upon his shoulders

Our family has been memorizing Isaiah 9:1-7 during our evening devotions this Advent.  In hearing the text repeated over and over out loud, I noticed the repetition of the word “shoulders”.  In its first usage, “shoulders” is where the “bar” of the people’s “burden” (as in “the yoke of their burden” ) and the “rod of their oppressor” lies.  Their shoulders are the locus of the people’s oppression, the place where their suffering is most keenly felt.  In its second appearance, however, “shoulders” is not the same place of the people’s burden but upon which the “authority” of the “child born for [them]” “rests”.  Suffering is no longer the “bar across their shoulders”; “authority rests upon his shoulders.”

Through this word-play, that is, through “shoulders”, Isaiah emphatically links suffering and authority.  “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”, they now “rejoice as with joy at the harvest”, because “the yoke of their burden and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor” has been broken “as on the day of Midian”.  It has been broken because authority, in spite of all worldly pomp, does not in fact rest with “their oppressor” but upon the shoulders of “the son given to us”--the Messiah or Christ, the anointed one of God.  “The bar across their shoulders” has been broken because all authority rests upon the shoulders of the One who is for them, “for us”.

Yet the close linkage in the text between suffering and authority does not refer simply to the end result--the change in state from darkness to light, from suffering to joy--which the people enjoy.  Surely, Isaiah also has in view the means by which their oppression was broken.  Isaiah sees not only that the people now enjoy freedom; he sees with great clarity the One who purchased their freedom.  The prophet sees that the “child born for us” broke the “bar across their shoulders” only by bearing the bar across “his shoulders”.  The authority that rests upon the shoulders of the Messiah is revealed in his suffering for those oppressed.  Only then is he acclaimed, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  And only thus “will his authority grow continually”, even in us--as we share in his suffering for others so also to be exalted with and by him.

-Joe