The psychic, emotional and psychological pain of Jesus

Let me meditate with you a little bit about a theme from Scripture, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus, his sacrifice on the cross. Quickly go with me to the 53rd chapter of Isaiah and there we see this passage that is so well known about the crucifixion and the suffering of Jesus. Let's read, I think that simply reading this passage edifies us so much already and introduces us to the very center of the meaning of the passion of Jesus. It says in verse 3:

"...Despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows, experienced in grief and as we hid our faces from him, he was despised and we do not esteem him..."

One of the things that makes this passage so extraordinary is that it was written hundreds of years before Jesus was born, before the Lord went through the reproach and terrible affliction, the psychological and emotional agony, the shame, the public exposure of his body on the cross and before that the agony he went through during his trial, a completely twisted, unfair trial. Before the Lord incarnated as a man, this prophet Isaiah, I personally believe that writing something that he himself did not know all its implications, nor did he know the real, literal meaning that his words were going to have, because thus the prophetic move.

Many times God illuminates a person, and the person writes, like many of these writers, in Scripture. The Bible has 66 books, at least the Protestant Bible, and was written over a period of nearly 3,000 years from the first book under consideration, the book of Job, to one of the last books, the books of the Apostle John written in the first century after Christ. It is almost 3000 years in which different books were written by different men in different regions of Israel.

And these people did not know each other, in many cases, and yet the Bible has an impressive unity, between all these different assertions. Imagine, 3000 years, people writing, there was no Internet, there was no possibility of some reading what others were writing, and yet you see in Scripture an absolutely impressive unity.

And here we see one of those cases that reminds us that the Bible is definitely the word of the Lord, where Isaiah writes and prophesies about things that we believe he himself could not understand all that his words implied, and yet he is describing , as if I were watching a video of the passion of Jesus, scene by scene, all that the Lord was going to suffer and experience during that terrible night of his passion and then at the moment of the crucifixion.

One thing after another, and he speaks hundreds of years before the Lord comes to earth, because the first Gospels were written some 70, 80, 90 years into the first century. Isaiah writes hundreds of years before that, centuries of years, and he is describing, not only what the Lord suffered, but also the very nature of his ministry and his relationship with the Father and what that sacrifice on the cross effected and did. possible in the spiritual world, and why it was necessary, and what effects it left on humanity.

So, he says here in verse 3, “despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows,” he is alluding here to some aspects of the nature of Jesus. He was despised, he was rejected by his own people, the Bible says that he came to his own and his own did not receive him. He came in the midst of the people of Israel, that God had made a special people, where he was going to incarnate his Messiah, there he comes and what he receives is one rejection after another, by the religious authorities of his time, even by his disciples who they did not understand, ultimately, his true divine nature, and when he was crucified they fled, because they thought it was a defeat.

So, the Lord dwelt on earth as a solitary being ultimately not understood. Imagine living your whole life feeling misunderstood, living your whole life as Clark Kent who can never take his suit off and flash his big S on his superman suit. Because Clark Kent at least had, the poor guy, the possibility of occasionally getting into a phone box and coming out as Superman.

The Lord spent his life on earth walled in, as it were, within his human frame, being God. People didn't see it that way, they didn't understand it. His mother herself, he was a mystery to his mother, a riddle, an enigma. His mother herself did not clearly understand, the Bible says, she did keep certain things in her heart, she remembered the angel's announcement, a number of things, but she did not truly understand, because she was not capable of understanding what her Son fully meant in his identity as the Son of God.

So, the Lord walked, I believe that one of the greatest agonies that the Lord suffered on earth was not necessarily at the moment he was put on the cross, or when he allowed himself to be mounted on the cross, but rather it was the live a life of misunderstood, of knowing that he was God.

He told him once, I think it was to Pilate, and to the Jews, he says, look, if I wanted to send a legion of angels to deliver me, I could do it, but he didn't. He could not do it without violating the mission for which he came to earth. He had to stay within that straitjacket of his humanity all his life, while people looked at him, many despised him, many saw him as an impostor, as a false pretender and he had to swallow that, knowing that at any moment he could display all his glory if he wanted to. But he had to keep going.

That was part, I believe, of the bitter pill that the Lord drank drop by drop, even when he was a child and I imagine that the other children played and got into their roles and that, and he perhaps, in the ministry of the incarnation Feeling that he had that deity inside of him, that call from God, he couldn't play like the other children. Probably at times he did some of the things that children did, but he also felt in conflict with himself, because there was something inside of him that he knew that he came for a Father's business on earth.

