Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases

let the Jews pay the price in their place.” I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find that a very
satisfactory solution, either.
Every time we try to give an explanation to why God causes suffering we are going to
end up in just such a perverted place. And maybe that ought to convince us that we are asking
the wrong question, the wrong question of God, and the wrong question of the Bible. For, if we
look carefully, the Bible, as God’s revelation, often cuts against the grain of our knee-jerk
reading of it. Often we don’t see it because we read into the Bible what we expect to find.
We too readily assume that accounts of the suffering servant, or Jesus’ death are just
special cases of deserved suffering. Sometimes we assume it so much that those are the answers
we read the text to find, and we fail to see that this amazing piece of poetry is answering a
different question altogether. God simply doesn’t answer why he causes or allows suffering.
That may be pretty frustrating, but God just doesn’t answer those questions.
But God does answer the question of what he tries to make out of the suffering,
especially when it is we human beings who cause it. People caused the holocaust. People
crucified Jesus. And people struck and afflicted and bruised the suffering servant in this
morning’s passage. There was transgression to spare. That part we get right. But the
transgressions are to be found in these very actions against the innocents—the Jews, the
suffering servant, and Jesus himself. Human sinfulness, human fallenness is the human
condition, but it manifests itself very often in actions that cause suffering to those who are the
most innocent.
There are many reasons we do it. Sometimes it’s lust for power. Sometimes it’s fear.
Sometimes it’s insecurity. Sometimes it’s to distract us from our real problems. Sometimes it’s
to blame others for our problems. Interestingly, though, when we perpetrate suffering mostly our
truest reasons are hidden from our sight. Germany blamed the Jews, among others, for her post
World War I problems. Both Pilate and Caiaphas saw Jesus as a threat to peace and stability.
Neither Germany nor Jerusalem said, “Let’s kill some innocents.” That’s what they did. We can
argue that they should have seen it for what it was. But the fact is that they deluded themselves
into seeing a perversion as perfectly reasonable. And we should be cautious in saying how much
they missed the obvious, for we may well be missing such obvious things here and now. The
moral of this story may be how hidden from us are the obvious things we miss.
And that’s where God comes into the story. God’s heart is in a state of perpetual
brokenness for the anguish that we cause. God weeps day and night for the pain we suffer and
the pain we cause. And when God can, he takes that pain and suffering and tries to expose it to
us for what it is, tries to un-cloud our vision, tries to undermine our obscuring logic.
Isaiah’s suffering servant is one of the clearest examples of God’s attempt to illuminate
our situation. The fact that we most easily read the story as how God made the servant suffer in
our place shows just how persistent is the veil on our eyes. The suffering servant is not a story
about God punishing an innocent other in our stead. It is a story about how God shows us the
death and destruction we cause, and then it is a story about how God redeems it, turns it into life.
As a sidebar here let me be clear. Redemptive suffering has gotten a very bad reputation,
and it is absolutely well-deserved. The suffering we are talking about is not caused by God. It is
caused by people. And the redemption isn’t in saying that the suffering is something good to
have happened. The suffering we cause is bad, period. What good thing God does, the
redemption God works, if you will, is to shine a light on how we cause the suffering, to unveil of
deluded sight, and also to say that the suffering is not the end of the story. Out of death, God
will create life.
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