The Mental, Emotional, and Psychological Suffering of Jesus

Allow me to reflect with you for a little while on a subject from Scripture that focuses our attention on Jesus’ crucifixion, his sacrifice on the cross. Turn with me quickly to chapter 53 of Isaiah, where we find this well-known passage about Jesus’ crucifixion and suffering. Let us read it. I believe that simply reading this passage already edifies us greatly and brings us into the very heart of the meaning of Jesus’ passion. It says in verse 3:

“…Despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; and as one from whom we hid our faces, he was despised, and we did 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 endured 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 corrupt, unjust trial. Before the Lord became incarnate as a man, the prophet Isaiah wrote this, personally, I believe, writing something whose full implications he himself did not know, nor did he know the actual, literal meaning his words would have, because that is how the prophetic movement works.

Many times God enlightens a person, and that person writes, as did many of these writers in Scripture. The Bible has 66 books—at least the Protestant Bible does—and it was written over a period of almost 3,000 years, from what is considered the first book, the book of Job, to some of the last books, the books of the Apostle John written in the first century after Christ. That is almost 3,000 years in which different books were written by different men in different regions of Israel.

And in many cases these people did not know one another, and yet the Bible has an impressive unity among all those different statements. Just imagine: 3,000 years, people writing, no Internet, no possibility for some to read what others were writing, and yet you see an absolutely impressive unity in Scripture.

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 whose full implications, we believe, he himself could not understand, and yet he is describing—as though he were watching a video of Jesus’ passion, scene by scene—everything the Lord would 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, or 90 years into the first century. Isaiah writes hundreds of years before that, centuries before, and he is describing not only what the Lord suffered, but also the very nature of his ministry and his relationship with the Father, what that sacrifice on the cross accomplished and made possible in the spiritual world, why it was necessary, and what effects it had on humanity.

So he says here in verse 3, “despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows.” Here he is alluding to certain aspects of Jesus’ nature. 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 among the people of Israel, whom God had made a special people, where his Messiah was to become incarnate. He comes there, and what he receives is one rejection after another—from the religious authorities of his day and even from his disciples, who ultimately did not understand his true divine nature and who fled when he was crucified because they thought it was a defeat.

So the Lord lived on earth as, ultimately, a solitary, misunderstood being. Imagine living your entire life feeling that no one understands you, living your entire life like Clark Kent, who can never take off his clothes and reveal the great S on his Superman suit. Because poor Clark Kent at least had the possibility of occasionally going into a telephone booth and emerging as Superman.

The Lord spent his life on earth sandwiched, so to speak, within his human frame, while being God. People did not see him that way; they did not understand him. Even to his mother he was a mystery, a riddle, an enigma. His own mother did not clearly understand. The Bible says that she did treasure certain things in her heart; she remembered the angel’s announcement and many other things, but she did not truly understand, because she was incapable of understanding all that her Son signified in his identity as the Son of God.

So the Lord walked—and I believe that one of the greatest agonies the Lord suffered on earth was not necessarily the moment when they put him up on the cross, or when he allowed himself to be placed on the cross, but living a life of being misunderstood, knowing that he was God.

He once said—I believe it was to Pilate and to the Jews—look, if I wanted to command a legion of angels to deliver me, I could do it, but he did not. He could not do so without violating the mission for which he came to earth. He had to remain within that straitjacket of his humanity throughout 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 remain on that path.

That was part, I believe, of the bitter cup that the Lord drank drop by drop, even when he was a child. And I imagine the other children played and got into their roles and all that, while he, perhaps, in the mystery of the incarnation, sensing that he had that deity within him, that calling from God, could not play like the other children. He probably did some of the things children did on occasion, but he also felt conflicted within himself, because there was something inside him that knew he had come to be about the Father’s business on earth.

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

And that is why I believe Isaiah says that he was despised, rejected among men, a man of sorrows. It was as though his very identity were summed up in the word sorrow: a man of sorrows. The Lord knew sorrow as we have never known it. He knew psychic, emotional, and psychological pain. Psychological pain can often be far more piercing than physical pain; the Lord’s psychological agony was extreme.

