The Servant: A Light to the Nations

Isaiah 42:1–9 (with Matthew 12:15–21; Luke 2:25–32)

Before this session, read Isaiah 42:1–9 slowly; it is the first of the four Servant Songs, the passage we set aside earlier. Hear the Father’s pleasure in His Servant (42:1, the words echoed over the Lord Jesus at His baptism); find the gentleness that will not break a crushed reed nor extinguish a dim wick (42:3); and see the Servant given as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes and to release the prisoners from the dungeons (42:6–7).

Here is my servant whom I support, my chosen one in whom I take pleasure. I have placed my Spirit on him; he will make just decrees for the nations.
Isaiah 42:1

The Songs of the Servant

We arrive now at the very heart of the book, and at the passages that, more than any others, have made Isaiah beloved of Christians, and especially dear to those who read the Old Testament looking for Christ. Scattered through these middle chapters of Isaiah are four passages of surpassing beauty that have long been called the Servant Songs: the first here in chapter 42, then others in chapters 49 and 50, and the greatest of them all in chapters 52 and 53. In each of them a mysterious figure steps forward, or is presented by God, and is called simply my servant, the Servant of the Lord. Who is He? A great deal of the gospel hangs on the answer.

The puzzle is this. All through these chapters God has been calling the nation of Israel His servant: You, my servant Israel, Jacob, whom I have chosen (41:8); Now, listen, Jacob my servant, Israel whom I have chosen! (44:1). So at first we might suppose the Servant of the Songs is simply Israel, the people as a whole. But then we read more closely, and it will not fit. The Servant of the Songs has a mission to Israel: He is sent to reestablish the tribes of Jacob and to restore Jacob to God (49:5–6). He cannot be the very nation He is sent to restore. And the Servant of the Songs is everything the nation was not: faithful where Israel was faithless, obedient where Israel rebelled, never failing where Israel failed at every turn. The Servant is not simply the nation. He is the one faithful Israelite who does at last what the whole nation was called to do and never could: the true Israel, gathered up into a single Person.

This idea, that the Lord Jesus is the true Israel, succeeding where the nation failed, runs deeper through the Gospels than we often notice. Where Israel was called God’s son and brought up out of Egypt, the Lord Jesus was carried down into Egypt as a child and called up out of it again, that the word might be fulfilled: I called my Son out of Egypt (Matthew 2:15). Where Israel was led into the wilderness and tested forty years and failed again and again, the Lord Jesus was led into the wilderness and tested forty days and did not fail once, answering every temptation with the very Scriptures the nation had forgotten. He walks back through Israel’s whole story and gets right every step the nation got wrong. He is not merely a son of Israel; He is Israel, as Israel was always meant to be, and that is precisely why the Servant of these Songs can bear the nation’s own name and yet be sent to save the nation. He is the faithful remnant of one.

And the New Testament leaves us in no doubt who that Person is. When Matthew wants to explain the quiet, gentle way the Lord Jesus went about His ministry, he reaches for this very Song and quotes it at length (Here is my servant whom I have chosen … He will not break a bruised reed) and says plainly that it was fulfilled in Him (Matthew 12:17–21). When Philip found the Ethiopian official puzzling over the fourth of these Songs, he began at that very Scripture and preached to him the Lord Jesus (Acts 8:35). The Servant is the Lord Jesus: the true and faithful Israel, who came to be everything His people could not be, and to do for them what they could never do. To read the Servant Songs is to stand and watch the Lord Jesus walk out of the Old Testament toward us.

It is worth being clear about why we read them this way, since it is not a matter of our own cleverness in finding the Lord Jesus where He is not. We are not allegorizing, not making the text mean whatever we should like it to mean. We are following the apostles. It was Matthew who tied the first Song to the Lord Jesus, Philip who tied the fourth to Him, Simeon and Paul who took the “light to the Gentiles” as fulfilled in Him. The New Testament writers, taught by the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus to find Him in all the Scriptures, read these Songs as testimony to Christ, and we read them so because they did, and because the Lord Jesus Himself said that the Scriptures testify about Him. To find the Servant here is not to impose Christ upon Isaiah; it is to receive Isaiah exactly the way the Lord and His apostles handed him on to us.

