SONG 7: Isaiah 53:1-3
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.
In the Servant Songs, the narrator changes from God to the Servant, and now to us. In this song, we look upon the Servant. As we apply the what we, as human beings, value as important, we find that the Servant lacks all those attributes we value. In spite of the Servant being the “arrow” of God shot into the midst of humanity to give us the message of hope and love from God, we, like so many others before us reject the Servant and the message the Servant carries from God. The concluding line of this section of text says it all, namely, “We held him of no account.”
I meditated long on this text as I began to compose the music. this is no more than a simple Prelude, the shortest of all the songs in this collection. In its brief duration, it speaks volumes.
