Project 119: Meditations on the Suffering Servant - Isaiah 53:4-6
| Project 119 | Ben Winder
“All of Us”
Wednesday, April 8 | Isaiah 53:4-6
This middle day of Holy Week brings us to the middle stanza in the Suffering Servant poem. As we are halfway between Palm Sunday and Easter, so too in this stanza we find ourselves between two sets of pronouns. The third person singular “He” and the first-person plural “we”. Him, the suffering servant alone; us, all of us, together in our sin.
There are some deeply profound truths in this Hebrew poem. Sin is universal and inescapable. Sin separates and scatters. Sin is essentially self-willed. There’s certainly a part of us that knows and understands these truths about sin. At least conceptually we recognize the universality of human sinfulness and the universality of the offer of God’s graceful salvation.
Nonetheless, as we read this passage, we can find ourselves in the seat of the first readers asking, “who is this ‘we’?” and “surely not us, Lord.” There is a certain anonymity in the plural. We can miss that we are we. Verse six begins and ends the same way. We all … we all. All of us … all of us. If we will recognize that we are we, if each of us will allow ourselves to be read into these many first-person plural pronouns, as certainly the author intended, then we will see the terribly unfair juxtaposition of ourselves and the Suffering One.
He took our pain and bore our suffering. Despite what we thought, He has not suffered because God has inflicted His deserved punishment on Him. Instead He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. His punishment brought our peace. His wounds brought our healing. This is terribly unfair. But as one songwriter has put it, “The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.”
All of us, yes, including me and you, all of us have gone astray like sheep. All of us, each of us, has turned to our own way. Yet in a way that seems terribly unfair, the Lord has seen fit to lay on Him our iniquity. The iniquity of all of us.
He in our place. Oh, divine mystery. Oh, beautiful, unfair grace. It is a gift for all of us. May each of us accept it with gratitude to God.