The Ancient Israelites lived a much harsher and more brutish life than we live today.   Occupied by the Roman army they were subject to a brutal regime.   The Romans may have brought high levels of civilization with them, but their entertainment was blood curdling.  The Gladiatorial ring where heroes fought to the death was good entertainment.   Feeding Christians to ravenous lions stirred a crowd into a frenzy of excitement.  

Twenty five years ago when I began University I soon found that reading the documents of the Early Church Father and early historians such as Eusebius made interesting and blood thirsty reading!  Descriptions of early pagan practices left little to the imagination.

Even though the world of two thousand years ago was full of suffering deliberately inflicted and otherwise, those ancient peoples were still unable to take suffering for granted.  They needed to know the reason for it.  Most assumed it was God's will, a kind of punishment sent by a loving Father to make them aware of their sins and pull them back onto the right path. 

In ancient Israelite thought, everyone who was blessed in life through good health and wealth and a large family, was thought to have earned their blessings through their good and devout life, while everyone who was poor or sick or without children was thought to have merited their unfortunate situation in life as a punishment for their sins.  When this was clearly not the case because an obviously good person fell ill or lost all his wealth, the blame was laid at the feet of his ancestors.  It was believed that one of his forebears had sinned and that the punishment was meted out to the "third or fourth generation" of those who remained (Exodus 20:5). 

But even in those days this was thought by some to be too simplistic an explanation and the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, some of the Psalms and some of Isaiah offer a different explanation, or at least question the accepted one. 

Certainly Jesus never turned away from suffering.  If anything, he walked towards it, encouraged it and embraced it, as he did on that first Palm Sunday, when he rode into Jerusalem in the time-honoured manner of the long promised Messiah.  Perhaps Jesus' way of walking headlong towards all that was scary and potentially fatal, was one way of tackling the problem of suffering, for since the beginning of Creation human beings have puzzled over why a God of love should allow his children to suffer.  By moving towards suffering and embracing it, perhaps Jesus is showing that not everything about suffering is bad.

Isaiah who wrote the so-called "Suffering Servant" song towards the end of the period of exile in Babylon and which we read today, clearly marks this suffering servant as one of God's chosen ones.  Later interpreters have identified the Suffering Servant as Christ because the parallels in the passage with the passion and crucifixion of Christ are so marked.  But this wasn't the original intention.  Nobody knows quite who was portrayed in this song, but some scholars think it may refer to Israel herself, to the whole nation and especially to all those Israelites who remained faithful to God despite the distractions and seductions of Babylon. 

It's a very profound passage, rich with wisdom, which still holds good today.

Today's passage begins, "The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.  Morning by morning he wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught." Its good to know that the Suffering Servant identifies being a good teacher with good listening.  And the purpose of the good teacher is to sustain and nourish the weary. 

Not that this sustenance is necessarily well received, as many a teacher will know, and the poem goes on to say, "I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard (a grave insult in those times); I did not hide my face from insult and spitting."

It sounds like the worst sort of inner city classroom, or the worst sort of response to Christian ministry, full of despair and hopelessness.  But that's not at all how the Suffering Servant sees it.  He continues immediately, "The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near."

No matter what happens, God is there with the one who suffers, especially with the one who suffers through trying to do God's work.  Not only is God there, but God puts an entirely different value on the efforts and the results of the work.  Whereas in human eyes the whole thing is a failure, resulting not in people hearing the words that the teacher is trying to put across, but in scorning and jeering and ridicule, in God's eyes the teacher is fully acquitted and takes the highest honour. 

The result of the Suffering Servant's experience of his suffering is that actually, whatever it may look like to human eyes, in fact no-one can stand against him because God himself stands with him.  And because of this, he is able to "set his face like flint."

There are many stories of courage in the face of adversity, which are strong and so powerful that it takes the breath away.  People who, like Jesus, die under torture rather than betray their friends, their beliefs or their country.  That strength and that courage is only possible through the presence and the support of God. 

When we look back at the life of Jesus, we don't first remember him riding into Jerusalem in triumph.  We're much more likely to remember and to marvel at his fortitude on the cross, his absolute resolve and purpose in refusing to allow the authorities to subdue him or to change his direction even though he knew that they would kill him. 

The greatest picture of power in the gospels isn't the picture of Jesus healing the sick or walking on the water, but is of Jesus hanging helplessly on the cross.  He wasn't doing anything, he was simply suffering.  But within that terrible suffering was God's immense power. 

Six hundred years earlier Isaiah held the same image in his Suffering Servant songs and it remains to this day a most moving image of great beauty.  And that same strength and beauty is present within our own sufferings, whatever they might be.  As long as we set our faces like flint and hang onto God through our own integrity, refusing to go the way of the world despite our suffering, that strength and that beauty will be released within us.  And when that happens, lives and situations change and like Jesus, we too eventually experience resurrection.