The Suffering Servant

Archetypes of the Accused 6

The image of the suffering servant comes from a long Hebrew poem, two and half millennia old, found in the book of Isaiah. It’s long. Chapters 40-55 are an unbroken river of words. There are no breaks. It makes trance-like circles around a handful of oracles that ascend spiral-wise. I dare you to eat it whole.

Amidst its handful of themes, it describes some wretched figure. Someone pummelled beyond recognition. Someone regarded with cold indifference, contempt and revulsion. They're silent before all charges, in some corrupt trial. There is hair pulling and spitting and loss of heart. 

The image is properly archetypal. It's amorphous. It shifts from form to form: it's an individual, then it's an idea, then a whole people. One minute it's the narrator, and the next it's someone else the narrator points to. Sometimes this character is idealised vision; some mystical Other, pure and quietly powerful. Sometimes the suffering servant is entirely relatable: a rather lost and wilful and imperfect figure. 

These poetic sketches were an ode the Israelite tribe, at a time when they were displaced and oppressed. They interpreted their situation in two ways: this beleaguered tribe were suffering because of their own mistakes and regrets, and they also were suffering because of the brutal powers that terrorise the world. Both/and. They would now be obliged to live in a violent world, powerlessly: to live among kingdoms with no king; between empires with no empire. They were to live out their crushed lives as a sign against a world of crushing empires. 

But there is lightness here also. There is a gentle and perhaps beautiful path; to be quiet of voice, to not break a bruised reed, or snuff out a smouldering candle wick, as the poem goes. There's something liberating in these images that indifferently pass by the entanglements of power. They choose, each moment, a steadfast gentleness instead.

There is a glimmering mystery in the poem. It hums with the idea that there is something redemptive about this quiet shouldering of the unjust charge. Somehow, in taking the blows, they deliver the world. They disarm violence and bring healing to the harmed. There is an astonishing reversal in the tale: "Kings shut their mouths," it says. Everyone is startled. The knowing submission of this nobody shuts down the whole machine. All the talk stops, the tower is silent and the flags go limp.

How does this non-person's quiet bearing of misjustice cause this earth stopping moment? They see themselves under the boot of systemic malice. And yet there is no defensive gesture. The total lack of tension at their end of the rope causes a kind of collapse of meaning at the other. The tyrant is revealed: he is a clanging gong. Everything is revealed. It all looks so absurd and thin and feeble that it might blow away in the wind and be gone forever. It is a momentary apocalypse, a eucatastrophe. 

Experience tells us that when such an unveiling occurs, and the world sees itself in the mirror, it quickly recovers itself and carries on. But it must now do so with a shadow of doubt. It can't unsee what it saw. This would seem a small gain, but I have a fancy that the gains are not so small as they appear. 

If the early messianics recounted this poem as they thought of Jesus on trial before the Roman coloniser, Pilate, it was only in continuity with this long Jewish tradition.

A picture tells a thousand words, and a Marc Chagall picture tells a million. Here's The White Crucifixion from 1938.