The Servant Makes Us Whole

So he does all these reintegration practices in his miracles. They're not just PR events or like magic tricks. All of them are about making people whole—recovery of sight to the blind, restoring life to Jairus' daughter, raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding the 5,000, feeding the 4,000. All of these were messianic signs. That's what John calls them. They're meant to show off: this is what God is doing in this savior, in this suffering servant Jesus. He is here to bring reintegration.

This is what he's all about. And Jesus would put things right provisionally in his first coming, but the great hope of all of scripture is that he's coming again to put everything right permanently. This is what's pictured for us. Jesus is saying, reintegration. This is what I'm all about. Making people whole, making you whole, making my people whole.

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We're today again in the book of Isaiah and walking through these passages toward the end of Isaiah. We're going to read together from Isaiah chapter 61. If you would join your voices along with mine, this is on page 646 in the pew bible or up on the screen. And it's our custom to read God's word aloud together.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God. To comfort all who mourn, to grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins. They shall raise up the former devastations. They shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. Aliens shall stand and feed your flocks. Foreigners shall be your plowmen and vine dressers, but you shall be called the priests of the Lord. Men shall speak of you as the ministers of our God. You shall eat the wealth of the nations, and in their riches, you shall glory. Instead of your shame, you shall have a double portion. Instead of dishonor, you shall rejoice in your lot. Therefore, in your land, you shall possess a double portion. Yours shall be everlasting joy. For I, the Lord, love justice. I hate robbery and wrong. I will faithfully give them their recompense. I will make with them an everlasting covenant. Their descendants shall be known among the nations and their offspring in the midst of the peoples. All who see them shall acknowledge them that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall exalt in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with a robe of righteousness. As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. — Isaiah 61

The Problem of Division

I know a lot of y'all have been watching Severance on Apple TV. It's been sort of the show I've heard a lot of people talking about. Don't worry, no spoilers. I'm not going to spoil anything, but in case you're not aware of the show, it's a science fiction thriller. The premise of the show is that there is this company, Lumen, and it employs all these people who have had a particular medical procedure done where there's been a microchip inserted in their brain. It causes them to have a sort of split in their personality where they go to work and their work self has its life at work. Then their home self goes home and doesn't remember anything from the day and has the home life. So there's an innie, as it's called—not a belly button innie, but like one who's inside the company—that's one half of the personality. And the Audi is the one that's at home and they don't remember or know anything about one another.

That's all I'm going to say about the show except to say this: there's something about that internal division that we're going to look at this morning that speaks very much to what's happening in this passage in Isaiah chapter 61.

Now we're in March and April. If you're just joining us, we're walking through these passages at the end of Isaiah, and I call them greatest hits because the early church opened up the Isaiah scroll and immediately after the resurrection of Jesus, we're like, Jesus is all over these passages. There are four sections in here about a suffering servant and we're walking through these as we go to Easter. We're walking the steps of the early church who read in these words the ministry of Jesus. And I'm calling these greatest hits because for a lot of people these are the passages in your Bible that you underlined a long time ago. You look at people's Bibles all over the place. These sections are among some of the most heartwarming, encouraging, clearly about Jesus' gospel-filled, hope-filled passages of the Bible.

Every time I've preached through this, I'm using the same outline which goes like this: What does sin do to us? What does the servant do for us? And what does this matter to me? That's my outline for this morning.

A couple weeks ago we looked at Isaiah 40. We talked about how sin alienates us, the servant comforts us and welcomes us. Last week we talked about Isaiah 55, how sin has this way of poisoning us, the servant invites us to this feast of grace. And today we're going to look at Isaiah 61 and I want to think about this with you: How does sin disintegrate us?

Let's think about that word. When we think of disintegrate, a lot of times we use that for something like a cookie in milk—it dissolves, it falls apart. But I think this is where the TV show Severance is really helpful because sin does something much more than cause something to crumble. It causes division. If you think about the word disintegrate, the word integrate means whole, connected. It means everything as the way it should be. Disintegration is like the severance procedure. Something's wrong. It's split. It's not whole. It doesn't have any unity. It's not 100%.

And what does this have to do with us? Well, sin disintegrates. It does something to us and our world to make it not whole, split in us. This is what this passage speaks to about the suffering servant who's going to come and reintegrate and make things whole.

Jesus Reads Isaiah 61

You know, if you recognize some of these words that we read out loud today, you might recognize them from Luke chapter four. They're the text of Jesus' very first ever sermon in the synagogue. He stands up and says they handed him the Isaiah scroll and he unrolls it and finds the place here in Isaiah chapter 61. And he says this:

He stood up to read and there was given the book of Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it is written: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." And then it says, he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant. He looks around and sits down and the eyes of everybody are upon him. And this is what he says: "Today, today these words are fulfilled in your hearing." — Luke 4

What Jesus is saying is: this is what I am all about. I am all about healing the disintegration of the world.