This is why these chapters are, for a confessional Lutheran, something close to holy ground. Here, seven centuries before Bethlehem, the Spirit of God paints a portrait of the Christ so detailed, so tender, and so exact that when the Lord Jesus finally came, those with eyes to see recognized Him. Here is His anointing and His gentleness; here is His mission to the nations; here, in the Song still to come, is His suffering and death and the very meaning of it, set down in advance with a clarity that can still take the breath away. We will spend several sessions among these Songs, and we will not exhaust them. For now we begin where the first Song begins: with God Himself pointing, and saying, Here He is.

Here Is My Servant

The first Song opens with a single arresting gesture: Here is my servant whom I support, my chosen one in whom I take pleasure. I have placed my Spirit on him (42:1). It is God who speaks, and He is pointing, drawing back a curtain and directing every eye toward one figure. Look at Him, God says. Here He is, the One I have chosen. There is something of a father’s pride in it, a father presenting his beloved son to the world: this is the one; look at Him.

And what God says of His Servant is about the most beautiful thing one person can say of another. My chosen one in whom I take pleasure. God takes pleasure in this Servant. He is the chosen one, the beloved, the object of the Father’s deep and settled pleasure. And if those words have a familiar ring to them, it is because we have heard them before, or rather, we will hear them again, on a riverbank in Judea. When the Lord Jesus came up out of the waters of His baptism, a voice came from heaven, saying, This is my one dear Son; in him I take great delight (Matthew 3:17). Matthew, who quotes this very Song (Matthew 12:18), knew exactly what that voice was echoing. The delight God declares over His Servant here is the delight the Father declared over the Lord Jesus at the Jordan. The Servant of Isaiah 42 is the beloved Son.

And it is worth noticing when the Father spoke that delight. It was at the very beginning of the Lord Jesus’s public ministry, at His baptism, before He had preached a single sermon, healed one sufferer, or gone anywhere near a cross. The Father’s delight rested upon the Son fully and gladly before the Son had done any of the work we usually think of as His work. The delight did not have to be earned by performance; it was simply there, the settled love of a Father for His Son. And this is no small thing for us to see, because it is the very pattern by which the Father deals with His children in the Son. He does not begin to love us as His children only once we have proven ourselves useful; He delights in us first, and the obedience flows out from the delight, and not the other way around. The Servant was beloved before He lifted a finger, and so, in Him, are we.

And God adds, I have placed my Spirit on him. The Servant is the Spirit-anointed One, and again the baptism comes to mind, for it was there, as the Father spoke His delight, that the Spirit descended like a dove and rested upon the Lord Jesus. This is what makes Him the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ: the very title we traced last session, through the shadow of Cyrus, to its true bearer. Cyrus was anointed for an earthly task, to break open a Babylon of brick and iron. This Servant is anointed by the Spirit Himself for the salvation of the world. And His mission is named at once: he will make just decrees for the nations. Not for Israel only, but for the nations, the whole wide world. From the very first verse, the Servant’s reach is global.

And the Spirit that rested upon the Servant did not rest upon Him for His own sake alone. The Anointed One was anointed in order to anoint, to pour out upon His people the very Spirit He had Himself received. The very name Christian carries this within it: a Christian bears the name of the Christ, the Anointed, and shares by sheer grace in His anointing. The Spirit who descended upon the Lord Jesus at the Jordan is the same Spirit He breathed upon His disciples, and poured out at Pentecost, and gives still in the washing of baptism. We do not stand looking at the Spirit-anointed Servant from the outside, as spectators of someone else’s anointing. By faith we are joined to Him, and His anointing overflows to us, so that the Spirit who delighted to rest upon the Beloved comes to rest, for His sake, upon us.

There is gospel hidden in that opening verse that we dare not hurry past. The Father’s delight rests, perfectly and without reservation, upon the Servant, and the staggering news of the gospel is that all who are joined to the Servant by faith are caught up into that delight. Paul puts it exactly: God’s grace is the grace that he has freely bestowed on us in his dearly loved Son (Ephesians 1:6). The pleasure the Father takes in His Son becomes, for those who are in the Son, the pleasure the Father takes in them. This is the very root of our assurance. On our worst days, when we are quite certain there is nothing left in us for God to delight in (and we may well be right), the delight does not finally rest on us at all. It rests on the Servant, the Beloved, and it covers everyone who is hidden in Him. Here is my servant … in whom I take pleasure, and here, in Him, are you.