When he was on the cross, in that moment whose intensity we will never be able to understand, the Lord said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Those were not metaphorical, poetic, symbolic words. When the Lord—I believe that at that moment, there on the cross of Calvary, all the ontological sin of humanity, the sum total of the past, present, and future sin of all humanity, men and women throughout all history, from Eden to the final moment of judgment at the end of time—the Lord gathered, packed, and wrapped up all of humanity’s sin and laid it upon the bloodied shoulders of his Son on the cross of Calvary.

And at that moment, I believe the Lord experienced a pain that only infinite, divine shoulders such as his could bear. Because the one who paid humanity’s price had to be a divine being. What human being could have gathered all the contamination of humanity into his own chest and survived without his chest bursting into 50,000 pieces because he could not contain it, without his shoulders falling apart? No one could; no one had enough capacity, enough room within his being, to receive everything that needed to be redeemed—which was the sin of all humanity—and to pay the price for those who had sinned, those who were sinning at that moment, and those who would sin. Because you and I, two thousand years later, more than two thousand years later, can appeal retroactively to that moment and say, you know what? I appeal to what Christ did on the cross of Calvary. I put my name on the list of all those who throughout history have said, I acknowledge that at that moment the Lord secured my salvation and my redemption, that through his substitutionary death, my sins are also forgiven, and the Lord laid my sins upon Jesus’ shoulders.

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

And until a person does that, that heroic act remains mere potential—potential energy, not active energy. One has to sign one’s name to that act; one has to personalize it; one has to appropriate it so that what was declared there may become a reality in our lives.

That is the mystery, and that is why throughout the ages people have been called to say, you know what? Today I receive Christ as my Lord and my Savior. Today I acknowledge that what he did was for me—and for others as well—but for me. We must do that.

Because that is what the Lord accomplished. That is why it says that he was a man of sorrows; he took on the entire burden of humanity, acquainted with grief. The Lord was an expert; he had a PhD in pain, suffering, and brokenness. And it says that it was as though we hid our faces from him. You know what? That “we hid” is collective and inclusive; it tells us that it was not only the Jews. We have blamed the poor Jews—they have taken the heat for many things throughout the ages—but no, you know what? You and I also hid our faces from the Lord. It was not only Peter who denied him; it was not only the Jews who crucified him. We too have crucified the Lord through our sins. He came for us; he came for you and me, and no one can say, you know what? I am exempt from that drama; other sinners are involved, but not me. No, everyone is.

Likewise, the Word says, because all have sinned. Notice that everything here is “we.” We hid our faces from him. You hide your face from someone of whom you are ashamed, don’t you? You hide your face from someone whose predicament or difficulty you do not want to share. You feel ashamed or implicated, or you want to escape responsibility, or you want to slip away from what is happening. And when we saw him there on the cross, spiritually speaking, we preferred to walk by like those who walked past the wounded man in the parable of the Good Samaritan; we abandoned him, we left him alone there, we hid our faces from him, and we did not esteem him.

He was not esteemed for who 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 have. Neither do we today, and one of the things I believe we must always remember, brothers and sisters, is that God calls us to esteem him, to correct that terrible failure of not having esteemed the Son of God as he deserved.

Tonight, when we give him glory and honor, we esteem him and say, you know what? We want to correct that wrong, that unforgivable wrong, that terrible wrong. That is what we do when we worship the Lord: we esteem him, we give him glory and honor, and we say to him, Lord, we do not want to be like that humanity which rejected you. We want to acknowledge who you are.

Let us finish now, because I do not want to… I believe we have done enough tonight to acknowledge what Christ has done on the cross of Calvary. But remember this: every time we gather in a meeting like this, every time we come to church on Sundays, every time we set aside time to worship the Lord, to sing as we have done, to listen to these beautiful songs of praise, what we are doing is esteeming the Lord, giving him the esteem he requires.

God wants us to be a people of worshipers, for us to understand what we are doing when we sing. Many people who perhaps do not understand these things may wonder, well, why do these evangelicals sing so much? Goodness, let them be satisfied with a little chorus and a hymn already, and let us get to what we came for. Brothers and sisters, we must understand more and more each day that one of the greatest ministries of God’s people is to give the Lord the esteem he deserves, the glory and honor he deserves.

