How does Luke use the servant discourse of Isaiah 40-55 & 61 in his gospel?

Introduction

This year, our column will focus on Luke’s Gospel. Our first few columns will consider the Servant prophecies of the book of Isaiah and Luke.

Isaiah’s servant figure is a significant piece in Luke’s Christology. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26-40) confirms that early Christians were interpreting Jesus’ life in light of the song of the ‘suffering servant’ in Isa 52.13-53.12.  Disagreement, however, arises in discussion of whether Luke’s gospel portrays Jesus’ role as predominantly Isaianic, priestly, Davidic, messianic or apocalyptic.[1] Simeon’s song (Luke 2.25-35) and the Nazareth sermon (Luke 4.16-30) have the highest concentrations of Isaianic servant allusions in Luke’s gospel. This essay will focus on these two passages to explore how, and for what purpose, Luke front-grounds the Isaianic aspect of Jesus’ ministry through his use of the servant discourse of Isaiah 40-55, 61.

Since Bernhard Duhm’s demarcation of the servant songs (1892), scholars have contested the boundary lines that structure Isaiah’s servant discourse and distinguish the poems from the rest of the text.[2] Stepping back from the debate, N. T. Wright aptly warns of the anachronistic reading that ‘second-Temple Jews had anticipated modern criticism in separating out the ‘servant songs’ from the rest of Isa 40-55’ and instead recognises that ‘Isaiah 40-55 as a whole was thematic for Jesus’ kingdom announcement.’ [3] This essay agrees with Wright’s wider inclusion of the servant discourse, but will go as far as showing that Isaiah 40-55 and Isaiah 61 is necessary to understand Luke’s use of the servant discourse in his gospel. We include Isaiah 61 in the servant discourse because it strongly echoes and reflects the writing of earlier servant songs, despite not referencing a servant explicitly.

With this category of ‘servant discourse’ in mind, it is possible to demonstrate how Luke appropriates motifs from Isaiah 40-55, 61 to create narrative episodes that are programmatic for Jesus’ ministry and rejection. With regards to an audience-orientated perspective, we are using Menakhem Perry’s scholarship to shed light on the impact of Luke’s narrative ordering. We will also compare Luke and Mark’s use of Isaiah 40 as a key to understanding Luke’s interest in specific Isaianic motifs. From there, close analysis of Simeon’s song and the Nazareth sermon will demonstrate how the Isaiah’s servant discourse influences Luke’s own language.  Observations of literary style such as parallelism, morphology and phonology aim to show how Luke reworks the language of Isaiah’s servant to produce two similarly shaped narratives which, like Isaiah, have ‘servant songs’ at their centre.

Unlike scholars such as Darrell Bock and Paul Schubert who emphasise the Christological or soteriological function of the OT scriptures in Luke’s gospel,[4] we will argue that Luke’s use of Isaiah’s servant discourse is not solely Christological or soteriological but also has a strong narrative function.[5] The function of Isaiah’s servant intertext is not simply to prove Messianic prophecy as fulfilled by Jesus, but is also to allude to familiar ‘frames’ from the Jewish scriptures by which his audience can create ‘structures of expectation’ for his ensuing narrative.[6]

We will begin by dealing with the co-textual issues of narrative ordering, followed by a brief examination of Luke 3.4-6 as a key to understanding Luke’s thematic interests. In future columns, we will turn to literary analysis of ‘Simeon’s Song’ and the ‘Nazareth sermon.’

Narrative structure

Luke structures his gospel in a way that heightens the programmatic qualities of his chosen Isaiah-influenced texts. At the beginning of the gospel, Luke draws his readers’ attention to the significance of narrative order: ‘I too decided […] to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus’ (1.3). Menakhem Perry’s scholarship in literary theory has highlighted the significance of narrative ordering in texts.[7] In his essay, ‘Literary Dynamics’, Perry references research in psychology to show that narrative information at the beginning of a text exercises huge influence on the reading process and on the reader’s creation of meaning.  He calls this phenomenon the ‘primacy effect’.[8] Simeon’s song and the Nazareth sermon, both set at beginning-points of the narrative thus exercise a ‘primacy effect’. The infant narrative at the beginning of Jesus’ life and the Nazareth sermon at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry thus function to anticipate events in the unrolling narrative. This particular arrangement of servant allusions immediately suggests that they are deliberately positioned to increase their programmatic function.

The significance of Luke’s narrative arrangement is heightened when the Nazareth sermon’s location is compared with its position in the other synoptic gospels. If Mark and Matthew are referring to the same incident as Luke (Matt 13.53-58, Mark 6.1-6), then they position the episode much later in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. In contrast, Luke places the episode at the very beginning of the Galilean ministry and includes more detail and plot in the narrative. Such an editorial decision suggests that the episode holds extra significance for the audience’s understanding of the gospel narrative that follows.

