Sermon - Healed by His Passion - Sunday March 7, 2004
Last Sunday the Academy Awards were watched as usual by about a billion people worldwide.It’s the biggest and considered by many to be the most important awards event in the entertainment world.
The awards were hosted this year again by comic Billy Crystal. Before the show started he said he was nervous standing up and doing his thing before the whole world, because, he said, a billion people is a tough room. Good line.
And believe it or not, that got me thinking. The world is a tough room. The world is a tough place. Bitterly tough. And life is no picnic for most people in the world. In the past year alone there has been a nightmare of a war in Iraq.
We’ve had terror attacks, we’ve had deadly disease in our own city. There have been religious slaughters - like the one in Iraq this past week where hundreds died during what was suppose to be a joyful religious celebration kind of like our Christmas. Families devastated in a way that we can’t even imagine.
There has been so much suffering all around us...and some of us have suffered this year as well. Some have lost loved ones. Some have slipped in their recovery from addiction. Some have had to deal with pain that the rest of us mostly don’t know about.. And there is not one person here today who does not need to be held and healed and sheltered from the storm that we call life.
Solomon wrote, very soberly: “What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labours under the sun? 23All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest”
The world is a tough room. It is a hard place to do life. No doubt about it. And we need to be
sheltered, yes, absolutely...but what of the pain and what of the wounds we have already received in life? What are we to do with our present suffering? Is God...part of the picture...at all. Or are we alone?
It may be rare that we actually slow down long enough to smell the roses let alone reflect on such
things. We come by business and distraction very easily nowadays. Let’s take a moment to think
about what God says in his Word about what He has done for us...to speak to our need for healing.
I want to focus in on six verses that have something direct to say about healing.
Let’s look again at Isaiah 53:
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised and we esteemed him not. 4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten 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 upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
In this prophetic passage written at 700 years before Jesus Christ was born we learn of something that was in God’s mind long before Jesus was ever born among us.
That’s the value of prophesy to us now. Originally prophesy testified to the truth of something
yet to come. For the early church when they would look back at the Old Testament scriptures and see these things that were predicted of Jesus that they had witnessed as they happened, they were convinced and inspired to keep on keeping on.
But for us, we look back at these passages that Predict what was going to happen to Christ and
we see something of the mind of God, something of his plans.
Jer 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not
to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
God had a plan, and his plan was Christ. Sometimes people think that the incarnation was plan B. god originally intended something else...somehow that He was not aware of all that would happen in the garden, in the flood and in our rebellion in general. God was surprised by all this, so the theory goes, and so as a reaction to this unexpected turn of events he sent Jesus. Nothing could be further from the truth.
From the beginning, before the beginning when there was only God and nothing else, God had a plan, and that plan was Christ. Revelations in 13:8 says that Christ was “slain before the foundation of the world”. It was in God’s mind that Jesus should come to us in the flesh and suffer in the flesh as one of us. So...
God Knows Suffering from the Inside Out
God is not a stranger to suffering. Even before he came in Jesus Christ, he understood human suffering. Knowing everything, God knew human pain. He knew this because there is nothing outside the scope of his understanding. And yet He chose to become flesh - fully human - that he might see, from the inside out, from your point of view, what life is like for you and me.
And in Jesus, our passage today teaches us, God knew what it was to be human in the worst way. He knew what it means to be hated. To be scorned and turned away. To be full of sorrow.
In fact he was the taunted one. The bullied one. We ended up hating him. Our Saviour knew what it was like to have people turn away, hide their faces. To Say “no!”. To say “I will follow you wherever you go”, only to be followed up in the next breath by “I swear I never knew the man!” To say “Hosanna” in one breath and “Crucify him!” in another.
God knows suffering from the inside out, and so our God is able to sympathize with us. Verse 3 says “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering”. The KJV says he was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. I have to wonder if there’s not a terrible irony in that verse. A little dark humour.
Let’s be honest. It’s a terrible understatement to say that Jesus was acquainted with grief. Acquainted” means to know something or someone superficially - on the surface. No one has suffered pain like Jesus suffered, no one has been more rejected, abused, neglected, despised than Jesus was and it was the world who rejected him. That means me. That means you. That’s the point.
I saw a T-shirt once that showed a picture of Jesus’ bloodied body on the cross with words that said,
“If I am alright and you are alright, then why did this happen”?
There’s a story about a young child who lay in hospital dying of cancer, withering away to nothing. Her family was devastated. Friends came, from church, from work...and tried to offer solace. They tried but could only come up with unhelpful little sayings that didn’t begin to touch the pain the family felt. And then a man from the church came.
He walked into the hospital room, didn’t say a word, sat down beside the girl, as a few members of the family gathered...and he wept. He wept for a good 15 minutes. Then he got up and left. The family said that this man offered them an amazing gift. He identified with their pain. He let it in. He let it in.
Our Saviour has offered us an unspeakable gift. By his own choice, when he didn’t need to, when he was seated at the right hand of God the Father, he came to us. And he came to us with an attitude - with an attitude worth considering:
“Being in very nature God, (Jesus) did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Do not ever forget that even before he came to heal us, he came to suffer with us. Think about that. As we think about the healing that we each need most deeply, we need to remember that Jesus did not come firstly to put an end to suffering, but rather to fill it with His presence.
God Enters Our Pain in Order to Heal it
There was a point to Jesus coming to suffer with us, and to suffer in the worst way with us...to
suffer more in fact than any one has suffered in this life. Jesus spent a lot of time healing people.
