The wilderness of suffering encounters the Suffering Servant
Albert Bogle
April 14, 2025
Add to Favourites
Listen to this daily worship
Isaiah 53: 1-6 (NIV)
1
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?2
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.3
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.4
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.5
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.6
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Our reading today doesn’t try to hide the enormity of our rejection of God. This rejection is in fact also a rejection of ourselves. Our self interests have made us totally blind to the joy of living in relationship — so we live in our self-confessed loneliness, alienated yet longing for more.
Jesus not only lived in the wilderness of our blindness but also the wilderness of our suffering.
He came as one of us and we didn’t like what we saw of him on the cross, because he was carrying our grief, and our sorrow, and the effects of our sinfulness.
So we hide from him. Just like the story in Genesis. Adam hid from God because he realised what his nakedness meant. So we today continue to hide from God because we cannot face our true selves. We dare not look into the mirror that reflects the sadness and the struggle of our broken lives and our broken world.
If only we could take time out today and find the courage to stand at the cross and see ourselves in all of Christ’s nakedness. To look and see God stripped bare of all but love for you and me. You see there is always the other. The other makes us a person offers us communion, fellowship, love. The cross calls us to love our neighbour as ourself. If we allow ourselves to be drawn to the cross and gaze on the spectacle of love stripped bare, dare any of us turn way unchanged?
Loved back to life
Thieves, vagabonds, murders and cheats
The gutters their bed, cardboard boxes for sheets
And sharing a doorway with outcasts he eats
Loving them back into life on the streets
His beard it is matted his clothes they are torn
He’s been fighting a battle before he was born
But we couldn’t see the blood on the thorn
Loving us back into life to belong
Don’t turn away
He speaks to our hearts
And he feels through our eyes
Loving us back into life as he dies.
Prayer:
Lord, I can’t turn away
Thank you for fighting my battle.
May the blood and the thorn
restore my wounded soul
Amen.
Login to comment.