And I think that must have caused him great mental, emotional and spiritual agony. And I believe that all of this was part of his passion, it was part of his crucifixion. We only emphasize the culminating, graphic, dramatic, terrible moment of the cross, but I believe that the whole life of the Lord was a life of incremental, gradual, little by little crucifixion, the furnace gradually increasing its temperature until reaching the very moment of the crucifixion and death.

And that is why I believe that Isaiah says, he was despised, he was rejected among men, he was a man of sorrows. It was as if his very identity was summed up in the word pain, man of sorrows. The Lord knew pain as we have not known it. He knew the psychic, emotional, psychological pain. Many times the psychological pain can be much more penetrating than the physical pain, the psychological agony of the Lord was extreme.

When he was on the cross and in that moment that we can never understand his intensity, that the Lord said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" These were not metaphorical, poetic, symbolic words. When the Lord, I believe that at that moment, when there on the cross of Calvary all the ontological sin of humanity, all the summary of past, present and future sin, of all humanity, men and women, that through Throughout history, from Eden to the final moment of judgment, at the end of time, the Lord summarized and packed and wrapped all the sin of humanity and deposited it on the bloody shoulders of his Son on the cross of Calvary.

And at that moment I believe that the Lord experienced a pain that only infinite shoulders like his, divine, could bear. Because the Lord had to be a divine being who paid the price for humanity. What human being could have collected within his own chest all the contamination of humanity and survive without his chest exploding into 50 thousand pieces for not being able to contain it, his back falling apart. No one could, no one had enough capacity, space within their being, to receive everything that needed to be redeemed, which was the sin of all humanity and pay the price for those who sinned, those who sinned at that time and those who they would sin. Because you and I, two thousand years later, two thousand plus years later, we can go back to that moment and say, you know what? I refer to what Christ did on the cross of Calvary. I put my name on the list of all those who throughout history said, I recognize that at that moment the Lord achieved my salvation and my redemption, that by his substitutionary death, my sins are also forgiven and the Lord cast my sins away on the shoulders of Jesus.

And when you receive Christ as Lord and savior, when you make your personal pact with him, what you are doing is that you are putting your name, your identity, your person, on the shoulders of Jesus crucified and you are saying, I I activate the redemptive power of Christ and the cross for my life.

And until a person does that, that heroic act remains a mere potential, potential energy, not active energy. One has to sign that act, one has to personalize it, one has to appropriate it so that what was declared there can have reality in our lives.

That's the mystery and that's why through the ages people have been called to say, you know what? I today receive Christ as my Lord and my savior, today I recognize that what he did was for me and for others as well, but for me. You have to do that.

Because that was what the Lord accomplished. That is why he says, he was a man of sorrows, he assumed the entire burden of humanity, experienced in brokenness. The Lord was an expert, he had a phd in pain and suffering and brokenness. And he says that we hid his face from him. You know what? That we hid is something collective and inclusive that says that it was not only the Jews, we have blamed the poor Jews, they have taken the waters for many things through the ages, but no, you know what? That you and I also hid the face of the Lord. It was not only Peter who denied it, it was not only the Jews who crucified him, we too with our sins have crucified the Lord. He came for us, he came for you and me, and no one can say, you know what? I am exempt from that drama, or other sinners but I am not. Not all.

The word also says, because all have sinned. Note that here everything is us. We hid our faces from him, do you hide the face of someone you are ashamed of, yes or no? you hide the face of someone whose predicament or difficulty you don't want to share. You feel ashamed or you feel alluded to, or you want to escape responsibility or you want to escape from what is happening and when we saw him there on the cross, in a spiritual way, we would rather walk like those than walk next to the wounded man on the cross. parable of the good Samaritan and we abandoned him, we left him alone there, we hid his face, we did not appreciate him.

He was not esteemed for what he was. We did not understand him, we did not give him the honor that he... humanity did not understand him, they did not esteem him, they did not esteem the Lord as they should esteem him. Neither do we today, and one of the things I think we have to always remember, brothers, is that God calls us to esteem, to correct that terrible mistake of not having esteemed the Son of God as he deserved.

On this night when we give glory and honor to him, we esteem him and say, you know what? We want to correct that mistake, that unforgivable mistake, that terrible mistake. That is what we do, when we adore the Lord, we esteem him, we give him glory and honor and we say, Lord, we do not want to be like that humanity that rejected you. We want to recognize what you are.

Let's finish now, because I don't want… I think we have done enough tonight to recognize what Christ has done on the cross of Calvary. But remember that, every time we get together in a meeting like this, every time we come to church on Sundays, every time we take time to worship the Lord, sing as we have done, listen to these beautiful praises, what what we are doing is esteeming the Lord, giving him the esteem he requires.