A Crushed Reed He Will Not Break

Having pointed to His Servant, God describes how this Servant will go about His enormous mission, and it is not at all what we would expect of someone sent to bring justice to all the nations of the earth. He will not cry out or shout; he will not publicize himself in the streets (42:2). No shouting in the marketplace, no loud campaign, no self-promotion, no spectacle. We expect world-changers to be loud: to announce themselves, to dominate the room, to seize the attention of the crowd. The Servant does the very opposite. He works quietly, without fanfare, almost without notice. And this was exactly the manner of the Lord Jesus, who again and again told those He healed to keep silent about it, who withdrew from the crowds that wanted to make Him a king, who came not to be served but to serve, and whose kingdom, He said, does not arrive with outward show. The mightiest work in the history of the world was done without a raised voice.

And then comes one of the most tender verses in all of Scripture, a verse that has been a pillow for countless weary heads. A crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish (42:3). Picture the two images. A reed growing down by the water, but crushed: bent, cracked, half-broken, the kind of useless thing you would snap off and toss aside without a second thought. And a dim wick: a lamp wick burned down almost to nothing, no longer giving any real light, only a faint glow and a thin thread of smoke, the kind of thing you would pinch out and replace. Both are pictures of weakness at its very last gasp, the nearly broken and the nearly extinguished. And what will the Servant do with such things? Not at all what we would do. He will not break the crushed reed. He will not extinguish the dim wick. The damaged thing He will not finish off; the flickering thing He will not snuff out.

Stay here, for this is the gospel for everyone who has ever felt like a crushed reed or a dim wick. There are seasons in every Christian life (and whole stretches of life, for some) when our faith is not a bright and steady flame but a barely glowing ember, more smoke than fire; when we are not strong, upright reeds but bent and cracked ones, half-broken by sin or sorrow or failure or sheer exhaustion. And the great fear, in such a season, is that God has finally had enough of us: that He will do what we would do with a broken reed and a dying wick, and quietly discard us. But here is His Servant’s heart, declared seven full centuries in advance: He will not break you. He will not extinguish you. The Lord Jesus does not come to the weak in order to finish them off; He comes to bind up the crushed reed and to cup His hands around the dim wick and breathe it gently back into flame. He is tenderest with exactly those whom the world, and our own accusing hearts, would throw away.

We should be careful, though, not to mistake this gentleness for mere sentiment, as though the Servant simply pats the crushed reed and tells it that it is fine just as it is. He does not leave the reed crushed, or the wick dim. He binds up the broken reed so that it may stand and grow again; He shelters the dying flame and feeds it until it burns clear and bright once more. His gentleness is not the indifference that leaves us as we are, but the patience that refuses to destroy us while it heals us. There is all the difference in the world between the two. The world’s kindness often amounts to leaving people alone in their brokenness and calling it acceptance. The Servant’s kindness goes far deeper, and costs far more: He receives us broken, exactly as we are, and then sets about the long and gentle work of making us whole, never breaking us in the process, and yet never content to leave us broken either.

Matthew saw this so clearly that, of all the things he might have quoted to explain the Lord Jesus, he chose this. When the Pharisees were plotting against Him and the crowds were pressing in upon Him, the Lord Jesus simply went on quietly healing the sick and the broken, and Matthew says, this is what Isaiah meant: He will not break a bruised reed or extinguish a smoldering wick (Matthew 12:15–21). It was His way with the woman caught in her sin, with the doubting and the failing among His own disciples, with the dying thief beside Him on the cross. And it is His way still. The Servant who will rule all the nations rules them like this: not by crushing the weak, but by refusing to crush them; not by snuffing out the dim, but by tending them until they burn again. If your faith tonight is more smoke than flame, this is the best news in the world: He will not extinguish it.

