This Sunday we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord, and the Lectionary pairs the Gospel account of Jesus's baptism (Matthew 3:13-17) with Isaiah 42:1-9, one of the so-called Servant Songs. The pairing invites us to see Jesus in Isaiah’s servant, to see Jesus as God's chosen one, anointed with the Spirit, beloved and delighted in. The resonances are unmistakable, and for two millennia Christians have read these Isaiah passages as prophetic foreshadowing of Christ.
In the original time frame of the text, however, the servant in Isaiah 42 almost certainly refers to Israel itself, not to some future messianic figure. Throughout Isaiah 40-55, “servant” is covenant language describing Israel’s unique relationship with YHWH. YHWH calls, chooses, and strengthens Israel (41:8-10); does not forget Israel (44:21); declares love for Israel (43:3). The servant is YHWH’s chosen one “in whom my soul delights.” This is the intimate language of covenant relationship.
So, the question isn't so much whether Isaiah was predicting Jesus. Instead, it’s what does this special servant vocation actually entail? And what does it mean that at his baptism, Jesus took up this particular calling?
Israel as Covenant to the Nations
One of the most striking things about Isaiah 42 is found in verse 6, where YHWH says to the servant: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” Not that Israel has a covenant with YHWH—that’s the old understanding. Rather, Israel is YH’WH’s covenant to the nations. The servant exists not for its own sake but as testimony, as witness, as light illuminating the ways of YHWH in a world darkened by systems of power and domination.
This shifts everything from privilege to purpose, from possession to vocation. To be YHWH’s servant means to exist for the sake of others, to be the living embodiment of YHWH’s covenant commitment to the whole world. When the Spirit descends on Jesus at His baptism, this is the mission He’s being anointed for—not to receive special status but to embody YHWH’s covenant purpose for all people.
When we are baptized, we’re joining this same strange work. We’re marked not as recipients of divine favoritism but as participants in God's self-giving love for the world.
The Servant's Method: Vulnerability, Not Violence
How does the servant described in Isaiah carry out his mission?
He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench" [Isaiah 42:2-3].
Some scholars have wondered if the servant might refer to Cyrus the Persian, the foreign king whom YHWH explicitly calls “my anointed” elsewhere in Isaiah (45:1). Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to return home—a genuine act of deliverance. But as Old Testament scholar Robert Alter points out, the servant’s methods here—not raising his voice, refusing to break what’s already shattered—scarcely accord with a king commanding a powerful army.
The servant operates through an entirely different logic than conquest and imperial decree. It’s a detail that most English translations obscure: the servant doesn’t merely refrain from breaking bruised reeds and quenching dimly burning wicks out of gentleness toward the weak. According to the Hebrew, the servant himself “does not burn dimly, nor is he broken”—meaning he shares the vulnerability of the bruised reed and dimly burning wick. He perseveres through fragility, not from a position above it.
This is power operating against the logic of empire. This isn’t a strong figure being kind to the weak. Instead, this is a weak figure refusing to adopt the tactics of the powerful.
The Discipline of Silence
Moreover, the servant is silent. He “will not cry or lift up his voice” [42:2]. Earlier in Isaiah, we hear Israel crying out in complaint: “Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God?’” (40:27). Such cries—demands for justice, protests against mistreatment—are well known in the biblical tradition. Think of the Psalms of lament, or Jeremiah’s complaints, or Job’s accusations against God.
The servant, however, does not cry out. His silence, however, isn't passivity or resignation. Rather, it’s the active discipline of refusing blame, recrimination, and retaliation. Margaret Odell, Professor Emerita of Religion, St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN), in her commentary on this passage posits that the servant’s silence “creates space for the emergence of new insights, even perhaps into the ways of God.” When we stop filling the air with our righteous complaints (however justified they may be), other voices can be heard. Other perspectives can emerge. Space opens for understanding we couldn’t access while we were shouting.
This is how the servant “brings forth justice”—not by imposing it from above through decree or force, but by creating conditions for its emergence through patient, vulnerable, persistent presence.
Baptized Into This
When the Spirit descends on Jesus at the Jordan, He’s being anointed for this servant mission. Not the Cyrus mission of conquest and power. Not the mission of fixing what’s broken through force or authority. But this mission: being present among the broken (including our own brokenness), creating space rather than filling it, persevering in vulnerability as testimony to another way of being in the world.
This would have been urgent and radical for first-century Jews living under Roman occupation, many of whom expected a messiah who would operate more like Cyrus than like the vulnerable servant of Isaiah 42. Jesus’s baptism marks Him as taking up the servant’s strange vocation instead.
And, as observed above, when we’re baptized, we join this same work. We’re conditioned to think power operates through dominance, through having the loudest voice, through the ability to break our enemies before they break us. Baptism conscripts us into a different way. We become, as Odell puts it, “salt and light, the leaven in the lump, a messenger bearing silent witness to another realm of justice and right.”
We don’t grasp at the world’s forms of power. We don’t insist on our rights through volume and force. We practice the discipline of vulnerable presence, of creating space, of refusing retaliation. Not because we're weak—though we may be—but because we’re bearing witness to how God actually works in the world.
New Things
Our Isaiah 42 passage ends with YHWH’s declaration:
Former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them" [v. 9].
YHWH announces new things before they emerge into visibility. They exist as promise before they appear as reality.
Baptism marks us as people who live toward these new things—not by grasping at old forms of power but by embodying this servant vocation. We're baptized into a long, strange tradition of being God’s covenant to the world, not just with God. We’re anointed for the work of vulnerable witness, of creating space for justice to emerge, of persevering without breaking even when we ourselves are bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks.
It’s not the vocation the world would choose. But it’s the one into which the Spirit descends at baptism, marking us as God’s beloved servants, called to bring forth justice to the nations through the strange and gentle power of persistent, vulnerable love.
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