God wants us to be a people of worshipers, that we understand what we do when we sing. Perhaps many people who don't understand these things will wonder, well, why do these evangelicals sing so much? Gosh, let them settle for a chorus and a hymn, and let's go to what we came here for. Brothers, we have to understand more and more every day that one of the greatest ministries of the people of God is to give the Lord the esteem that he deserves, the glory and honor that he deserves.

Quite a long time that humanity has underestimated the dignity of Jesus and one of the things that the Lord says, look, if you do not adore me, the stones are going to have to adore me because the Son of God has to be adored.

I tell him, Lord, help us to be a church of worshipers, a church that rejoices in giving you glory and honor and that we correct that lack of humanity of not giving you the place that you deserve. Brothers, one of the things that the Lord is calling us, as we have said, so many times these Sundays, is that with our life, our experience, we honor his terrible sacrifice.

You could spend hours exposing this passage and other passages of Scripture that remind us of all that our salvation cost the Lord. And for that sacrifice we have to live a life of dedication to him, of service to him. Today, tonight, I ask that the Lord make each one of us aware of how great a sacrifice he purchased for our salvation. And may we spend the rest of our days thanking the Lord for the courtesy that he had, as it were, to come into the world and lay down his life for us and suffer that horrible death, and live that life of perpetual agony, stitching himself up slow fire since he entered his mother's womb as an embryo, until the moment as a complete man, he suffered death on the cross of Calvary, you and I must remember.

That's why it's important, many people don't like it, there are evangelicals who believe that Holy Week is a Catholic issue, as they say, that has nothing to do with it. No, it is for all humanity. I believe that every year it is good that the church takes this week to remember that culminating time, because it was so important.

But we have to live like this every day of our lives. One of the things that we greatly desire is that this church is also populated with people who know that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was very costly and that we live for him, for his glory and honor, we live a life that honors him, a life of consecration, of surrender, of everything we have, everything we are, nothing that you can give to the Lord is appropriate enough to cover the debt that you have with him, especially when you think that he not only won the Lord on his cross your eternal salvation, because remember that, one of the things that the Lord bought for you and me is the fact that this world, this earth, this time, this space that we inhabit, is purely temporary and relative . Our true home and destiny is after death and that gives us incredible freedom, rest, an incredible lightness of spirit, for those of us who have the redemption of Christ Jesus in his blood, eternity is our destiny. It is what awaits us, life is a prelude, it is a mere moment of waiting for what truly matters.

Listen to me, rejoice in that and give thanks to the Lord. Eternity for you and me. We are going to see each other there in heaven, brothers, we better learn to love each other and get along here, because we have an eternity together. Hallelujah! Glory to the name of the Lord.

Christ bought that privilege on his cross, his suffering, his suffering. Hallelujah! But know, also here he bought for you and me, in life, here, blessing, healing, power, authority, hope, emotional reconciliation of our emotions and feelings often in conflict, access to the throne of grace, being able to come before the Father and present our needs to him, to be able to change and be better every day, to have the energy and motivation to improve, to get rid of our imperfections and character defects, and to be better every day, like Christ.

It is a life of perpetual improvement that we have here. Christ made it possible by his wounds, by his death, by his blood, by his suffering, by the lashes he received, by the agony he experienced, by that cross that pierced his bones and sinews, his muscles. Today I know that he bought life and life in abundance for me here on earth too. Hallelujah!

His sacrifice on the cross, for our sin he was crucified, but his crucifixion he won for us redemption on earth and hope for eternal life with him. Hallelujah! That is why nothing that we do in this world for him is excessive, because everything we can do is because he has made it possible. If there is any hope, any element of joy in our lives, it is because he made it possible on the cross of Calvary. He redeemed us from being simply beings bound by time and space, and when we die we cease to exist. How terrible that.

We know that no, I have eternal significance, because Christ made it possible. glory to his name. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Come on just a minute, bow your head now. I want you to take a moment before you leave here tonight to seal all that you have heard in your heart and in your spirit. Thank the Lord for everything we've done tonight, for being part of a terribly blessed family. I love the Lord more every day and I want to serve him more and be more useful to him and I fall more in love with the privilege of being part of a spiritual family like this. I thank the Lord tonight for all the blessings received, for you, I thank him, for what he is doing among us, for what he will do, for those little children who now have a different destiny in our church, our families, because the Lord made it possible. This Latino community here in Boston, which God is blessing and lifting up because its wounds still have an effect on us.

We give to the Lord. We don't want to leave here like okay, we already did what we have to do, now I'm leaving and a clean slate. Take everything you have experienced home with you.