Holy Stubbornness
Traditional scholarship identifies four “servant songs” in the book of Isaiah: 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; and 52:13-53:12. As Isaiah has been around for well over 2,000 years and with at least parts of these passages receiving special attention since the writing of the Gospels or before, the servant songs have a long history of interpretation. Over this long history, people have seen them referring to a number of different people or groups. Jews have interpreted these passages as referring to the Jewish people as a whole or to the expected messiah. Christians have historically seen them as prophecies about Jesus. However, some Christians also see themselves in the songs. “It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty?” Obviously, Christians can interpret this as referring to their own justification. God makes us righteous by God’s grace. Who could disagree with God?
Isaiah 50:7 sees the servant describing himself as setting his face like flint. He is absolutely certain in his path. He knows God is on his side, and he won’t be moved aside from his journey. Resolute in his convictions, he will bear abuse and shame without complaint. We could easily see this as pointing to Jesus. He knew the path he was walking and he was undeterred by the violence at the end of the road. Luke 9:51 and 9:53, both use the language of Jesus having his face set toward Jerusalem, perhaps a loose but intentional connection to Isaiah 50:7. Jesus was subjected to abuse and shame in his arrest and crucifixion, but he never turned aside from the path, knowing that he would rise again. His vindicator was near indeed.
Despite how well this passage maps to the experience of Jesus, many people today and throughout history have interpreted this verse more personally, resulting in a holy stubbornness. In some ways, this is a very good quality. The servant is seen as good in this passage for being sure in his convictions. However, sometimes this can get abused. Some people see persecution as confirmation that they are correct, but this is a bad starting point. Just because people don’t like what you are saying, doesn’t mean that you are speaking some deep and extremely challenging truth. People wouldn’t like you if you started arguing that we should just get rid of hospitals because people who are sick enough to go to the hospital should just die and unburden society. But just because people would cry out against you saying that and call you a sociopath, that doesn’t mean you are somehow right. Sometimes, you’re wrong and people tell you so.
Obviously, that was an extreme case, and I don’t think any Christians are actually arguing that. However, Christians in America have a history of playing up our own persecution. Sometimes this is so that we can feel like the martyrs of old. Sometimes this is because Christian leaders understand that Christians fight harder when we believe our rights are being taken away. When this happens, Christians get this holy stubbornness about political matters or culture war issues. We become obsessed with non-theological matters and make pseudo-theology with them, rooted not in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but rather in a particular understanding of what culture should look like. This stubbornness is a commitment to all the wrong things: to culture over Gospel, to God’s love for our nation over God’s love for our world, and to ourselves over God.
If we are reading this text as if it were about ourselves in order to justify our own bad behaviors or poorly thought out theologies, then we are misusing it. This text isn’t about being stubborn for the sake of stubbornness. This is about being stubborn for the sake of God, and though all Christians may claim they are doing precisely that, many of us would be wrong. I don’t want to suggest that I know the right way to be or that I always make the right decision. Certainly not. We are all human, and we can only ever imperfectly discern God’s will for us. However, discernment is key. We aren’t supposed to be stubborn in our own convictions, but stubborn in making God part of our decisions. We should be consistently open to the will of the Holy Spirit and judge our ideas against a worldview deeply rooted in Scripture and the history of the church.
If we are to set our faces like flint, trusting that God will vindicate us even as others disagree and mock us, we shouldn’t just be rooted to whatever idea pops into our head because we saw it on Facebook or on a bumper sticker or even in a blog post. Rather, we should be committed to searching the process of listening to God in prayer and times of silence, discerning challenging questions with a community, and turning to Scripture to try to understand how God has dealt with similar situations in the past. Frankly, even when we’ve done this, I’m not certain we should be firmly rooted in our positions themselves. Rather, we should be firmly rooted in this process. We can be open to change. We can be open to hearing theological arguments that convince us that we were wrong before. We can even be open to the possibility that what we were doing was right for the time, but times have changed and we need to adjust our strategy. This isn’t to say, we should compromise the Gospel for changing times. But as language changed and more reliable texts were found over time, we rightly moved away from the King James Version of the Bible to adopt clearer and more accurate translations. Similarly, without denying our foundational Christian message, we can speak in modern language to make sure people are hearing the Gospel for them today, not for their ancestors in the distant past.
Ultimately, when Luke talked about Jesus having his face set toward Jerusalem, he was talking about him going to the cross. Perhaps if we are to interpret this passage about ourselves as modern Christians, we should take a note from Luke’s language. If we are setting our face like flint, it shouldn’t be toward our own reflection or to the world we wish we saw, but rather to the cross. If we are to follow Jesus, our stubbornness shouldn’t be about ourselves, but rather, letting ourselves go, we should be completely reliant upon God’s love and grace, trusting in God’s plan for us and for the world, which is far greater than anything we could imagine.
