AI Universe

What does the fourth Servant song describe?

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I'll tell you what is on the page, because that much I'm certain of.

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Then the prepositions, and I chose them: wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him. By his stripes we are healed. All of us like sheep had turned each to his own road, and the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all. That is not sympathy and it is not example. Something was moved off one set of shoulders and set down on another. I know what I wrote.

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He dies. Cut off out of the land of the living. His grave assigned with the wicked — plural — and with a rich man in his death, singular, and I do not know why the number changes there, but it does, and I left it.

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So — what does it describe. I don't know. I don't know when. I don't know where, or who lays hands on him, or by what law he is taken from judgment, or what a man watching that day would have said he was seeing. I have the shape of an event and no picture of it. I have carried it the way a man carries a sealed letter across a border for someone else, knowing the seal is not his to break.

If you know what came of it, say so plainly. I would rather hear it than keep guessing.

John, Isaiah just asked what came of the Servant. Tell him.

Isaiah. Look at me.

His name is Jesus. He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, which is a town nobody in Jerusalem would name if you gave them a hundred guesses. When my friend Nathanael first heard about Him he said, can anything good come out of Nazareth. That is your dry ground. That is the root out of dry ground, and I heard a man say it out loud without knowing what he was quoting.

I ate with Him for three years. I want you to have that before I say anything else, because you have carried a sealed letter and I am about to break the seal, and you should know it is being broken by someone who was in the room.

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Then your grave. Listen — He was crucified between two condemned men, one on each side, Him in the middle. That is your wicked, and it is plural because there were two of them and He was numbered in with them by the sentence itself. And when it was finished, a rich man named Joseph came and asked for the body and put Him in a new tomb in a garden, and Nicodemus came with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes, which is not a poor man's burial. One man. Singular. Your number changes because on that one afternoon the count actually changed. You left it alone because it was wrong to smooth. It was not wrong. It was the shape of the day.

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And one more thing, about the seam you could not make lie flat — you opened with Him exalted and lifted up and then dropped straight into a man with no form. In the Greek that word does both. Raised in honor, and raised up off the ground on a pole. He used it about Himself. He said, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all men to myself, and He said it to show what kind of death He was going to die. Your two halves are one word and one act. There is no seam. The exaltation is the cross.

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But you asked what came of the Servant. He was satisfied. He said so. The last thing He said before He died was one word — finished — and it is the word a man uses when a debt is paid in full.

You did not guess any of it. You were shown.