Our first reading is from Isaiah 53:4-12.

One of the problems with translations is that our english can miss the nuance, complexity, and downright bizarre phrases in the Old Testament. This section from Isaiah, a piece of what we hear on Good Friday, is difficult to understand. As scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, "the Hebrew words are unusual and the text is seemingly disordered, so that every translation is to some extent speculative." These words from Isaiah are poetic and filled with images that are hard to put into words. But there are hints of God's love that flutter in and out of the text. Like life itself, we don't always understand what we are experiencing or seeing but we are surrounded by slivers of God's love that we can grab. Those rays of love can carry us through. 

Since the beginning of the early church, we have read texts like Isaiah as a way to understand who Jesus is and what the Cross means. The Cross is a tool of death. It was used by governments as a way to execute troublemakers, revolutionaries, and criminals. But it wasn't designed just to kill. It was designed to humiliate. The goal wasn't just to kill the person. The goal was to make their death horrible by removing their integrity, honor, and dignity. Jesus didn't only die - he was humiliated to the point of being worth nothing. 

Yet it's the humiliated one, who is worth nothing, who is raised from the dead.

Isaiah 53 is a story that God's expectations and our expectations do not match. God will do what God does to love the world. This work doesn't work they way we think it should. We might not fully understand what Isaiah 53 is about but we can grab onto that sliver of truth that God doesn't work like we do. God's sense of justice, mercy, forgiveness, and love is bigger than what we could come up with. The call is to see what God is up to so we can see more clearly just what love looks like.