The end of Luke’s gospel further confirms the programmatic nature of the servant allusions, particularly the suffering aspect. Whilst they, at the beginning of the gospel, anticipate how the audience should understand Jesus and his ministry, the resurrected Jesus’ conversations with his disciples confirm how readers are to understand his life retrospectively: ‘Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (Luke 24.27; see also Luke 24.25-27, 32, 44-46). Perry supports Luke’s retrospective reading process when he theorises that the reading process is not unidirectional. He writes: ‘What has been constructed up to a certain point sheds light on new components, but is illuminated by them as well.’[9] The servant references are emphasized at the beginning and at the end of Luke’s gospel which are key positions for communicating how the audience should understand the narrative.

Even the confirmation of the servant aspect of Jesus’ life at the end of Luke’s gospel is somewhat programmatic. Jesus’ teaching on how the disciples are to understand his life retrospectively is programmatic for the disciples’ own ministry in the book of Acts. Whilst the events of Luke 24 come at the end of Luke’s gospel narrative, they also are repeated at the beginning of Acts’ narrative (Acts 1.1-11). Jesus’ confirmation of the servant interpretation of his life becomes programmatic for how the disciples will understand and teach about him in their own ministry (Acts 2.23, 3.17-18, 8.35).

As well as the servant references at the beginning and at the end of Luke’s gospel, additional allusions to the servant discourse throughout the gospel suggest the theme is not only foregrounded but front-grounded. Jesus reasserts two features of his Nazareth reading of Isaiah in respect of John the Baptist (Luke 7.22) as confirmation that he is Israel’s Messiah. Isaiah’s servant discourse is further alluded to in Luke 18.32, 23.23 and directly referenced in Luke 22.37. Perry also asserts that ‘the primacy effect never works in isolation. If the text intends the effect of its initial stage to prevail throughout, it must keep reinforcing it.’[10] By carefully ordering events, Luke manipulates the reading process of his narrative, establishing texts influenced by Isaiah’s servant discourse as programmatic of, and reinforced by the rest of the gospel.

Luke 3.4-6

Luke’s use of Isaiah 40, in comparison with Mark’s usage, is a key to identifying specific Isaianic motifs Luke is interested in and appropriates in his programmatic texts. If Luke is using Mark’s gospel as a source for his own, then how Luke repeats or adapts Mark’s material reveals significant editorial intention regarding matters of theme and style. Isaiah 40.3 is particularly significant because not only is it one of the few texts used by all four gospel writers, but it also forms the opening lines of Mark’s gospel. Luke’s use of Isaiah 40 provides a valuable example of Luke’s thematic interest as well as his exegetical method.

Whilst Mark quotes just Isa 40.3, Luke under inspiration extends and changes the quotation to include:

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; and all flesh (πᾶσα σὰρξ) shall see the salvation of God.  (Luke 3.5-6, RSV)

Luke extends the quotation to include Isa 40.4-5, thus showing specific interest in three vivid motifs that he reconstructs to be programmatic and thematic for the rest of his gospel. The first motif is the reversal of statuses, manifested by the symbolic restoration of the path of YHWH’s return.[11] Luke uses this Isaianic theme to create an image of ‘undulation’, a rising and falling movement of landscapes, people, statuses and fortunes. Luke creates the undulating effect by the repeated movement from noun to indicative verb.  This undulation motif is a representation of the workings of God’s salvation, foretelling restoration for the deserving and punishment for the wicked. As we shall see, Luke also appropriates this theme in Simeon’s song and the Nazareth sermon to be programmatic of the effect of Jesus’ ministry.

The second motif Luke identifies is one of salvation for Jews and Gentiles, communicated by Luke’s use of πᾶσα σὰρξ. A third motif is the tangible presence of God’s salvation. This theme is emphasised by being positioned at the end of the passage. God’s salvation is visible, as Simeon’s song and the Nazareth sermon later declare, in the person of Jesus himself. Luke’s extension of the Isaiah 40 quotation reveals his editorial interest compared to Mark and the other gospel writers. Reversal of conventional statuses, a message for Jews and Gentiles, and the immediate presence of salvation are repeated themes from Isaiah that Luke reconstructs in his own songs about his very own servant.

The programmatic nature of these themes is immediately glimpsed in the following episode of John the Baptist (Luke 3.7-22). The reversal of statuses motif is manifested in John’s dialogue with the crowd, as he warns his audience that the privileged sons of Abraham are ready to be disinherited and that God is able to ‘raise up children to Abraham’ from stones (Luke 3.8-9). Isaiah’s message to ‘all flesh’ is manifested in the three contrasting social groups that approach John, with the soldiers, whether Jewish or Roman in ethnicity, representing Gentile forces in the land (Luke 3.10-14). Finally, the visible, tangible presence of God’s salvation is revealed as Jesus enters the scene and is baptised and anointed with the Spirit (Luke 3.21-22). This hint of fulfilment in John’s ministry suggests how the servant discourse in the following texts might influence Luke’s narrative.