Commentary on Isaiah 52:13—53:12

Setting the stage for this lectionary reading is the prophetic command, “Depart, depart, go out from there!” (Isaiah 52:11). For Second Isaiah, “there” carries a clear point of reference: exile, the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Sadly, the place of empire and forced migration is a recurring place for Israel—first, their migration (lāgûr šām, verse 4) to Egypt, the place of their enslavement; second, their subjugation (“oppressed them without cause,” verse 4) under the Neo-Assyrian Empire; and lastly, the prophet’s “now” moment (verse 5), extending this traumatic history into Israel’s present life under yet another unjust empire.

Before turning to the assigned text, the preacher would do well to attend to the prophet’s “now” moment in the preceding verse. The “there” is not an isolated time or place but part of a recurring cycle of imperial violence enacted “without cause” against vulnerable people. Indeed, this is the world surrounding the assigned lectionary reading—a world marked by displacement and captivity (verse 5). It is this trauma-inducing world, born of imperial violence, that the prophet commands Israel to leave: “Go out from the midst of it” (52:11).

A new exodus in view

With a new exodus liberation in view (52:11–12), the preacher enters the world of Isaiah 52:13–53:12. Although the servant/slave (ʿeved) stands at the center of the text, the violent atmosphere that surrounds him warrants interpretive pause. 

In verse 14, a group of bystanders looks on, “astonished” at the servant’s disfigured appearance. Their presence gives this encounter a public dimension. It is the public’s shock that gives visibility to this mangled male slave. Rather than appearing fully human, he is seen by the public only as “beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals” (verse 14). For this public, it is the only way a slave draws attention—when he is tortured, disfigured, and dehumanized. Without a gory spectacle, he is as the prophet describes in 53:2: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition).

Seeing and not seeing

In considering the preacher’s public, are there similarities between the witnessing public in the text and that of today’s society? What does it reveal about a society when people of low status are brought into public view only as nonhuman? Or even more troubling, what does it mean to be seen only as disgust—to exist solely within the public’s feelings of revulsion and shock? In such a context, empathy is misplaced. It is directed not toward the wounded, low-class person who suffers violence but toward the public’s own discomfort at being confronted by that suffering.

The text’s context of exile and empire invites a connection to the ways contemporary migrants and exiles are made visible only when detained or deported. Their humanity is reduced to criminality, erasing the full reality of their lives—their labor to harvest food, care for the sick, build homes, clean spaces, and sustain society’s everyday rhythms. In the public imagination, they are seen only when “led to the slaughter” (53:7)—when their suffering becomes a social nuisance. Their pain is overshadowed by the public’s outrage at the spectacle of their removal (verse 8).

An indictment of all publics

In this lectionary reading, the public within the text indicts all publics that see people of low social and economic status—the servant, the slave—as less than fully human. The “we” in the text points to a collective way of being that benefits from their servitude, yet is incapable of seeing their suffering (verse 3), their oppression, and their affliction (verse 7). What registers emotionally for this “we” is disgust (verse 3), not the “perversion of justice” that incarcerates, displaces, and annihilates the poor servant (verse 8).

Public desire (verse 2) is misplaced when people of low social status are afforded little worth (verse 3). Their social apathy is rooted in the binary logic that sustains empire-building—a world divided into “we” and the servant “other,” the valued and the disposable, the powerful and the powerless. As the text reads, this is a world in which the “we” enjoys health (verse 4), freedom, wholeness, and healing (verse 5) at the expense of the servant’s dehumanization.

Leaving the empire’s mindset

The “we” in the text is a public that sees as empire sees—viewing its servants, slaves, and people of low status as mere objects to be exploited and then discarded. In many ways, it is this collective failure to see the servant “other” as fully human that prompts the prophet’s command to “go out from there” (52:11). 

Extending the “there” into the assigned lectionary reading, the place of empire also contains a public “we” that sustains its own life by extracting it from vulnerable people. By devaluing the servant “other” (53:3), this public “we” creates the conditions that make collective violence against him possible. Their rejection of him as a human being renders their public witness to this violence void of empathy. Fixed on their own well-being, they lack the capacity to feel the pain and suffering of those of low status.

Such an environment points to the place of empire itself—a collective mindset that converts public witness into self-comfort and, in doing so, perverts justice. Whether in the text or in contemporary society, the poor, the migrant, and the servant “other” suffer public displacement, deportation, and erasure. Leaving such a public—one desensitized to the suffering of lowly people—is itself part of the new exodus liberation envisioned in 52:11.