Jesus falls for the first time
From Isaiah 53:4-7
Yet it was our suffering he carried,
our pain and distress, our sick-to-the-soul-ness.
We just figured that God had rejected him,
that God was the reason he hurt so badly.
But he was hurt because of us; he suffered so.
Our wrongdoing wounded and crushed him.
He endured the breaking that made us whole.
The injuries he suffered became our healing.
We all have wandered off, like shepherdless sheep,
scattered by our aimless striving and endless pursuits;
The Eternal One laid on him, this silent sufferer,
the sins of us all.
And in the face of such oppression and suffering—silence.
Not a word of protest, not a finger raised to stop it.
Like a sheep to a shearing, like a lamb to be slaughtered,
he went—oh so quietly, oh so willingly.
Who was this man? This person silently and willingly carrying the cross? Falling and getting up and falling again all the way to Golgotha? Suffering for us? Taking on our pain and distress? Falling from great heights to the lowest of the low?
Verse 4 of the Isaiah passage above refers to our assumptions about Jesus. We assume that God has rejected him. We assume that God is the reason he is hurting so badly. Is this true? No. Verse 5 clears it up. He was hurt because of us. Our wrongdoing wounded him. After all, Jesus was God. Or so we say. But do we really believe that? Jesus was God taking on our suffering. Letting us wound him. This was God, laying down his life for us. This was God, doing this for us, showing us a better way to handle pain.
Author Baxter Krueger in The Shack Revisitedsays, “Jesus suffered from the wickedness of humanity. It was the human race, not the Father, who rejected his beloved son, and killed him. The wrath poured out on Calvary’s hill did not originate in the Father’s heart, but in ours. The humiliation that Jesus bore, the torment that he suffered, was not divine but human. We mocked him, we detested him, we judged him. We ridiculed him, tortured him, and turned our face from him. It was not the Father or the Holy Spirit who abandoned Jesus and banished him to the abyss of shame, it was the human race. We cursed him.”
That is grace. That is grace upon grace.(John 1:16) That is breathtaking love. That is putting relationship above all else. That is the Incarnation of the Eternal One submitting to us. That is shocking forgiveness. That is radical mercy. That is love meeting us on our terms. That is love meeting us in our darkness. That is God.
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