I want you to think about the categories of disintegration that are listed in this passage. Ways that people are not whole. Some of them are physical, some of them are emotional, some of them are psychological, some of them are spiritual. Things like this: the poor, the blind, the brokenhearted, the captives, those who mourn—they put ashes on themselves. They're all the ways that people experience disintegration, non-wholeness. All of us can say, okay, I know what it's like to be in at least one of these. And some of these are societal. Did you hear some of these? The cities are in ruins. The walls are destroyed. Everything is broken.

The Historical Context of Isaiah

Now, I want you to understand Isaiah was not writing that as a metaphor. Isaiah prophesied in a time seven hundred years before the coming of Jesus. He had words for the Northern Kingdom and for the Southern Kingdom. He was a part of the Northern Kingdom. After the reign of Solomon, around the year 900, the nation of Israel had this sort of bloodless civil war where it divided into 10 tribes in the North that were henceforth called Israel, and two in the South called Judah. Isaiah was from the North and he prophesied, "Hey, you have abandoned your God, Northern Kingdom. And because of that, the Assyrians are going to come in and wipe you out."

So the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah—it's super discouraging. It's like woe and warning. God is about to allow this nation to come and wipe you out. Then he has words for the Southern Kingdom. So that happened around 722 BC. They were wiped out.

The Southern Kingdom, Judah, made up of two tribes lasted for another one hundred and fifty years and they were capped, first sieged and then taken in captivity by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. This is what we read about in lots of parts of our Bible that have words about the Babylonian exile. But Isaiah writes words to them of comfort. So they go into this exile. It's like house arrest for half the nation in Babylon, modern Iraq. And it's filled with all these words of hope—all these words that God is going to come, that he's going to send this sufferer to make everything right.

Look, these people, this was not a metaphor. They knew disintegration. They knew what it was like for our nation to be reduced to rubble, our temple gone, everything we are that's familiar to us is gone. They were very in touch with this disintegration of this world. And to express this feeling they did something really unique. They would go to the fireplace and they'd scoop up ashes and dump them on their head. It's a fascinating picture of an outward expression of feeling the disintegration of the world, feeling the sorrow, feeling the sadness.

So we just had Ash Wednesday. We celebrate this in our church. We had an Ash Wednesday service. This is where this comes from. We have a service of lament and repentance. We put a little cross on your head as a symbol of ashes, right? It's ash, but this is tiny compared to what they did. Scoops of ash dumped all over you. It was a picture of: I'm despondent, I'm in mourning, I'm hopeless. It was a way of expressing outwardly what you felt on the inside.

We could really actually use something like this. We're not a culture that knows how to express sadness very well, to be sad, or to be with other people who are sad. But it was like an outward ugliness that you put on you that everybody would see, and they would know how to relate to you. There are all these people who did this in the Bible. You read Job, you read David, you read Jeremiah, and so many others who did this practice. It's not a bad idea. We find it hard to be sad. It's hard for us to relate to other people who are sad. It's hard for us to know how to be sad with other people. But this practice gave people a really visible picture of what you're going through right now.

Can you imagine if people did this at our church? Someone showed up on a Sunday and somebody's covered in gray ash. It would change how we relate to one another. It would probably make us more empathetic. Like, oh, you're feeling the disintegration of this world.

Why Ashes?

Ashes are the residue of a disintegration process. If you think about taking a piece of wood and throwing it in the fireplace, it's whole. What happens over time is it disintegrates, it becomes broken down. You take a piece of paper, you put it in the fire, it disintegrates. You take marshmallows and you're trying to get them all nice and brown, right? You're holding them just close enough that you don't want them to turn into black soot. You don't want them to just catch on fire. The brown ones are good. The black ones not so much because it's disintegrated.

And you know, Tim Keller puts it this way. He says, we could almost say the wages of sin is ash. That's what life is like in this world at times. We're in touch with the ash of this world.

The Servant's Work

So this is a great picture for us of what the servant comes to do. The servant steps into a world of disintegration to bring reintegration, to bring wholeness. This passage again is about this coming of this suffering servant figure, and he brings all these words:

Good tidings to the afflicted, recovery of sight to the blind, binding up the brokenhearted, liberty to the captives, open the prisons.

A garland—this is what they use in the Olympic ceremony. A garland placed on someone instead of ash. Anointing with the oil of gladness. This is like a symbol of: I have so much abundance, I can just pour it out. That poured on me, a sign of blessing and abundance.

Repairing the broken cities, repairing the broken walls. And then the Jubilee—declaring the year of the Lord's favor. This requires a little explanation.