He Will Not Grow Dim or Be Crushed

There is a turn in the next verse that is easy to miss but richly rewards a careful eye. Having said the Servant will not break the crushed reed or extinguish the dim wick, God says of the Servant Himself: He will not grow dim or be crushed before establishing justice on the earth (42:4). The NET lets the English reader see what the Hebrew is doing: the words for “grow dim” and “be crushed” are the very words used a verse earlier for the dim wick and the crushed reed. So the verse is making a deliberate and beautiful contrast. The Servant who will not break the crushed reed will not Himself be crushed. The Servant who will not extinguish the dim wick will not Himself grow dim. He is gentle with the weak precisely because He Himself is not weak.

This matters enormously, for it tells us where the Servant’s tenderness comes from. There is a kind of gentleness that is really only weakness in disguise: the softness of someone who has no strength to be otherwise, who does not break the reed because he simply hasn’t the power to break anything. That is not the Servant’s gentleness. He could break it; He chooses not to. His is the gentleness of strength held under perfect control, the tenderness of one who is utterly unbreakable cradling something utterly fragile. And only such a Servant is finally safe to cling to. A reed cannot hold up another reed; a dying wick cannot relight another. But because this Servant will not grow dim and will not be crushed, because His own flame will never go out, no matter what is poured upon it, He can be trusted to hold the crushed and to tend the dying without ever once collapsing under the weight of them.

We tend to get this exactly backwards in our thinking about strength and gentleness. We assume that the gentle are the weak: that to be tender is to be a soft touch, a pushover, someone who cannot or will not stand firm. And so we are forever tempted to want a different sort of savior: one who is hard, forceful, impressive, who throws his weight around and crushes his enemies. But it runs the other way. Gentleness with the fragile is one of the rarest forms of strength there is, precisely because it requires enormous power held under perfect restraint. A weak man cannot be safely gentle, for his gentleness may give way at any moment; only the very strong can be reliably tender. The Servant is gentle with crushed reeds not because He is too weak to break them, but because He is far too strong to need to. His strength is exactly what makes His gentleness trustworthy, and it is the gentleness, not the show of force we imagined we wanted, that in the end saves us.

And He did not fail. The whole story of the gospel is the story of a Servant who would not be turned from His mission though everything was thrown against it: who set His face to go to Jerusalem, who would not be turned aside from the cross but went straight through it, and who, when every reed around Him had broken and every light had gone dark, did not Himself break or go out. They bruised Him, but His spirit was not crushed; they tried to snuff Him out in the grave, and on the third day the flame they thought extinguished blazed up again, unconquerable. He will not grow dim or be crushed before establishing justice on the earth, and He did not, until He had set salvation as firm in the earth as the stone rolled away from an empty tomb. The hand that holds your crushed and flickering faith is the hand of the One who went down into death itself without going out.

A Light to the Nations

Now God formally commissions His Servant, and He does it in His grandest voice. The speaker is the true God, the LORD, the one who created the sky and stretched it out … the one who gives breath to the people on it (42:5). The One who sends the Servant is no local deity but the Maker of heaven and earth, the Giver of breath to every living soul. And because the One who sends is the Creator of all people, the Servant He sends is sent to all people. I, the LORD, officially commission you; I take hold of your hand. I protect you and make you a covenant mediator for people, and a light to the nations (42:6).

There is something here that ought to make every non-Jewish reader of this study sit up, for we are the nations. When Isaiah wrote, the nations of the earth (which is to say, our own distant ancestors) sat in spiritual darkness, knowing nothing of the true God, bowing down to idols of wood and stone, with no covenant and no hope in the world. And into that darkness God promised to send His Servant: not as a teacher for Israel only, but as a light for the whole world, our own part of it included. The plain fact that this gospel has reached us at all, that we who were once far off and in the dark now know the name of the God of Israel and of His Christ, is itself the fulfillment of this verse. The light promised here has come all the way to us. We are not eavesdropping on a salvation meant for somebody else; we are among the very Gentiles the Servant was given to enlighten.

Two staggering things are said of the Servant in that single verse. First, God gives Him as the covenant for His people. The NET’s “covenant mediator” is a fair gloss, but the Hebrew says more, and the ESV keeps it: I will give you as a covenant for the people (Isaiah 42:6, ESV). Not merely to announce a covenant, or to broker one, but to be the covenant, in His own Person. The Servant is Himself the bond between God and His people; in Him, God and sinners are joined together. And second, God makes Him a light to the nations, a light to the peoples sitting in darkness. Old Simeon, holding the infant Lord Jesus in the temple courts, knew this verse and saw it fulfilled in the child in his arms: a light, for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel (Luke 2:32). And Paul and Barnabas, turning at last to preach to the Gentiles, took these very words as their marching orders: I have appointed you to be a light for the Gentiles (Acts 13:47). The light kindled in Israel was always meant for the whole dark world.

