples, “You are the light of the world.” He says that to all his disciples down through the ages. We are to be the servants God is looking for. We’re to be a light to the nations – not on our own but as those who reflect the light of Christ, the means by which his light is spread in the world.

And as it was for Jesus, that begins with our baptism. Think of some of the commitments that are made by the newly baptized person in our service: To “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ”, to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself”, and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. That’s being the light of the world, the light of Christ.

This also why the newly baptized person is given a candle that has been lighted from the paschal candle that represents Christ. We don’t just hand the person an unlit candle and say “Let your light so shine before others.” Where would they get the light to shine? We have to receive the light first, to be illuminated by it, so that we can be light for others, for the world.

That’s servant work – the work of Israel and the work of Jesus Christ. It is the work of the Christian community, empowered by the Spirit of Christ. It is your work, and mine.