We have probably all seen images of Jesus resembling everything from a body builder to Mr. Rogers that make us shake our heads, but the sobering reality is that we also are tempted to interpret Jesus through our preferred cultural or historical stories. If we are honest, whether it be through the articles of the intelligentsia, hit TV shows, or the algorithms of the influencers (Christian or otherwise), whatever cultural winds are blowing this decade may leave an imprint on how we conceive of Jesus.
And certainly many of these portrayals would evoke Jesus’s own words about Messianic misunderstandings: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matt. 16:23). And it’s not just our culture. Just like the apostles’ confused hearts, we have to deal with our own wanderings and misconceptions. Indeed, Jesus makes it quite clear that any real understanding of his message or mission is a work of God (Matt. 13:11; 16:17). But to hear who Jesus is again, we must listen carefully to the Scripture.
In light of this confusion about Jesus, this article seeks to use a lens (which is provided by the Bible itself) through which we can understand Jesus: the Servant of the Lord. We begin by reflecting on how the first few decades of the church likely preached about Jesus as the Servant of the Lord. It then turns to the story of the Servant of the Lord in the Bible. Finally, it closes with some reflections on how we approach Jesus in our own Bibles and churches today.
The Servant of the Lord in the Early Church
Imagine with me you are gathered with brothers and sisters in the newly planted church in Rome, before the writing of the New Testament. You have faithful elders, and whenever you gather, one of them opens the Greek Old Testament to proclaim from Scripture that Jesus, the Messiah, is Saviour and Lord. They always seek to ground their message in what was spoken by God in the law and the prophets.
On this particular evening, he is speaking on the exaltation of Jesus the Messiah. What chapters of the Greek Old Testament does he turn to? Or when Paul visits your church in just over a year, what passages will he cite to describe the suffering of Christ, justification from sins, the exaltation of Jesus, the nature of the gospel, and the call for Christians to serve each other? After all, the first gospel won’t come into circulation for another several years.
That elder would probably use the same chapters that Jesus had used regarding his own exaltation. And based on the New Testament (and as I have shown in a series of previous articles) over and over again they would have turned to the Servant of the Lord as portrayed in the book of Isaiah to talk about the gospel, humility, suffering, resurrection, atonement, exaltation, mission, and many other things.
In their desire to ground their message in the Scriptures before the New Testament was formed, they would have expounded Isaiah’s Servant of the Lord, especially Isaiah 53. (Of course, there would be other passages as well, such as Psalms 2 and 110, Daniel 7, or the foundational Genesis 1-3). And how do we know that the Servant played a critical role? Because when the apostles began to write, the Servant of the Lord’s ministry was quoted or alluded to all over the New Testament. It likely even shaped entire books, such as 1 Peter.
However, as time passed and the New Testament was composed and received, sermons would have been preached from the New Testament as well. Given their deep knowledge of the Old Testament, the connection between the Servant of the Lord (and other Messianic figures) and the new proclamation grounded in New Testament would have been clear to those first listeners. They would use the same vocabulary, images, and theological structures.
But this continuity can be harder for us to see as modern believers, as most of us have not had significant teaching from the Old Testament on Jesus’s identity. Therefore, we miss most of the clear allusions to the Old Testament, and the direct quotes can seem like proof texting. We also live in the shadow of the Enlightenment in which the unity of the Old Testament was torn asunder. “Critical consensus” has made some hesitant to affirm what the New Testament clearly does: that Jesus was the Servant of the Lord.
The Servant of the Lord in the Bible
Although we could trace the theme of the Servant of the Lord from creation onward, we will constrain ourselves to two major Biblical books: Isaiah, which is the definitive Old Testament treatment, and Luke, a representative New Testament sample of how Isaiah’s Servant is appropriated.
Isaiah’s Servant
With the background of the failed servanthood of Israel (Isa. 42:19) and Cyrus’ limited but successful servanthood (Isa. 44:28), there is another much greater Servant. He has several key characteristics. He is empowered by the Spirit for obedience as a Servant,[1] fulfilling God’s purpose.[2] In this, he is a herald of comfort and prophet of judgment.[3] He is both an advocate of justice[4] and he brings physical and spiritual restoration, making Israel holy.[5] However, he also has a redemptive purpose for the nations.[6] He suffers in the place of others, cleansing and interceding for them.[7] Despite this suffering, he knows he will be vindicated by God, exalted beyond his suffering.[8] In all this, he brings glory to the true God.[9]
The Servant of the Lord in Luke
Now we must ask ourselves if what I have written above is really true. Did the first interpreters of Jesus really think of him in terms that are fundamentally shaped by Isaiah’s Servant of the Lord? When the apostles and their companions started writing about Jesus, was the Servant a significant interpretive lens for their understanding of Jesus? Obviously, we can’t examine the whole New Testament and, having examined Mark elsewhere, we reflect here on how Luke develops this theme further, assuming much of what Mark has written. Luke’s stated purpose is to carefully convey what the first eye-witnesses said so that we would have confidence in this regard (Luke 1:1-2). And the witness is clear, not only from the lips of others, but Jesus’s own lips.
