He took up our pain

“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)

 

This year’s Lent is the forty days except Sundays from Ash Wednesday February 26 to the Easter Eve April 11. And today, Palm Sunday, is the first day of Passion Week ahead of Easter. This subject, Jesus Christ’s suffering and Palm Sunday, makes us feel some of contradictory image. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, a large crowd welcomed Him, waving palm branches. But Jesus, before the imminent death of the cross, had to suffer a lot from people. The crowd welcomed Jesus and the leaders persecuted Him from each different position, but all of them were bound to be foolish lives after all. And it is the reality of life that represents oneself.

 

We often divide people under certain conditions. That is probably because it is generally convenient to do so. For example, we may divide them depending on where from, gender, age, property, disable or not, and etc. And that would be efficient in its own way. It can be one way of doing things for understanding others, because the statistical commonalities and differences allow us to know easy what they are. However that is also a matter to be taken with caution to Christians.

Everyone should be respected in Christ, without any strings attached. And anyone who stays in God’s word is blessed as a great person. Whether the person is male or female, from Seoul or Busan, adult or child, the disabled or the non-disabled, the rich or the poor, those conditions should not work for reasons of respect and non-respect.

Jesus is the Son of the holy and almighty God the Trinity. Nevertheless, He came into the world humbly in form of natural man. Isaiah the prophet said, “~ He had no beauty or majesty ~ nothing in his appearance that we should desire Him.” in Isaiah 53:2. To the eyes of man, He seemed like insignificant. That would have been general, but He suffered a great deal of contempt and contempt. Furthermore, He was despised by the people and eventually executed by death of the Crucifixion. That is truly an incomprehensible irony, yet why did He have to put Himself in such an extreme suffering? It contains there mysteries of Jesus’ salvation and the faith. Even many Christians, what they called, unfortunately would have not known its real significance as usual.

The extreme suffering of Christ is to replace the hardship that man had to burden. What does it mean by the hardships and sorrow that man deserves? And why should man receive them? To answer about that, if someone has lived even a day and think of the life, the person could not deny sadness and hardship of oneself. We say people eat food for hunger, pleasure of eating, and good health, but people are excreted by eating and they grow up to become old and sometimes sick and to reach death. Everyone has no choice but to go through birth, old age, sickness, and death. Even those who believe in Jesus are not different from others under physical conditions. However it’s possible to change it in Jesus and to be spiritually delighted, for He replaced the sadness and the pain of life. That is the core of the gospel Christians have. Pain is something that people originally have on their own, but the salvation in God is an additional grace given.

Those, who do not know their own wrongs and refuse to admit its fact, are so pitiful beings. In addition, those who blame others but rationalize oneself are very foolish and bad. They even argue to Jesus’ Crucifixion, “He was punished and beaten by God and suffered.” The world is always noisy to blame everyone else, because they don’t know what the Crucifixion means.

 

Why did Christ, the Son of God, come to this world? He came into the world in order to remove the hardships of life. Christ was stabbed, wounded and punished because of the wrongs and sins of man. By doing so, on the contrary, we have gained peace and healing in Him the Holy Spirit. To believe in Jesus is just to seize the full opportunity that God has given to man. Lives that wander around like foolish sheep, secure the safety of life in Jesus who has been in charge of the hardships of life!

 

(Written by Koonoh, Pastor of JDO Presbyterian Church in Korea, on Apr 5th 2020)