Isaiah 42

Isaiah 42 opens with God introducing someone. Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights. What follows is unlike any description of a conqueror in the ancient world. He will bring justice to the nations, but he will not shout or raise his voice in the street. He will not break a reed that is already bent, or blow out a wick that is barely burning. He will not quit until justice is set up on the earth, and distant islands will wait for his teaching. Matthew quoted these lines to explain Jesus, who healed crowds and told them to keep quiet about it, and Christians have read the whole passage as his portrait ever since. The Creator of heaven and earth then speaks to the servant directly and gives him a job that reaches beyond Israel: to be a covenant for the people and a light for the nations, to open blind eyes and lead prisoners out of the dark. The response is a new song, sung from the sea and the desert and the mountaintops, and then a startling picture of God himself, silent for ages and now crying out like a warrior and gasping like a woman in labor, tearing up the landscape to make a road for the blind. Then the chapter turns and asks a harder question. Who is blind but my servant? Israel, chosen to see, has not seen; plundered and burned, it did not understand. The servant who will bring light to the nations is needed first by the nation that was supposed to carry it.