Jesus, however, linked expectations of the Son of man with the figure of the suffering servant of God (as in chapter 53 of the Book of Isaiah).
Our rivalry with Catholics at times seemed fuelled by an unacknowledged tenderness, theirs for our historical struggles, professional erudition, and exegetical trenchancy, ours for their majestic spaces, genuflecting hockey champions, and forgiving, suffering servant — a Jew, after all.
This is Gibson's Jesus too: a suffering servant who takes the lash with us, exhales his last breath for us and comes to us in the "real presence" of the Eucharist.
Mr. Deri himself has been transformed by his followers into something of a saint, a suffering servant of the Torah whose mere presence in a nearby cell has already worked wonders.
Once again, it is Christianity that greedily fattens itself on the scattered suggestions of the Hebrew Bible, reading Isaiah's suffering servant as nothing less than the suffering Messiah, and turning Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac into a harbinger of God's completed sacrifice of Jesus.
Christ came as a lowly, suffering servant who gave up all his power and became one of the weak.
To enter into the Good Friday narrative, of Jesus, Suffering Servant, a human being who is "Beloved" of God, who is the embodiment of a loving God, who has done everything right, and gets tortured for it?
Unfortunately, the only theological case for torture that I've heard sounds less like Jesus, the suffering servant, is at the heart of moral reckoning than, what appears to be, an unwavering commitment to cost-benefit analysis.
My friend Gaynor Ithell, who has died aged 52 after suffering an aneurism, was a senior civil servant from a working-class background.
Sanders admits, as an academic, sales skills are not his strong point but says, as a former civil servant, he had already honed his people skills and that the unit isn't suffering from missing skills.