That first phrase deserves a moment of its own: God gives the Servant as a covenant for the people. We are used to thinking of a covenant as an agreement, a set of terms, a document with signatures at the bottom. But here the covenant is not a document at all; it is a Person. The Servant does not merely bring the terms of peace between God and sinners; He is, in Himself, the peace, the living bond in whom the two are held together. This is why the Lord Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, lifted the cup and called it the new covenant in His blood. He was not pointing to a contract written down somewhere; He was pointing to Himself, and to the blood He was about to shed, as the very thing that binds God and His people together forever. Where He is, the covenant is; to have Him is to have the whole of it. God gave us, for a covenant, not a piece of paper, but His own Son.

And the Servant’s work is spelled out in three swift strokes, each one a picture of the gospel. To open blind eyes, to release prisoners from dungeons, those who live in darkness from prisons (42:7). Blind eyes opened, for we are, every one of us, born spiritually blind, unable to see God or even ourselves truly, and only the Servant can open our eyes. Prisoners released, for we are captives, bound fast by sin and death, unable to free ourselves, and the Servant comes to throw the prison open. Those who live in darkness brought out into the light, for the whole world sits in the shadow of death, and the Light of the nations comes to lead it out. When the Lord Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and read out His mission, it was words very like these He read: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed (Luke 4:18). The Servant came to do exactly what this verse said He would: to open eyes, to break open prisons, and to bring a world out of the dark.

The first Song closes with God reasserting what He has insisted on all through these chapters: that He will share His glory with no rival whatever. I am the LORD! That is my name! I will not share my glory with anyone else, or the praise due me with idols (42:8). The idols get nothing; the Lord’s glory is His alone. But this raises a question the Song quietly answers. If God shares His glory with no one else, how can He give His Servant such glory: to be the covenant, the light, the savior of the nations, the very one in whom God takes pleasure? How can the Servant do God’s own work of saving without robbing God of His glory?

The answer is the one the whole New Testament will go on to make explicit: the Servant is not “anyone else.” He is not a rival to God, not a created go-between who might run off with the praise. He is the eternal Son, of one being with the Father, sharing the glory He had with the Father before the world existed (John 17:5), so that the glory given to the Servant is not given away from God at all. When Simeon called the child a light to the Gentiles, and when the Lord Jesus called Himself the light of the world, no idol was being honored and no rival glorified: God Himself was being seen, in the face of His Servant. The glory God will not share with anyone else, He pours without reserve upon the Servant, because the Servant is Himself true God, the Son sent by the Father to save. We are, once again and very quietly, standing on the ground of the deity of Christ.

And the Song ends by looking forward. Look, my earlier predictive oracles have come to pass; now I announce new events. Before they begin to occur, I reveal them to you (42:9). The earlier things (the rise of Cyrus, the fall of Babylon) have happened just as God said they would. Now He announces new events, things not yet begun: the coming of the Servant, the light to the nations, the opening of blind eyes, the great salvation of the world. He tells them in advance, as He always does, so that when they begin to occur we will know whose hand has done it. And they have occurred. The Servant has come. The new thing God announced in Isaiah’s day is the old, glad story we now go out to proclaim.

Gathering the Threads

The first of the Servant Songs has set the figure before us, and we should fix Him in our minds, for we will be with Him for several sessions to come. He is the Servant of the Lord: not the failing nation, but the faithful One; the true Israel; the Lord Jesus. The Father takes pleasure in Him; the Spirit rests upon Him; He is the beloved Son, anointed for the salvation of the world. He goes about His work without ever raising His voice, and He is tender beyond all telling with the weak (He will not break the crushed reed, nor extinguish the dim wick), and yet behind that gentleness stands a strength that will not grow dim and cannot be crushed, a strength that went down into death itself without going out. He is given as the covenant and the light, sent to open blind eyes and break open prisons and lead a whole world out of the dark. And the glory of it all belongs to God, because the Servant is God’s own Son.