Jubilee is a mechanism given in the book of Leviticus to God's people. Now, you're probably familiar with Sabbath. One day in seven was to be a day of rest and worship, given to the Lord. God's people were supposed to stop doing what they were doing, stop planting, sowing, reaping, taking care of animals, all those things, and rest and worship. That was practiced regularly in Israel.

One year in seven in Israel was supposed to be a Sabbath year where you would let the land rest. And some of you who are in crop science at NC State, you know you could give us lots of reasons why resting the land is good for further production. But for a year, you don't plant anything.

Well, seven sevens—there was supposed to be after forty-nine years, another year that was set apart as a year of rest. So that every seven sevens, people who are in economic debt are also meant to be liberated from that. If you got in behind with payments on things, you could in Israel make yourself a hired servant to another person, to another family, and sort of pay off your debts. But every seven years, those debts were to be completely forgiven. Every fiftieth year, the jubilee year, not only were the debts forgiven, not only were you not supposed to work, but if you had lost your family land sometime in the forty-nine years before this, all of that was to be restored to you.

This was a mechanism to prevent poverty, to keep families together, to allow thriving of God's people. And there's no record that God's people actually ever practiced the year of Jubilee, but that's what's described here. And Jesus is standing up in the synagogue and saying, "Today, this is what I'm proclaiming. I am proclaiming Jubilee."

And if you look at Jesus' earthly ministry, over and over, this is all of what his earthly ministry was about. All of it was Jesus proclaiming and bringing the Jubilee year to God's people. So he does all these reintegration practices in his miracles. They're not just PR events or magic tricks. All of them are about making people whole. Recovery of sight to the blind. Restoring life to Jairus' daughter. Raising Lazarus from the dead. Feeding the 5,000. Feeding the 4,000. All of these were messianic signs—that's what John calls them. They're meant to show off: this is what God is doing in this savior, in this suffering servant Jesus. He is here to bring reintegration. This is what he's all about.

And Jesus would put things right provisionally in his first coming, but the great hope of all of Scripture is that he's coming again to put everything right permanently. This is what's pictured for us. It's like Jesus is saying, "Reintegration. This is what I'm all about. Making people whole, making you whole, making my people whole."

How the Servant Brings Reintegration

How did our servant Jesus bring reintegration? Well, it's fascinating the way this passage is written. Listen to verse seven:

Instead of shame, you'll have a double portion. Instead of dishonor, you will rejoice in your life. Therefore, your land shall possess a double portion. Yours shall be everlasting joy.

Over and over, there's a picture of this exchange in this passage. "Instead of this, this"—a swap. "Instead of ashes, a garland. Instead of mourning, oil poured on your head." Or remember what he's been saying over and over in this book of Isaiah—double payment. This is what Jesus says: "I'm gonna give you what I've got and I'm gonna take what you have."

And what did he get? A couple weeks from now on Palm Sunday, we're gonna read the passage we actually read as part of our assurance of pardon from Isaiah 53. And Isaiah writes about the physical ugliness of Jesus. He says:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him.

Why? Again, this is substitution. This is what Jesus does for us. In this life we're in touch with the disintegration of this world. It's like all of us taking ashes and putting them on our head. Do you know a sense of disintegration of this life? Are you feeling that? Any of you this morning? Of like, "This is not right." This is what's pictured for us.

Why was Jesus ugly? Because he took our ugliness. He takes on himself the ugliness that we experience all the time. This is why he had no majesty, why we're not drawn to him. He takes our ugliness. He gives us his beauty. He takes our despair. We get his joy.

So the cross—he's ugly. It's like people turn their face away in Isaiah 53. They don't want to look. No beauty that we should desire him. In exchange, what does he give us? Listen to the words at the end of this passage. These are incredible words:

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord. My soul shall exalt in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation. He has covered me with the robe of righteousness as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, as a bride adorns herself with jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots and a garden causes what's sown in it to spring up, so the Lord would cause righteousness and praise to spring forth among all the nations.

This is the boast of the child of God. This is the boast of every person who's in Christ. You have been clothed with the beauty and majesty of Christ. You should never walk in this room with your head low. Your head should always be up. You are clothed. He has taken your ugliness and given you his beauty.

I heard a story, and this is not from Raleigh, so just in case you're worried I'm talking about somebody that you're like, "I think I know who this is"—you don't. It's a pastor in a different town.

Told me the story about a woman who comes to him years into her marriage and she's like, "My marriage isn't okay and my husband doesn't know it." And he's like, "Okay, explain to me what's going on."

And she said, "Well, I need to tell you a story. When we were engaged, I was unfaithful to him. I cheated on him with another man. I've never told him."

And he said, "Well, you have to tell him."

And she said, "I don't want to tell him. I'm not telling him that."

He said, "You have to tell him."

So, don't know what God's going to do with this. You have to tell him. And so she sat with that. She was not ready.