Upon His Shoulder

We size up a heavy thing by the shoulder we mean to lay it on. Movers turn a piano so its weight falls across the strongest back; medics slide the wounded onto the steadiest carrier; a worn-out child goes up onto the parent whose shoulder can take the dead weight the whole way home. So when Isaiah, writing to a people "who walked in darkness" and living under an empire's boot, wants to say who will finally set the world right, he first tells us where the weight will come to rest: "and the government shall be upon his shoulder" (Isaiah 9:6). The entire business of ruling everything — every court, every border, every last account — laid across one shoulder.

And whose shoulder? Isaiah has just named him twice over — "to us a child is born, to us a son is given" (Isaiah 9:6). Not a general marched in at the head of an army, not a dynasty voted into power, but a child; and onto that child Isaiah loads titles no crib could hold: "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." A few lines earlier the shoulder had belonged to the oppressor — "the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor" (Isaiah 9:4), the yoke-bar that lay across the neck of the beaten. Now the prophet watches God break that rod and set a wholly different weight in its place. The bar comes off our shoulder; the government goes onto his.

Seven centuries later an angel stood in a back-country town and said much the same thing to a frightened girl, almost in Isaiah's own words: "the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David... and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Luke 1:32-33) — the old promise read back to us with a name attached at last. But the strangest fulfillment of the shoulder came at the end and not the beginning. "He went out, bearing his own cross" (John 19:17). The shoulder that carried the government of the universe carried, up a hill outside the city wall, the crossbeam of his own execution. This King did not rule the way we hand the heavy end to the strong; he ruled by taking the heaviest thing there is onto himself, and so his reign rests on real justice — a debt paid, at last, under our own load.

Isaiah promises that "of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end" (Isaiah 9:7). Every human rule crests and recedes; the strongest shoulder tires, the steadiest reign is only a lease. His does not tire. His government does not weigh on him — it spreads out from him, a widening peace that the fourth name had already promised, and his is the throne of David arrived at last at its rightful King. The guarantee behind it is not our loyalty or our strength: "The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this" (Isaiah 9:7).

So we can set down the pretense that our own shoulders were ever built for the load. The rod is already broken; the government already rests where it belongs. The whole of this morning's invitation is to lay our small, crushing weights down beside the one this King has already carried up the hill — and to let the shoulder that bears the world bear us home.