What a Change! (Isaiah 53:4-5)

Several speakers have something to say in this prophecy. Already we have heard the Father speaking about his Servant in 52:13-15 and then in 53:1 we heard the complaint of the announcers of the report about the Servant concerning the rejection of their message. In verses 2-6 of the prophecy, another set of speakers make their contribution, and they are identifiable by the repeated use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’. It is noticeable that these pronouns do not occur in the rest of the prophecy.

 

In verses 2-6 what we have are predictions of the thoughts of the Jews about Jesus as they thought about details of his life and death as seen by them. We can see from the second half of verse 4 that they have changed their minds about him. Initially, their assessment of him was extremely negative, but it had changed to incredibly positive. The negative assessment was ‘we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.’  this previous assessment, now no longer held, indicates a dramatic change in their outlook.

 

Their negative assessment

In verses 2-3, they describe how they previously regarded the Sufferer in a negative way, and they had two reasons for their opinion of him. One reason was that there was nothing striking about his physical appearance (‘he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him’). Another reason was that he had a very sad demeanour (‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’).

 

Of course, there are many people who have no physical presence in the company of others and there are some people who carry intense burdens all the time. But Jesus was quite different from such. Both his lack of presence and his sorrow were of a different kind altogether from what others have at times because it was constantly obvious. In a strange way, they thought he was unique in his isolation and sadness.

 

Yet they had not been prepared merely to ignore the strangeness they thought they had seen in him. After considering what they saw, they had come to an initial conclusion as to why Jesus was like this, and they reveal it in the second half of verse 4. Their conclusion was that God had punished him in a dramatic overwhelming way. It was no ordinary sadness that he had, and it was no ordinary lack of attraction that marked him. They assumed that he must have been very bad to be punished in such a way by the God of Israel.

 

Sometimes we forget how people of his day regarded Jesus and imagine that everyone found him attractive and appreciated his words and actions. Here are some examples of those who did not.

 

First, recall how his fellow villagers in Nazareth responded to him when he revealed to them that he was the Messiah. Prior to this occasion, he had been baptised by John and began his years of public ministry in Israel, and this was followed by his forty-day conflict with the devil in the desert. When he came back to his hometown and spoke in the synagogue they were impressed initially by his words, but it was not long until they changed their minds about him: ‘When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff’ (Luke 4:28-29).

 

Second, there is the response of the people who had participated in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand by Jesus, recorded in John 6. Initially, they were so impressed with his abilities about providing food for such a large number that they wanted him to compel him to become their Messiah and deliver them from the grip of Rome. Yet after he had explained more of his mission and how he was the bread sent from heaven, and that they were sinners in need of divine mercy, many disciples stopped following him.

 

These are two examples of what became a common attitude. In John 8, the people tried to stone him. On other occasions, the religious leaders said that he was an agent of the devil. Things became so bad that in the end the crowds attending Jerusalem for the Passover wanted him killed as an imposter, and cried loudly for that to happen.

 

Of course, some people were friendly towards him and listened gladly to him. Yet we have to bear in mind the comment of the apostle John in the first chapter of his Gospel that Jesus came to his own and his own received him not. It was not just the Jews in general who treated him with disdain, so also did his siblings who lived with him. On one occasion, his brother James taunted him about why he should go to Jerusalem and do some miracles there. On a previous occasion, his family had come to Capernaum to take him back to Nazareth because they disapproved of what he was doing.

 

All this negative assessment about Jesus would have been confirmed in the thinking of the Jews who are prophesied about in this passage when they saw or heard that he had been crucified. They had been taught that nothing worse could happen to a Jew than to be hanged on a tree because it indicated that the person had been cursed by God.

 

What made the difference in their thinking?

Yet now they were of a very different opinion and we will think about their changed views in a minute. Before we do so, we need to ask why they changed their minds about Jesus. To find the answer we need to look down the prophecy, go through the various descriptions of his suffering, to where the Sufferer becomes the ruler of a cosmic kingdom. In other words, in the prophecy we are looking at one who became alive from the dead and then ascended to incredible glory in heaven. The obvious suggestion is that here we have the confession of the Jews who believed in him after the Day of Pentecost. His resurrection and subsequent glory caused them to think again about his life and death and what had achieved through them on behalf of others.

