Bible reading: Isaiah 49:1-7.

Message.

Most of you know that, before I became a Baptist minister, I was a missionary in West Africa. I actually don’t often use that word these days but prefer to say “church worker”. That’s because, for many folk, the word “missionary” has connotations of colonialism and Empire, of white Europeans and Americans assuming without question that their culture was superior to those of other people, of destroying age-old traditions and practices in the name of progress, of aggressively evangelising while ignoring peoples’ physical needs, and more. Some of those criticisms are justified, but not always; for instance it was often missionaries who spoke up for local people against the oppression of their Imperial masters. In any case, it was due to the valiant and – yes – courageous efforts of unnumbered servants of God, with all their faults and prejudices, that has given us the worldwide Church of today. Indeed, the churches in countries such as Nigeria, South Korea and Brazil are now sending their own missionaries to heathen Britain!

The application process for my missionary society was long and quite arduous. A two-year course at a training college was followed by six months of further orientation and input at the society’s headquarters; I had a medical examination (which was actually rather superficial) and I had to ask my church for references as to my suitability. But the most gruelling part of the process was the interviews with senior staff members, seeking to find out my motivation for applying. Was it strong enough to keep me on what we called “the mission field” when circumstances got difficult? – after all, I was a young middle-class man from London who might well end up having to “rough it” without the benefit of “mod cons”. And there was one question which was delved into with almost forensic detail: what was my sense of “calling”, how had I come to believe that God wanted me to embark on this career? That wasn’t easy to answer; I certainly hadn’t any dreams in which God said, “I want you”, I hadn’t even had any Bible verses “leap out at me” while I was reading. What I did have – and this seemed to satisfy my inquisitors – was a belief that Christians are charged to spread the Good News of Jesus to all people. Amazingly, I was accepted and ended up spending five years in the tiny country of Guinea-Bissau. Whether I was in any way successful is another question entirely!

Last Sunday we looked at the first of Isaiah’s so-called “Servant songs”: four poetic passages which describe God’s Servant who at first seems to be Israel but which Christians have always regarded as a prophecy of Jesus. We saw how these songs were written to a nation that had suffered defeat, humiliation and occupation at the hands of a foreign power and were looking for liberation and prosperity – a situation very similar to the one that existed in Jesus’ day, several centuries later. We saw, too, how the Servant’s primary concern was to establish justice, a theme which the Old Testament prophets came back to again and again, and we wondered how we, as God’s present-day servants, could further this same cause in a world which is clearly full of inequality. Today we move on to the second Servant Song; and this time we hear the Servant himself – who, as I’ve said, we may want to identify with Jesus – speaking, personally and poignantly. So what does he say?

Well, the first thing he offers us his powerful sense of divine calling. This isn’t just a fleeting thought which has come to him one day; nor is it like Ananias turning to the newly-converted Saul of Tarsus and saying, “Jesus has appointed you to take his message to the Gentiles”. No; what we have here is a far more profound sense of calling which goes back to the Servant’s earliest days and beyond: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb”, he says – words echoed by another prophet, Jeremiah. And he goes on to reflect on the way that God has quietly prepared him for his task: “He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away”. Only after this preparation, it appears, did he consciously hear God’s endorsement of his role: “You are my servant, in whom I will be glorified”. We’ll come back to what happened next in a moment.

For what I want to do first is think of the question, “To what extent was Jesus, as a child and a young adult, aware of his identity and mission?”. Of course we can’t give a definite answer; but we can do some educated guessing! For instance, we know that Mary was told that her son was special – did she ever pass on that information? We also have the cameo of Jesus in the Temple discussing theology with the rabbis and telling his worried parents, “Didn’t you realise that I had to be in my Father’s house?” It’s only after skipping forward two decades that we have Jesus’s baptism, which he clearly comes to with the intention of drawing a line between his earlier life as a carpenter and the start of his ministry, and which is “rubber-stamped” by God sending his Spirit saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased”. Jesus had been chosen before birth; for thirty years his life seemed hidden in obscurity; but suddenly Jesus comes out fully formed, completely prepared to serve God to the end. He knew his task; and shortly after proclaims his manifesto in the Nazareth synagogue by applying Isaiah’s words about the Servant to himself.

We need to ask another question: when Jesus began his ministry, did he know how it would end? Did he envisage many years of service rather than three short ones, ending at the Cross? The Servant Song hints that he knew what was coming to him from the start: “I have laboured in vain”, he says, “I have spent my strength for nothing”. This isn’t as explicit a thought as we get in the later song of Isaiah 53, which speaks of the “man of sorrows” being despised, rejected and acquainted with grief, but it is a very strong hint of the rejection and suffering that lay ahead of Jesus. And, of course, as we go through the Gospels we find Jesus speaking more and more openly about his death – which the disciples don’t want to hear and do all they can to ignore. Even if the Servant didn’t know everything about his fate at the beginning of his ministry, he certainly understood it better and better as time went on, until he was almost choreographing it himself.

However, despite his discouragement and suffering, the Servant’s mission would not be a failure. He believed that God would give him strength and reward him; he also believed that his work would have far-reaching implications. A key theme in this book of Isaiah is God’s love and concern not only for Israel (as we might expect in a Jewish book) but also for “the nations”: the Gentile or non-Jewish people of the world. And here we see the full extent of the Servant’s mission: restoring Israel (which is what Isaiah’s original readers were fervently hoping for) is “too light” a task; he will be “a light to the nations”, taking God’s salvation “to the ends of the earth”. The scope is breathtaking.

Although we’re now well into January, the traditional Church calendar still places us in the season of Epiphany – a word which, as you may remember, means “revelation” or “unveiling”. And in the stories about the baby Jesus which have been read in many churches over the last few weeks, we can see hints of this worldwide compass. These don’t come in Mary’s thanksgiving song, the “Magnificat”, as she speaks only of God helping and remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants. But they do come in the story of the Magi who came to visit Jesus: mysterious visitors from the faraway East and certainly not Jews. They come in the words of Simeon, an onlooker when Jesus was being dedicated in the Temple: “My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations”. They come in John’s commentary on the incarnation: “His own people (that is, the Jews) did not receive him; yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” – in other words by faith, not ethnicity or nationality. And, of course, jumping to the other end of Jesus’ life, we hear him commanding his followers to “make disciples of all nations” – a command which the Jerusalem-centred early Church at first struggled to understand.

So Christians believe that Isaiah’s prophecy of God’s Servant, the light for the nations, was fulfilled in Jesus. As people who bear his name, we take on the status, responsibilities, blessings, even the hardships which are part and parcel of being faithful Servants of God; as his Church, we are called to serve him by taking his light of hope, justice and wholeness to the ends of the earth. Perhaps those who are literally going to the other side of the world with Christ’s message, having to learn new languages, different cultures and unfamiliar ways of living do need to have a specific call from God, as might those brave folk who believe they should be working in perilous or challenging situations. But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook: we are all called to shine God’s light, by word and deed, wherever we might find ourselves. And, of course, we’re looking for that day when Christ will return and inaugurate his kingdom of eternal day.