The Gospel of Luke’s portrait of Jesus as the Servant has several unique contributions. It begins in the infancy narratives. There are various people who speak for God with prophetic voice, making clear that Jesus is the coming Servant. Zechariah looks forward to God’s visitation to “give light to those who sit in darkness,” a clear allusion to the Servant’s mission in Isaiah 61:1-4. Simeon prophetically thanks the Lord for his “salvation… a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” This is certainly an echo of Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6. God is speaking prophetically to prepare the listeners for the restoration that Jesus, the Servant, will bring.
When Jesus is formally beginning his ministry, Luke brings the Servant to the forefront (Luke 4:16-19). Jesus has returned from being tempted and enters the synagogue at Nazareth. There he reads Isaiah 61:1-2, where the Spirit of the Lord is upon the Servant of the Lord in order for him to preach to a variety of people who are living under the heavy effects of sin. The Servant does this in order to bring transformation to their lives (freedom for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, setting the oppressed free). And Jesus says that he fulfills this mission.
When we near the end of Jesus’s life, Luke sees the Servant there too. After Jesus reinterprets the Passover through his own death (Luke 22:14-23) and just before Jesus goes out in the garden to wrestle in prayer with bearing the cup of God’s wrath, he speaks to the disciples of the difficult days to come. He completes his warning with these words: “I say to you: that which is written, it is necessary that it be completed in me, ‘and he was reckoned with the lawless,’ for this has its completion in me” (Luke 22:37, author’s translation). This is a direct quotation of Isaiah 53:12. Luke believes that Jesus understood his own death in which “he bore the sin of many” to be a fulfillment of the Servant’s death (Isa. 53:12).
Moreover, after Christ is raised from the dead and is traveling on the road to Emmaus, he describes how his disciples should have grasped his identity by alluding to Isaiah 53. He was “handed over” and “suffered” like the Anointed Servant, with each key Greek verb drawn from the Isaiah text. Jesus was also resurrected (Luke 24:7) and received glory (Luke 24:26), like the Servant (Isa. 52:13, 53:10). And this was all according to the Scriptures (Luke 24:26, 44). Jesus’s own post-resurrection commentary on his identity is profoundly shaped by the Servant of the Lord. Indeed, when Jesus opened their eyes so that they could recognize him (Luke 24:31), he fulfilled the very reason why the Servant came: “to open the eyes that are blind” (Isa. 42:7).
The Servant of the Lord in the Bible and the Church
Even this short sampling should make it sufficiently clear that, when the apostles were considering ways that they should think about Jesus, the Servant of the Lord was important. The apostles did not come up with this by themselves—Jesus clearly taught it. For the apostles and Jesus, to misunderstand the Servant of the Lord would be to misunderstand significant aspects of Jesus’s identity.
Indeed, to repurpose a C.S. Lewis illustration, Jesus’s Servant-identity is not just a ray of light we can use to look around the tool-shed of the New Testament, using the light of revelation that it provides. Instead, we must turn and look directly into the light of the Servant of the Lord and so see all things by him. In other words, the New Testament does not just proclaim to us that the Servant of the Lord has come, but rather, the coming of the Servant of the Lord has fundamentally shaped certain contours of the New Testament. It should cause us to open the New Testament and expect to see the Servant of the Lord.
On a basic level, this makes it important for us to give time to reflecting on key passages regarding the Servant of the Lord. Without reflecting on the Servant of the Lord, it will be like studying European history without reference to the Roman Empire: we are likely to misunderstand a good deal of what goes on and mistake major plot lines for minor ones.
And reflecting is the right word. If “all Scripture is God-breathed” and some foundational pieces of Jesus’s identity are from the Servant of the Lord, we should have some of our most worshipful and transformative encounters with the living Lord in these passages (2 Tim. 3:16).
These texts are not an obstacle to be tackled before we can get back to the joy of Jesus in the New Testament, but rather they are like the embrace of a spouse when our hearts are breaking—nothing else will substitute for this particular encounter. Indeed, the fact that the New Testament writers were so often and so deeply shaped by the Servant shows that this is so.
And we need to lead others into this as well. We need more teaching on the Servant of the Lord: more camp devotionals on his humility, more missions sermons on his salvation of the nations, more family bible times focused on his exaltation, more worship songs focused on his atoning death.
My grandmother was a vibrant, Bible-loving believer. I can remember her, near the end of her long life, saying in mid-conversation that “he was pierced for our transgressions,” assuming that everyone would know what she was talking about. This was not an academic reference, but rather an integrated part of her spirituality. Christ being crushed for her was a real comfort in her relationship with the Father. I think this was a profound mark of health in her life: cross-centered, reflective, and deeply acquainted with God’s Anointed Servant. This Old Testament familiarity was more of Christ, not less, and a summons for me to do likewise.
1 See Isa. 42:1, 6; 61:1-9.
2 See Isa. 42:2; 49:4; 50:4; 52:13; 53:10.
3 See Isa. 42:2-3; 61:1-2 and Isa. 50:10-11; 61:2 respectively.
4 See Isa. 49:2; 50:4.
5 See Isa. 42:7, 49:5, 8; 61:3, 6.
6 See Isa. 42:6; 49:6; 52:15; 53:12; 61:9.
7 See Isa. 49:5, 7; 50:6; 53:4-6, 12, 15.
8 See Isa. 50:7-9; 49:4, 7; 52:13; 53:10-11.
9 See Isa. 42:8; 49:3.
