On July 18, 1969, as the world waited for Apollo 11 to land on the moon, presidential speechwriter William Safire had an unpleasant task. He had to write a contingency speech for Richard Nixon to read in the event the astronauts became stranded on the moon. It began, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” Can you imagine anyone being willing to go on a mission so dangerous that they write your obituary before you leave?
But it happened 2700 years earlier when Isaiah wrote the obituary of Jesus of Nazareth. “Who has believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:1-3).
You have to think that a prophecy so important to Jewish hope and expectation would have been read frequently in the temple and the synagogues, so how many times did Jesus hear it read? The theme of Isaiah 53 often seems to be on His mind, though He doesn’t directly quote it in the gospels. In Matthew 9:15, He tells His disciples that He would be taken away from them and Isaiah 53:8 says, “He was taken and cut off.” In Matthew 17:12, the disciples bring up Elijah and Jesus connects him to His own suffering. Repeatedly in the gospels, when Jesus connects His coming suffering and death, He is appealing to an aspect of Messianic Prophecy highlighted by Isaiah that was unmistakeable if unpopular.
Isaiah describes His suffering, but the crux of His story is salvation. But just as that word crux means “cross,” it’s difficult to separate the victory from the viciousness. Yet, because Jesus was willing to accept His deadly mission, we can have eternal life!
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