These days, it’s hard not to think of theologian Karl Barth’s counsel that the proclamation of the gospel should be done with the Bible in one hand and that morning’s newspaper in the other. It was a fitting image when he said it. It is a memorable one now, with the struggle to connect a biblical faith with the world’s challenges in a way that is true to both.
The fourth of the “servant poems” in Second Isaiah (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), alongside the steady disclosure of sexual exploitation in our national consciousness, brings these two realities together in a way that suggests how healing happens in a society. The prophet writes of the Lord’s “servant”—the people of Judah in exile, victims of Babylonian domination—bruised and beaten, cut off from their core identity.
The first three songs affirm the Lord’s faithfulness to this servant, who, despite their suffering, will remain the Lord’s agent of a redemptive agenda. The fourth song portrays the “suffering servant” through imagery that has become central to the Christian redemption story:
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and by his stripes we are healed (53:4-5).”
The servant is silenced by the abuse and is unjustly removed from a place of belonging—a victim of the broad transgression of those who were once his people. But, in one of the great ironies of all of history, it is the woundedness of the servant, the victim of injustice, that has the power to transform and restore what was lost under the weight of overpowering injustice.
How can we forget the images of the Salem witch trials? Or the insistence of Emmett Till’s mother that his casket remain open at his funeral so that all could see the brutality inflicted upon him? Or the images from the Holocaust and the firehoses and police dogs used to quell demonstrators for racial justice?
As awful as these realities are, they have been catalysts for transformation in the minds and hearts of people who stand up and say, “Never again.”
In many ways, they were “wounded for (and by) our transgressions,” but they also have been part of a society’s redemption from complicity with the injustice that inflicted them (Isaiah 53:5).
Now, to today’s newspaper. For weeks, we have been subjected to a legal and political contest that has sought, on one hand, to bring about justice in a monumental case of sexual exploitation and on the other, to hide from view the details of that exploitation and those who were complicit in it.
Legal minds and media commentators have jockeyed back and forth in the contest of “who would win” (i.e., benefit most) from whatever the outcome of the contest turns out to be. Most spectators, it seems, were becoming impatient with the game and its chief players, finding the contest itself to be quite unsatisfying.
But then, the victims—hundreds of them—of this cruel and abusive exercise of dominant power, who have found each other and their collective voice. They have said, in effect, “You will not find what you really need to know to respond to this crime by looking in FBI files or in congressional transcripts. Look at us! Listen to us! See and hear firsthand the lingering pain and suffering that has marked our lives for decades.”
I don’t suppose we can know at this point what the final resolution of this matter will be. There are innings still to be played in the “game.”
But when wise reflection gets the attention it deserves, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that the “stripes” of the victims have been significant in our healing. Their needless suffering may help heal a society wounded by its own complicity—by the ways we have enabled wealth and power to shield the privileged from accountability.
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Professor emeritus of religious studies at Mercer University, a member of Smoke Rise Baptist Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and the author of Keys for Everyday Theologians (Nurturing Faith Books, 2022).