The word “healing” appears 66 times in the New Testament.
He took our infirmities to the cross with him; he carried our sorrows with him along the [pic] via
dela rosa, the road toward his suffering, toward the cross. And when he was doing this thing, this
wonderful thing that was such a gift and so hugely important for us, for all of humanity, it says
“we considered him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted”.
We so didn’t get it. In verses 3 and 4 Isaiah tells his listeners that when the Messiah suffered,
people would turn their backs on Him because they believed that He had to have done something
to deserve the punishment that He was receiving. This is part of the reason that verse 3 says that
He was despised.
At the end of verse 4 we see that we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. People could justify His treatment because they thought He deserved it.
We figured he was suffering for his own sin. We figured God had stuck him down. We were satisfied in our judgment.
Have you ever been terribly wrong about something?
You were convinced that you were right and all of your best mental resources pointed you in one clear direction...so you go there...and then you discover you were absolutely wrong. Am I the only one who’s ever done that?
We missed the point - we judged him wrong. If we look closely enough we can see ourselves in many of the people who filled Jesus’ days and lat hours. In Pilate we were powerful and influential and we waffled about Jesus.
Maybe he’s innocent, maybe he’s not. Sure wouldn’t be popular to come out boldly and state he was innocent.
That just wouldn’t have been smart. In the crowd on Palm Sunday we first welcomed Jesus as a king and then by our actions we turned against him. In Peter we confidently affirmed our faith in Jesus. In Peter we turned away from him at his darkest hour. In the soldiers who tortured Jesus with 39 lashings, we see ourselves at our worst.
Not just not-getting-it. But actually participating in the crucifixion. It is here that we understood Most vividly that our sins put Jesus on the cross. That’s worth thinking about.
In Lazarus and in Blind Bartemaus and the woman with an issue of blood and the woman caught in adultery hopefully we see ourselves as well, discovering with fresh eyes and wonder that our our healing is bound up in Christ.
Our Healing Is Bound up in Christ
“He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by His wounds we are healed”.
Isaiah says that one of the reasons that Jesus suffered was so that He could bear our griefs. The
word griefs in many contexts referred meant diseases and sickness.
Matthew 4:24
News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.
Matthew 8:16
When evening came, many who were demon possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick.
Matthew 12:15
Aware of this, Jesus withdrew from that place. Many followed him, and he healed all their sick,
Matthew 14:36
and begged him to let the sick just touch the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.
Mark 6:56
And wherever he went––into villages, towns or countryside––they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.
The purpose of healing is to be returned to wholeness, so that we can life as we ought to live. Is there something in your way today that’s preventing you from living as we ought? You can bring it to Jesus, and He will care for you. Does anyone in this room have an area of life where you are not living as you ought?
That can be sin and it could be something that point to your need for emotional, spiritual or physical healing. The effect of practising sin is to destroy the soul, to render us numb to God and, really, numb to life. That’s what often happens with overt or outward sin. In 1 Cor 11:28-30 Paul states that weakness and sickness are sometimes caused by not living an examined life. I am not saying that sin causes sickness in general. That is not the case.
In Romans 7, not to put himself above anyone else’s struggles, Paul confesses his desiring to do God’s will and at the same time his tendency to do the things he knows he shouldn’t do. He speaks in a very personal way about his struggle and its effect on his life. His conclusion? It is not “just get over it”, or “here’s the formula for living a victorious sinless life”.
His conclusion is “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God–through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:24-25) His conclusion is that his healing from this dual-mindedness that we all share is bound up in Christ.
Jesus was broken, in the worst way...his body was destroyed, as was illustrated vividly in The Passion of the Chris, though “he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth”.
And yet Jesus was returned to wholeness...that’s what the resurrection was all about. He who knew
no sin became sin for us, was beaten and destroyed in his body, and then he triumphed over all that
happened to him on the cross by his resurrection. All that was broken in him was made whole. Isn’t
that our heart’s cry?
That everything that is in us that is broken and sick and wounded might be made whole? That is my heart’s cry. And the way to wholeness is found in Jesus.
There was actually one thing that wasn’t made whole in Jesus at the resurrection. It is the only
man-made thing in heaven. The nail prints in the hands of the Christ of God. They will serve as a reminder for us for all eternity of the lengths he went to in order that we might be made whole. They will forever speak of his amazing love for you and for me.
How are we to respond to all of this? What then is our hope, where is our healing? What does our healing look like? It looks like Jesus. Every believer is destined to be “conformed to the likeness of God’s Son” (Romans 8:29). And that is the heart of the matter. “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
When Jesus died two thousand years ago He took your sicknesses, your diseases and your sins. For every stripe Jesus took, He also took the root cause for every physical or mental sickness that you would ever encounter. Notice it says we were healed. It is finished! The healing we experience today is rooted back at the cross of Jesus. 1 Peter 2:23-25 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats.
Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24He himself bore our sins in his body on
the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
Let’s pray. God, you are the one who heals. We bring our wounds, our sins, our sicknesses of all varieties to you, and we ask that you would touch each of us. We ask that our healing that was accomplished at the cross would soon appear. Thank you Jesus that you willingly laid down your life that we might be made whole. Thank you for the healing that you have done so far in our lives. Give us faith to believe you to complete that work you have begun in us. In Jesus Christ’s holy and majestic name we pray.
Amen.
