Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53:4 (NIV)
Whose Pain He Carried
The high school weight room smells like rubber mats and old chalk, and from three o’clock on it’s loud in there. A man is in the folding chair by the door with his keys still in his fist, waiting on his son. A box fan in the corner pushes the air around, and a dumbbell props the door open for it. He’s read the record board on the wall twice, and the top name on it is from 1994.
Isaiah 53 is spoken by a “we.” People are looking back at a man they had watched, and they say plainly what they thought of him while they watched. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
He took up their pain and he bore their suffering. They had the suffering right and whose it was wrong, and they say so themselves: the pain was theirs. They also say what they made of the sight of him. They looked at how much trouble the man was in and reasoned back to something he must have done to land in it, and the trouble they were looking at was their own.
People still read each other this way. If your year has gone bad, people who mean well by you have probably worked out the reason for it already, gently, in private. The men and women speaking in Isaiah 53 did that same reasoning, and they’re the ones who tell you how it came out. Nobody can look at what you’re carrying and read off what you did to deserve it, and that includes you. You can stop going back through your own life for the place where you must have.
The fan turns. His son comes out with his bag over one shoulder and says he’s ready. The man gets up, and on the way to the lot he doesn’t ask how it went.
A Prayer to Remember
We’ve each got a name in our heads this morning, Father, and we’ve each been the name in somebody else’s. Take the reasons out of our mouths before we say them. Come close to whichever of us is being explained right now, closer than the explaining gets.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