So the question this first Song presses upon us is simply whether we will let ourselves be His kind of people. Do you come to Him as a strong and upright reed, bringing your accomplishments in your hand? Then you have mistaken Him entirely. He came for crushed reeds and dim wicks: for the broken, the failing, the barely believing, the blind, the imprisoned, the ones still sitting in the dark. If that is you tonight, then this first Servant Song is your song. The Beloved in whom the Father delights will not break you, and will not extinguish you; He will hold your hand, and open your eyes, and lead you out of the prison, and carry the Father’s own delight to you. Look to Him, and let yourself be one of the crushed reeds He came, not to break, but to save.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

All through these chapters Israel is called God’s servant, yet the Servant of the Songs has a mission to Israel and is faithful where Israel failed (49:5–6). Why can the Servant not simply be the nation? How does seeing Him as the true and faithful Israel, the Lord Jesus, open up these chapters?
God says of His Servant, my chosen one in whom I take pleasure (42:1), nearly the words the Father spoke over the Lord Jesus at His baptism (Matthew 3:17). What does it mean that God’s grace is freely bestowed on us in his dearly loved Son (Ephesians 1:6), so that the Father’s delight in the Son covers those who are hidden in Him? How is this the root of assurance on our worst days?
The Servant will not cry out or shout; he will not publicize himself in the streets (42:2). Why is it surprising that the One sent to bring justice to all the nations works so quietly? What does His unselfpromoting manner tell us about how God’s kingdom actually comes into the world?
A crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish (42:3). What do these two images tell us about the kind of people the Servant is gentle with? Why is this such good news for anyone whose faith feels more like smoke than flame?
The Servant who will not break the crushed reed will not grow dim or be crushed Himself (42:4); He is unbreakable. Why does His own strength matter so much for our comfort? What is the difference between a gentleness that is really only weakness, and the gentleness of great strength held under control?
The Servant is given as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to release prisoners from dungeons (42:6–7). How do blindness, imprisonment, and darkness describe our own condition apart from Him? How did the Lord Jesus fulfill this mission (Luke 2:32; 4:18)?

Looking Ahead

We have only begun with the Servant, and the second of His Songs, in chapter 49, deepens the portrait. There the Servant speaks in His own voice, telling how the Lord summoned Him from birth and commissioned Him, and, astonishingly, named Him Israel, for He is the true Israel, in whom the whole nation’s calling at last comes good (49:1–3). We will hear Him speak with startling honesty of what looks, for a time, like sheer failure (I have worked in vain; I have expended my energy for absolutely nothing), and then we will watch that apparent defeat open out into the widest commission yet. It is too insignificant a task, God says, for the Servant merely to restore Israel: I will make you a light to the nations, so you can bring my deliverance to the remote regions of the earth (49:6). And we will hear words tenderer than a mother’s love could manage and not be outdone: though a nursing mother might somehow forget her child, God will never forget His people, for He has inscribed their name on the very palms of His hands.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 49:1–13, the second Servant Song, and on through verse 16. Hear the Servant tell how the Lord summoned Him from birth and named Him the true Israel (49:1–3); listen to His honest words about labor that seemed in vain, and His trust that the Lord will vindicate Him (49:4); notice how His mission widens from restoring Israel to bringing God’s deliverance to the very ends of the earth (49:6); and do not miss the tender promise that closes it: “Look, I have inscribed your name on my palms” (49:16).

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, we thank You for Your Servant, Your beloved Son, in whom You take pleasure, anointed with Your Spirit for the salvation of the world. We bless You that He came not with a raised voice and a crushing hand, but quietly, gently, tenderly; that He will not break the crushed reed nor extinguish the dim wick, but binds up the broken and breathes the dying ember back into flame.

We come to You as crushed reeds and dim wicks, weak and failing and so often barely burning; and we thank You that this is the very people Your Servant came to save. Open our blind eyes; bring us out of our prisons; lead us out of our darkness into His light. And since Your whole delight rests upon Him, let us be found in Him, that Your delight may rest upon us also, not for anything in ourselves, but for the sake of the Beloved. Hold us fast with the hand that did not grow dim and was not crushed, even in death; through the same, Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.