Isaiah 52.13-53.12; John 18.1-19.42
The account of Jesus’ passion in the Gospel of John is wide-ranging and vivid. There is the betrayal of Jesus late at night and the confrontation in the garden. At Jesus’ trial, Pontius Pilate asks a very modern question, “What is truth?” and admits he has no case against Jesus. The crowd shouts, “Away with him” and “Crucify.” Meanwhile, through all the chaos, the gospel writer carefully notes poignant details—the name of the slave whose ear was cut off, the quality of the woven tunic Jesus had been wearing, the charcoal fire—and sees how the events that are happening are not merely random and senseless acts but the fulfilling of scripture.
One of those scriptures filled with meaning at the death of Jesus is the first reading from Isaiah. Isaiah is also wide-ranging—portions of two chapters—and vivid: a servant so marred beyond human appearance the world is left speechless; a perversion of justice against an innocent person; yet through it all, the promise that even in anguish there is light and hope.
Taken together, the prophet Isaiah and the Passion of Jesus offer too much to grasp and absorb at one time. We need a smaller story, a summary, to gather up the details and give meaning to the big picture. And we’re given that in Isaiah as he describes the Suffering Servant and says, “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities…By his bruises we are healed.” These words are later picked up in the New Testament letter of 1st Peter and there speak directly of Jesus and the meaning of his death. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross…by his wounds you have been healed.”
Peter, as he writes his letter and with scripture in hand, reflects long and hard on the extraordinary events of Jesus’ death and resurrection to help us focus on what it all means, means for us. Peter wants us to make the story of Jesus’ passion our own; to find in it our forgiveness, strength, and healing.
Early in the letter, Peter looks to Jesus on the cross and says that forgiveness in God is not secured by silver or gold “but with the precious blood of Christ.” How precious? If “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” as the Old Testament says, then the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross is the ultimate gift of life, the gift of Jesus’ life for you. “The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin,” says the New Testament. On the cross is our forgiveness. As for our strength? Peter, later in his letter, sees how another Old Testament passage is filled with meaning in Jesus. Quoting Psalm 118, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” Peter see in Jesus the stone rejected by the world. Yet Jesus’ death and resurrection become a secure foundation for us through the changes and chances of life. “Those who believe in him will never be put to shame.” The cross of Christ is forgiveness and strength. As for our healing? With tonight’s reading from Isaiah in hand, Peter says, “Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the cross…by his wounds you have been healed.”
Only what does it mean to say that Jesus, by his wounds, heals us? Renaissance artist Matthias Grünewald, in a painting he did in the late 1400s for a German monastery, depicts Jesus’ death on the cross in a way that one art historian calls ‘fantastically weird.’ It’s Grünewald’s largest work, nine feet tall, and was meant to hang above the altar in the monastery church. The scene is heart-rending. Jesus’ body is twisted, disfigured, gaunt. You sense the agony of the crucifixion. Here, words from Isaiah are on full display, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity.”
Now Grünewald had a particular reason for depicting the crucified Christ the way he did. The monastery that commissioned the work ran a hospital devoted to caring for patients afflicted with a particular and painful skin disease. In the painting, Jesus’ crucified body is covered with the same sores that the patients themselves were afflicted with. In this way, the patients could recognize Jesus with them in their suffering, recognize their own suffering in the body of Jesus. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows and diseases.” Grünewald’s painting offered hope, pointed to something and someone bigger than present circumstances. In Jesus’ crucifixion, these patients could see God, know God. They could receive strength and courage from the cross. “By his wounds you have been healed.”
Jesus’ wounds reveal the far-reach of his love for us—the distance he goes and the depths he plunges—to bring you to God in forgiveness, strength, and healing. When 1st Peter tells us about forgiveness through the precious blood of Christ, strength in ‘the stone that the builders rejected now made our cornerstone,’ and healing in the wounds of Jesus, he is showing how the arms of the cross gather up our lives into the life of God. The crucified Christ shares the wounds of your life—the ways you have hurt yourself, hurt others, been hurt: the power of sin. And when you wonder if the sorrow and sin you carry will be with you for the rest of your life, it is Christ who bears in his body your pain, your suffering, all the things wrong that never seem to get set right. In his body, our Lord bears injustice and crime, violence and deprivation; he enters into a world of sin and takes it on for our sake, bears it for us. Christ crucified shows us that God is not safely tucked far away in the heavens, not far removed from human cruelty or suffering, does not turn a back on us even if we turn our back on God; “Christ died for the ungodly.” In the cross we see how heaven has come to earth in Jesus, how God is deeply and lovingly involved with the people he has made, right here in the thick of it all, with us and for us.
John Stott, British Anglican writer and preacher once said, “I could never believe in God if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, suffering, and sin, how could anyone worship a God who was immune to it?” God is not immune but takes pain, suffering, and sin onto himself in Jesus. And while Good Friday is a day with sorrow in it, it is chiefly a day to meditate on, and pray through, the hope that comes from God in Jesus Christ. All the wide-ranging and vivid details of Jesus’ Passion and Isaiah’s prophetic vision of a Suffering Servant are brought into focus with words that speak about Jesus’ death and the meaning of it, of the reconciliation and life that flow from the cross to you—forgiveness, strength, and healing. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross…by his wounds you have been healed.”
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