But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (WEB)
Pierced for Our Transgressions
Transgressions and iniquities are the part Isaiah gives us, and he names them plainly, the things a person does knowing better at the time. Everything that came of them landed on somebody else. He was pierced. He was crushed. The punishment went onto him and the peace it bought came over to us, and the healing has the same address as the peace.
He takes it at seven with the coffee, out of a blister pack, and has done for eleven years. It works. Before it there were four years that he will describe to you in one sentence if you ask, and then change the subject.
He has never read the insert past the first fold. He doesn’t know how long the thing took or what it cost to find, and he has never once thought about the people who were in the trials, some of whom got it and some of whom got nothing, and none of whom he could name. What arrived at his kitchen table arrived finished, with the price settled somewhere else entirely and no part of the settling left for him to do.
And there the likeness runs out, which is the part worth having. The people who paid for what’s in that blister pack can’t be named and didn’t choose it. Isaiah’s man can be named and did. That difference is the whole of what makes him worth anything to anybody.
People who’ve been sick for years have had this verse quoted at them as a promise about their bodies, and it left them worse off than they were, carrying a diagnosis and a new suspicion about their own faith. God heals bodies and sometimes he does it in front of you, and Isaiah is treating something else here. The healing runs back to the transgression and the iniquity, and the treatment was applied to a back that wasn’t yours.
Wednesday of Holy Week is a day to be slow about this. The wrongdoing came from us. The piercing, the crushing, the punishment and the wounds all landed on him. Peace crosses back over to you, and it arrives at full strength, and it cost exactly what Isaiah says it cost.
Seven in the morning, the pack, the coffee. He has been well for eleven years on a thing he has never looked into.
A Prayer to Remember
Make the cost land on me before the day gets going, Lord Jesus. I’ve taken the peace for years without once pricing it. I’m reading one sentence about your wounds and my peace, and I can’t get the two halves to meet in my head. Don’t let this reading stay as comfortable as the last one.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