Humanity has underestimated Jesus’ dignity for long enough, and one of the things the Lord says is, look, if you do not worship me, the stones will have to worship me, because the Son of God must be worshiped.

I say, Lord, help us to be a church of worshipers, a church that rejoices in giving You glory and honor, and help us correct humanity’s failure to give You the place You deserve. Brothers and sisters, one of the things the Lord is calling us to do, as we have said so many times these Sundays, is to honor His terrible sacrifice through our lives and the way we live.

You could spend hours expounding this passage and other passages of Scripture that remind us of everything our salvation cost the Lord. And because of that sacrifice, we must live lives surrendered to Him, serving Him. Tonight I ask that the Lord make each of us aware of how great a sacrifice purchased our salvation. And may we spend the rest of our days thanking the Lord for having had the graciousness, so to speak, to come into the world, give His life for us, suffer that horrible death, and live that life of perpetual agony—to be slowly consumed from the time He entered His mother’s womb as an embryo until the moment when, as a fully grown man, He suffered death on the cross of Calvary. You and I must remember.

That is why it is important. Many people do not like it; there are evangelicals who believe that Holy Week is a Catholic matter, as they say, and that it has nothing to do with us. No, it is for all humanity. I believe it is good for the church to take this week each year to remember that climactic time, because it was so important.

But we must live that way every day of our lives. One of the things we deeply desire is for this church also to be filled with people who know that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was extremely costly, and for us to live for Him, for His glory and honor—to live a life that honors Him, a life of consecration and surrender, giving all that we have and all that we are. Nothing you can give the Lord is sufficient to cover the debt you owe Him, especially when you consider that on His cross the Lord not only won your eternal salvation. Remember this: one of the things the Lord purchased for you and me is the fact that this world, this earth, this time and space we inhabit, is purely temporary and relative. Our true dwelling place and destiny lie beyond death, and that gives us incredible freedom, rest, and lightness of spirit. For those of us who have redemption through the blood of Christ Jesus, eternity is our destiny. That is what awaits us; life is an antechamber, merely a moment of waiting for what truly matters.

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

Christ purchased that privilege through His cross, His suffering, His affliction. Hallelujah! But you know, here in this life He also purchased for you and me blessing, healing, power, authority, hope, emotional reconciliation for our often-conflicted emotions and feelings, access to the throne of grace, the ability to come before the Father and present our needs to Him, the ability to change and become better each day, to have the energy and motivation to improve, to cast off our imperfections and character flaws, and each day become better, like Christ.

What we have here is a life of perpetual growth. Christ made it possible through His wounds, His death, His blood, His suffering, the lashes He received, the agony He experienced, and that cross that pierced His bones, tendons, and muscles. Today I know that He purchased life, and life in abundance, for me here on earth as well. Hallelujah!

His sacrifice on the cross—for our sin He was crucified—but through His crucifixion He won for us redemption on earth and the hope of eternal life with Him. Hallelujah! That is why nothing we do for Him in this world is excessive, because everything we are able to do is possible because He 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 mere beings bound to time and space who cease to exist when we die. How terrible that would be.

We know that is not so. I have eternal significance because Christ made it possible. Glory to His name. Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Now, for just a moment, bow your heads. Before you leave here tonight, I want you to take a moment to seal in your heart and spirit everything you have heard. Thank the Lord for everything we have done tonight and for being part of such a tremendously blessed family. I love the Lord more each day, and I want to serve Him more, be more useful to Him, and fall more deeply in love with the privilege of being part of a spiritual family like this one. Tonight I thank the Lord for all the blessings we have received. I thank Him for you, for what He is doing among us, for what He will do, and for those little children who now have a different destiny in our church and in our families because the Lord made it possible. This Latino community here in Boston, which God is blessing and raising up because His wounds still have an effect on us.

We give thanks to the Lord. We do not want to leave here saying, “Okay, we have done what we had to do; now I am leaving, and we can wipe the slate clean.” Take everything you have experienced home with you.