Conversations with a Suffering Servant

Book excerpt: David Wyn Williams presents a literary reimagining of the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah through the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, offering insight into how the servant's prophetic characterisation dismantled an exiled nation's ideologies of suffering and called the people to understand their plight as part of a redemptive story on behalf of the nations. While Williams devotes the first half of this volume to a close examination of the scriptural servant, the second half is given wholly to the experiences and thoughts of a contemporary 'suffering servant' whom Williams interviewed throughout his final days, setting up a dialogue between the two in order to raise important questions around our corporate and individual responses to suffering. This book is a timely reflection on how an ancient people responded in faith to a national calamity, and how a prophetic figure who features in but a handful of poems inspired the nation to endure and rewrite its own narrative of suffering. The servant's example in the midst of today's uncertainties could not be more poignant.