My Righteous Servant by Ella Pomeroy

IN OUR PREVIOUS studies we have seen how the attention of the conscious mind is called to the servant by the command “Behold, my servant”; and we realize that when we obey this command, recognizing ourself as a servant of Jehovah and knowing the Christ within as the Great Servant of all, the next step is inevitable. We are told, “Thou art my servant.” This brings assurance to us, courage to walk the path we have chosen, a deep and abiding conviction of the presence of God and His love in all our affairs. But we also become aware that of ourselves we cannot accomplish the work planned for us or by us: we must lean heavily on Jehovah and understand that “the Lord Jehovah will help.”

Isaiah 52:13. This dependence upon Jehovah brings us into such an alliance with divine wisdom that Jehovah says, according to the fourth of the Servant Poems (Isa. 52:13-53:12), “Behold, my servant shall deal wisely, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.” Such exaltation must have been in the mind of Jesus when He spoke of the Son of man being lifted up and healed. For healing on every level of experience comes when we cast ourselves upon the love and wisdom of Jehovah, ceasing to try to reason matters out for ourselves on the personal level and letting go of worldly wisdom to enter into the divine.

Isaiah 52:14. Then follows the passage that seems so strange to the lovers of the Christ whether they are accustomed to read it as a prophecy of the sufferings of Jesus Christ or, like ourselves, are training their mind to separate the thought of the holy and pure Christ from the thought of suffering of any kind. “Like as many were astonished at thee, (his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men), so shall he sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they understand.”

It is always difficult to express metaphysical ideas because of our lack of words that are free from meanings given them by constant use, free from association with physical facts and experiences. We are however building up new vocabularies, giving new values to common words: we are learning to look beyond the apparent meaning to an inner substance. We know quite well that the Christ remains always whole, utterly pure, and righteous. We know also that the Christ dwells in the heart or center of each of us. Yet we know too that the outside of many of us is not at all suggestive of the Christ: “his visage” is “so marred more than any man.” For when perfect beauty is at all marred by external circumstance, we feel it keenly; but when it is so marred that the beauty is difficult to see at all, we express a lively sense of outrage and protest aloud and vigorously.

Isaiah 52:15. The “form” of the Christ would be harmonious: do we not think of the body of Jesus Christ as well proportioned, well adjusted, supple, and active? Yet the Christ form that we make manifest becomes so marred in our handling of it that few ordinary men and women are even half as lovely as they should be, and many of us manifest traits that are hard to explain. But the servant will “sprinkle many nations.” He will reach out into the entire life: he will give of himself to every detail, every situation. At last we shall find ourselves, like the poet’s “kings,” with our mouths “shut”; for we shall be seeing things that we have not been told and understanding things that we have not seen during the days of our nonrecognition of the Christ power given to us. For the real world opens before our astonished eyes, and appearances cease to have any interest for us. We look past the marred countenance of life to the perfection of the Christ as the light of divine understanding illumines our mind and perfects our vision.

Isaiah 53:1. But, asks the poet, “who hath believed our message? and to whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed?” He does not answer his own question; for each of us must find the answer for himself. Do we grasp the nearness of the Christ? Do we see and utilize the power of the Christ? Are we so engrossed with the marrings of His countenance that we never look beyond them? Or are we so convinced of the love and inner presence of the divine activity that we never feel separated from it?

Isaiah 53:2-3. Then follows another lengthy description of the obscured Christ, usually called “the suffering Christ,” as He appears to the personality mind. The fearful, selfish, and material-minded side of us sees “no form nor comeliness” in the Christ idea. This side of us wants hard, concrete matter in our hands and has no patience with beautiful ideals. “When we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him,” for we see only with the eyes of physical desire; and for us, when we are in this personality mood, the Christ is “despised, and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ... we esteemed him not.” But surely the “sorrows” and the “grief” of the Christ are never personal! If He knows sorrow and grief, these must arise out of His vast compassion for men: never, like ours, out of pity for Himself! Think of the tender heart of the Christ as He watches our headlong plunges into disaster! Think of His grief when He would make Himself known to us in our daily living, and we turn aside and say, “That is not practical.” Think of the astonishment of the One who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows when we exclaim in our own heart: “I lack.” “I am incapable.” “I must go without.”

