Isaiah 53:3-6
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned-every one- to his own way;
And the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (NIV)
I love how God’s Word works. In different seasons of life, familiar words fall on us in fresh ways. The reality of Jesus intentionally entering into my sorrow and willingly bearing my sin takes on a new weight in a season where the brokenness around me and the brokenness within me are so apparent. We live life today, and every day, both as sufferers and sinners. In his life and death and resurrection, Jesus has come to deal definitively with both. Suffering and sin. Grief and guilt. The suffering servant bears them all.
As we focus our gaze upon the sufferings and sacrifice of Jesus this week, and particularly as we look to the cross, I believe this passage invites us to three things: to lament, to confess, and to rest.
The cross of Christ invites us to lament.
The suffering servant is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The God of the universe entered his world, and took on its pain in order that he might redeem it. But it is not just sorrow and grief in the abstract. There is power in the little pronoun “our”—he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows.
His acquaintance with grief is personal. He knows in an intimate way our particular sufferings and sorrows. All the places where you feel sadness and loss, all the realities you grieve and mourn—our Savior knows them all. And this passage says that he carries them, so you do not have to carry them on your own.
His acquaintance with grief is also collective. It’s not just yours and not just mine, but all of ours together. We taste this in our current circumstances. This pandemic has been called a collective trauma and called us to come together in a collective mourning. There is a comfort in knowing we are not alone, that all around the world we are together in our suffering and grief and loss. How much greater then the comfort knowing that the God chose to share in this suffering himself? And not only this suffering, but the suffering of all his people, over all of the world, throughout all time. We can only begin to grasp the weight. But this is our hope. Tim Keller says it this way, “The Christian hope is that Jesus hates pain and suffering so much that he was willing to come into the world so that he could destroy it without destroying us.”
Because our Savior knows our sufferings, we are invited to lament. We are invited to come to him with all our sadness and all our sorrow. To tell him honestly what is on our hearts. There is no sadness he does not know, no sorrow he has not borne.
What do you grieve this morning? What losses do you mourn? What fears enslave you? What sadness weighs heavily upon your heart? Speak to him about these things. Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:8, ESV)
The cross of Christ invites us to confess.
As deep and palpable as our suffering is, particularly as we experience it in new ways in these days, our deepest problem is not our suffering but our sin. The greatest weight is not the brokenness in the world, but the brokenness within us. Our greatest burden is not our hurt but our hearts. And in order to move towards us in our suffering, he had to do something about our sin. The cross of Christ shows just how far he was willing to go-
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. . . .
[T]he Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Is. 53:5, 6b;NIV)
As we look upon the cross, and see the innocent Son of God hanging there—pierced, crushed, wounded, mocked—we are struck anew with the weight of our sin. How great must it be if this is what it deserved? As we look upon the cross, and see the creator of the universe hanging bloody and naked in our place, we are invited, if not compelled to confess. . .what is it in us that put him there?
What sin have you seen in yourself in these last days? What idols have been uncovered? What addictions have we run to? What selfishness and impatience and anger has surfaced in the wake of fear and stress? Confess these things to the Lord. They are not hidden from him. They do not surprise him. He knows them. He bore them. He paid for them.
The cross of Christ invites us to rest.
This passage tells us that the suffering servant would be stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, and the Lord would lay on him the iniquity of us all. As Jesus bears the weight of all our suffering and sin in his body on the cross, he calls out to his Father, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
But the Father does not reply. His cries are met with silence.
Why? So that ours would never have to be. Jesus is utterly forsaken by the Father so that in all our suffering and all our sin, He can draw near to us. If you are in Christ, you can be assured that no matter how great your sorrow, deep your struggle, or comprehensive your shame, you will never have to say what Jesus did.
We do not yet know what sufferings we may experience or what sin may be exposed in these days. But because of the cross of Christ, we do know that we are never abandoned and never alone. He is with us. He is for us. Nothing can separate us from his love. And so friends, in the midst of the storms both around us and within, we can find our rest in Him.
May we stand beneath the cross of Christ, and find it to be what one hymn-writer penned,
The shadow of a mighty Rock within a weary land.
A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way,
from the burning of the noontide heat and the burden of the day.
(Elizabeth C. Clephane, 1872)