Our Lord, then, sprang from a generation of Israel, which had a strong conscience of the national aspect of the Service of God,--a generation with Isa. xl.-lxvi. at its heart. We have seen how He Himself insisted upon the uniqueness of Israel's place among the nations--_salvation is of the Jews_--and how closely He identified Himself with His people--_I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel_. But all Christ's strong expression of Israel's distinction from the rest of mankind, is weak and dim compared with His expression of His own distinction from the rest of Israel. If they were the one people with whom God worked in the world, He was the one Man, whom God sent to work upon them, and to use them to work upon others. We cannot tell how early the sense of this distinction came to the Son of Mary. Luke reveals it in Him, before He had taken His place as a citizen and was still within the family: _Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?_ At His first public appearance He had it fully, and others acknowledged it. In the opening year of His ministry it threatened to be only a Distinction of the First--_they took Him by force, and would have made Him King_. But as time went on it grew evident that it was to be, not the Distinction of the First, but the Distinction of the Only. The enthusiastic crowds melted away: the small band, whom He had most imbued with His spirit, proved that they could follow Him but a certain length in His consciousness of His Mission. Recognising in Him the supreme prophet--_Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life_--they immediately failed to understand, that suffering also must be endured by Him for the people: _Be it far from Thee, Lord_. This suffering was His conscience and His burden alone. Now, we cannot overlook the fact, that the point at which Christ's way became so solitary was the same point at which we felt our prophet's language cease to oblige us to understand by it a portion of the people, and begin to be applicable to a single individual,--the point, namely, where prophecy passes into martyrdom. But whether our prophet's pictures of the suffering and atoning Servant of the Lord are meant for some aspect of the national experience, or as the portrait of a real individual, it is certain that in His martyrdom and service of ransom Jesus felt Himself to be absolutely alone. He who had begun His Service of God with all the people on His side, consummated the same with the leaders and the masses of the nation against Him, and without a single partner from among His own friends, either in the fate which overtook Him, or in the conscience with which He bore it.
Now all this parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and the Servant of the Lord is unmistakable enough, even in this mere outline; but the details of the Gospel narrative and the language of the Evangelists still more emphasize it. Christ's herald hailed Him with words which gather up the essence of Isa. liii.: _Behold the Lamb of God_. He read His own commission from ch. lxi.: _The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me_. To describe His first labours among the people, His disciples again used words from ch. liii.: _Himself bare our sicknesses_. To paint His manner of working in face of opposition they quoted the whole passage from ch. xlii.: _Behold My Servant ... He shall not strive._ The name Servant was often upon His own lips in presenting Himself: _Behold, I am among you as one that serveth_. When His office of prophecy passed into martyrdom, He predicted for Himself the treatment which is detailed in ch. l.,--the _smiting_, _plucking_ and _spitting_: and in time, by Jew and Gentile, this treatment was inflicted on Him to the very letter.[167] As to His consciousness in fulfilling something more than a martyrdom, and alone among the martyrs of Israel offering by His death an expiation for His people's sins, His own words are frequent and clear enough to form a counterpart to ch. liii. With them before us, we cannot doubt that He felt Himself to be the One of whom the people in that chapter speak, as standing over against them all, sinless, and yet bearing their sins. But on the night on which He was betrayed, while just upon the threshold of this extreme and unique form of service, into which it has been given to no soul of man, that ever lived, to be conscious of following Him--as if anxious that His disciples should not be so overwhelmed by the awful part in which they could not imitate Him as to forget the countless other ways in which they were called to fulfil His serving spirit--_He took a towel and girded Himself, and when He had washed their feet, He said unto them, If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet_--thereby illustrating what is so plainly set forth in our prophecy, that short of the expiation, of which only One in His sinlessness has felt the obligation, and short of the martyrdom, which it has been given to but few of His people to share with Him, there are a thousand humble forms rising out of the needs of everyday life, in which men are called to employ towards one another the gentle and self-forgetful methods of the true Servant of God.