The difficult expressions of verse 8 are rendered in the Revised
Version with clearness and so as to yield a profound meaning. We may
note that here, for the first time, is spoken out that end to which all
the preceding description of sufferings has been leading up, and yet it
is spoken with a kind of solemn reticence, very impressive. The Servant
is 'taken away,' 'cut off,' 'stricken.' Not yet is the grim word
'death' plainly uttered; that comes in the next verse, only after the
Servant's death is supposed to be past. The three words suggest, at all
events, though in half-veiled language, violence and suddenness in the
Servant's fate. Who were the agents who took Him, cut Him off and
struck Him, is left in impressive obscurity. But the fact that His
death was a judicial murder is set in clear light. Whether we read 'By'
or 'From--oppression and judgment He was taken away,' the forms of law
are represented as wrested to bring about flagrant injustice. And, if
it were my object now to defend the Messianic interpretation, one might
ask where any facts corresponding to this element in the picture are to
be found in regard to either the national Israel, or the Israel within
the nation.
That unjust death by illegal violence under the mask of law was,
further, wholly misunderstood by 'His generation.' We need not do more
than remark in a sentence how that feature corresponds with the facts
in regard to Jesus, and ask whether it does so on any other theory of
'fulfilment.' Neither friends nor foes had even the faintest conception
of what the death of Jesus was or was to effect. And it is worth while
to dwell for a moment on this, because we are often told that there is
no trace of the doctrine of an atoning sacrifice in the Gospels, and
the inference is drawn that it was an afterthought of the apostles, and
therefore to be set aside as an excrescence on Christianity according
to Christ. The silence of Jesus on that subject is exaggerated; but
certainly no thought of His being the Sacrifice for the sins of the
world was in the minds of the sad watchers by the Cross, nor for many a
day thereafter. Is it not worth noting that precisely such a blindness
to the meaning of His death had been prophesied eight hundred years
before?
But the reason why this feature is introduced seems mainly to be to
underscore the lesson, that those who exercised the violence which
hurried the Servant from the land of the living were blind instruments
of a higher power. And may we not also see in it a suggestion of the
great solitude of sorrow in which the Servant was to die, even as He
had lived in it? Misapprehended and despised He lived, misapprehended
He died. Jesus was the loneliest man that ever breathed human breath.
He gave up His breath in a more awful solitude than ever isolated any
other dying man. Utterly solitary, He died that none of us need ever
face death alone.