Suffering Servant

‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed’ 1 Peter 2:24

Holy Week will see the release in Britain of Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’. Whatever else it may have done, it has at least focussed attention on a central element of Christian faith, the crucifixion of Jesus.

In recent years this has tended to get overlooked, even in the Church – simply contrast the size of congregations on Palm Sunday (donkeys, cheering children, waving palms and so on) and Easter Day with the turn-out on Good Friday. For many Christians, let alone the general public, the agony, arrest, trial, scourging and eventual execution of the Saviour are quietly by-passed.

Yet all the Gospel writers give far more space to what we call the ‘passion narrative’ than to anything else in the life of Jesus. Their message is severely distorted if we transform Jesus into an eloquent preacher, charismatic healer and friend of the oppressed (all of which he was) while side-lining that which he himself saw as the crown and glory of his life – his death on the cross at the hands of ‘sinful men’.

Jesus saw himself as the ‘Suffering Servant’ of the Lord foretold by Isaiah (chapter 53), not as the conquering hero waiting to res-tore the kingdom of David. That suffering was an essential element of his God-given work, and as the apostle Peter reminds us, it is ‘by his wounds that we are healed’.

So it is right and proper to reflect during Holy Week and beyond on the suffering he endured – not in an excessive way, but with the measured restraint and yet deep feeling of the Gospels themselves. As so often, Mrs Alexander gets it exactly right:

‘We may not know,
we cannot tell
What pain he had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.’