 

Their new assessment

Those Jews now have a new assessment of both the life and the death of Jesus. Their assessment of his life is seen in verse 4: ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’ We might think at first glance that this statement by them was fulfilled when Jesus suffered on the cross as the sinbearer. But that is not how Matthew interprets the verse when he quotes it in Matthew 8:16-17 and says: ‘That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”’

 

We can see from the context that Jesus had had a busy day in Capernaum and Matthew is guided to highlight his healing activities in which he was involved. He had healed a man in the synagogue, he had healed Peter’s mother-in-law, and then he healed all kinds of people who came to him after sunset with their varied problems. We might say that he faced a constant sight of incredible sadness as the sufferers lined up for hours to be helped by him.

 

It is important to remember that Jesus entered into the pain of those he helped that busy day. As they drew near to him they saw a man full of compassion, touched with their infirmities. Of course, he was pleased to help them, but everyone of them was a reminder to him of the ravages of sin in the lives of many people.

 

And it was not just on that day that Jesus saw such sights. It was the experience of his life to see with special insight the ugly consequences of sin in the lives of those he met with day after day. He was always affected by what he saw. There are several examples of that in the Gospels. What he saw on one occasion at the tomb of Lazarus was the mourning family and grieving crowd and he burst into tears even though he was about to perform a great miracle and raise his friend Lazarus from the dead. When he looked over the city of Jerusalem he wept over the inhabitants because of what would yet happen to them. Even when the woman with the issue of blood tried to evade publicity after her healing through touching the hem of his garment, he insisted on identifying her so that he could give to her special words of personal comfort.

 

The Jews in the prophecy had realised that Jesus had lived a life of costly service through the years he had been on earth. His unique distinctiveness and his deep sense of sadness were evidence that he was on a mission of recovery, a mission we can describe as him reversing the desperate circumstances caused by sin. And he did not merely drift through life until the final day when he became the sinbearer. Rather all of his life, he was affected by what came his way, and now those Jews in the prophecy knew why.

 

We can see that there is more about Jesus in their new perspective. Not only do they understand the nature of his unusual and wonderful life, they also appreciate in a personal way the solemn cause of his death on the cross at the hands of the Roman authorities. They recognise now that he had died in their place, that he had been punished because of their sins, that he was pierced by the sword of divine justice as he carried the burden that crushed him on the cross. He was there to pay the debts they could not pay. The one they had thought little of had been thinking about them and had gone into the presence of divine wrath in order to ensure that they would be safe forever.

 

They also could speak with wonder of the blessings that had come their way because he had gone to the place of the curse. As they put it, they now had peace. What peace was that? They had come to believe in him as the Messiah and because they did so they had been justified by God and so they had peace with him. Not only did they have that unchanging status with the Lord, they also had received the peace of God within their souls. We should not be surprised by this outcome because we know that the Saviour often spoke about peace. It was the way in which he greeted those he met on his resurrection day. What a marvellous change for the formerly spiritually blind who now can see. They live in the place of peace with the Prince of peace, the one sent by the God of peace, and in whose hearts the Holy Spirit was giving peace.

 

They have more to say than the possession of peace. In addition, they affirm that divine healing has come to them. Probably, they did not need the types of healing that Matthew described when he cited this passage from Isaiah 53. Yet they needed a greater healing than that which was experienced by the lepers, and the demon-possessed, and all the others who experienced his power that day in Capernaum. They needed the healing of their sin-sick souls. They needed pardon, new life, the life of God in their souls, the development of sanctification, and the ultimate experience of glorification in the eternal world. They were on the way to experiencing full health.

 

Of course, the call also comes to us to experience what Jesus has to offer us. We may have had our own views about who he is, views that fall far short of who he is and what he did. The fact is that he has lived a perfect live and died an atoning death on behalf of sinners. His resurrection calls us to consider who he was while he lived and died, and who he is at God’s right hand in heaven. Like the Jews in the prophecy, we need to experience his peace and healing.