Isaiah 53:4-6. As we read the next lines we must believe that our poet knew the great truth that is now becoming common property among all men: “Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” It is evident that the author of these lines understood clearly that the Christ was not caught in suffering of His own making, but voluntarily took upon Himself the woes of men in order that He might heal them. For consider our poet’s surprise that men should think the Servant had been “smitten of God.” It was so unthinkable a situation that our writer proceeds at once to state that all the woe we attribute to the Servant was not His own but was accepted by Him for the benefit of others. “All we like sheep have gone astray . . . and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

In the story of Jesus Christ, as we find it in detail in the Gospels, we are greatly impressed with His calm under attack, His serenity under sentence of death. Can we not see that the Christ center of Jesus was never touched by the outer world? Can we not lay hold of the idea that the Christ of us is always calm, steady, serene, and righteous; and that no matter what the surface disturbance may be, the inner depths are always at peace? It is only by realizing such peace that we are able to quiet the seas of life around us; and when we have achieved a knowledge of our power, we are able to “carry” the troubles of the world about us, but we will not absorb them. What we “carry” we raise up, what we absorb becomes part of us. It is the Christ privilege to “carry” and at the same time to be forever free from burdens.

Isaiah 53:7-9. Verses 7, 8, and 9 of this poem further develop the idea of the last-quoted texts, repeating the statement of the first poem that “he will not cry” and asking a strange question: “And as for his generation, who among them considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due?” It seems a strange question, for it apparently has no reference to what has gone before nor to what follows; but it is really a very pertinent question indeed. The spiritual truth is this. The Christ generation, those in the Christ mind, those who have let the mind of Christ Jesus be in them, know well that the Great Servant is never “cut off”: it is only those of another generation, the generation of the concrete minded, that think so mistakenly as to admit the idea that the Christ can be made to cease His activities. The Christ generation knows the eternal service of love and never doubts it for a moment.

Isaiah 53:10-11. “Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him; he hath put him to grief,” says our poet. This is the “great sacrifice” to which the minds of men constantly turn; for to our personal and material way of thought it looks like an unspeakable sacrifice for Spirit to involve itself in matter; and we speak of the redemption of material thought as a “great sacrifice” to us quite incomprehensible. But to the Christ it is a necessity of His being, as we well know when we pause to think of the Christ within each of us constantly knocking at the door of our consciousness for admittance into our daily life. Since Jehovah and Christ are one and the same, we understand that if it “pleased Jehovah to bruise him,” Jehovah became manifest as the Great Servant, deliberately undertaking to show men the path to the kingdom. “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin” and take upon yourself His mind, His ways of thought. His relation to God, His awareness of divine love, then “the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper”; for “by the knowledge of himself shall my righteous servant justify many,” and the seeking soul shall know that it forever belongs to God and cannot be separated from Him.

Isaiah 53:12. The one who would wholly serve the will of God finds that he cheerfully pours “out his soul unto death”—the death of all thoughts and conditions that fall short of the perfect ideal of the kingdom of heaven. Such a one finds that even if he is “numbered with the transgressors” of current conventions, popular fads and customs, he is nevertheless given “a portion with the great” because, as he prays for freedom for men and endeavors to point the path of peace to the world about him, he has truly borne “the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

The servant knows that he is known. He is aware that his service is recognized, because he sees results in his own life and in the lives of others around him. He understands clearly that he has not anything of himself, but that the Great Servant within him has become to him an intimate and beautiful companion, another self. When he feels that his duty has been imperfectly done, when he is uncertain as to what work to undertake next, he turns with entire confidence to the Servant of all men within himself and gratefully receives instruction from Him.

The servant has beheld the Servant within; he has heard the wonderful words “Thou art my servant”; he has realized that “the Lord Jehovah will help”; and he has heard sounding clear and melodious in his soul the words “My righteous servant.”

The conviction of inner rightness, not based on personal convictions or morals but upon a vast principle of rightness that is everywhere operative in the universe, gives us certainty in life; provides us with a rock on which we can depend; and imparts to all our conduct and affairs a quality of stability and soundness that produces a finely rounded and wholly useful life. The Great Servant within is serving both the Creator and His creations; the object of the great sacrifice is attained; and those who are of “his generation” know the Truth and are free!

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