A sermon on Isaiah 53:1-11 by Rev Richard Keith on Sunday 31 May, 2026
God is good. He is our heavenly Father. He made us to bear his image and to reflect his goodness and love. He made us to be good and for our good, and something deep within us still remembers that. Because we know the world is not the way it should be. We feel it when trust is betrayed, when relationships break down, when the powerful take advantage of the weak. Something in us says: this is wrong. This is not how things were meant to be. And we are right.
But there is something else deep within us too: the instinct to make sure that the fault lies somewhere else— with politicians, with corporations, with another country, another social class, another political tribe. We are very good at identifying evil in other people; we are far less willing to recognise it in ourselves. It’s an instinct as old as the garden of Eden. When God confronted Adam, Adam blamed Eve. When God confronted Eve, she blamed the serpent. Ever since then, human beings have been passing the blame as far away from themselves as possible.
But the Bible says: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
These words from the apostle Paul cut deep. “All” have sinned—“all,” not some, not many, not just those people standing over there. “All” fall short of the glory for which they were made. Paul leaves no room for blame‑shifting or self‑justification. His words include every one of us.
Yet these words are also the beginning of hope. Because even as Paul says all have sinned, the next words are already waiting: and are justified freely by his grace. There is salvation for those who stop defending themselves and come to God for mercy. Because God is good. He made us good and he made us for our good, and he is not content to leave us in our guilt and misery. He will not abandon what he made and loves. His kindness and mercy are extended to all, and that includes us as well.
Today we are looking at Isaiah chapter 53, and in it we see that God has intervened on our behalf through his promised servant. Through his servant’s suffering we are offered healing, and through his obedience we find life. Isaiah never names him, but we know his name: it is Jesus.
Isaiah 53 begins, Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
Isaiah confesses that his message is hard to believe, because it speaks of God’s kindness that is so unexpected and so undeserved that it hardly seems real. When we are wronged or betrayed we either nurse our grudge till the day we die or we pretend that nothing happened to keep the peace. Real forgiveness—the genuine restoration of a broken relationship—is harder to give and harder to find. The hurts we deal out and the hurts we feel remain like wounds that never heal.
So while we think non‑believers will struggle to believe in an invisible Spirit that made the whole universe, or that a man who died on the cross showed himself alive three days later, the real mystery at the heart of the gospel is that the all‑good, all‑holy, all‑knowing God can forgive us after all that we have done.
Isaiah continues: He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
It describes the ordinariness of our Lord Jesus—born in a stable in Bethlehem and visited by shepherds; raised in Nazareth, the son of a carpenter. A man of peace rather than a warrior bent on conquest; a teacher rather than a commander; a healer rather than a killer. There was nothing about him that matched our ideas of greatness. Because our values are often shallow, we judge people by appearances and celebrate outward beauty, strength, and charisma. Like a tender shoot, like a root out of dry ground, Jesus seemed to come to the wrong place at the wrong time. His contemporaries wanted a warrior king, a conqueror, a liberator. Jesus came gentle and humble in heart. He was not the saviour people expected, and so many failed to recognise the saviour they needed.
As Isaiah said, He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Jesus was a hard man to ignore not because he was wealthy or sought attention, but because everywhere he went his words and actions forced people to make up their minds about him. He blessed the children, spoke with women, ate and drank with sinners, touched the lepers, welcomed the outcasts and the forgotten, and spoke out against those who used their power to oppress and exclude. To Jesus, it was simply what it meant for God’s kingdom to come and bring its blessings.
Some rejoiced and believed and left everything to follow him, but others were offended. He didn’t keep their rules; he didn’t keep himself away from the wicked and unclean. He challenged their right to determine who belonged to God’s chosen people and who didn’t. They despised him and rejected him as a sinner and a liar, and they made up their minds to get rid of him. It wasn’t enough for them to make him suffer; they wanted to destroy him in the most shameful and humiliating way—a way that convinced everyone that Jesus was under God’s curse and not his blessing. If they had only stoned him they risked turning him into a martyr and the crowd against them, so they conspired with the Romans to nail him to a cross.
As Isaiah said, Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Their conspiracy played upon a fear that runs deep within all of us: if a person prospers we assume God is pleased with them; if a person suffers they must have done something wrong. That’s precisely how many looked at Jesus. They saw the cross, the shame, the suffering, and concluded God had abandoned him. That’s why the priests and Pharisees mocked him as he died.
He saved others, but he can’t save himself, they taunted. He trusts in God; let God rescue him now if he wants him. And no rescue came. For them the conclusion seemed obvious: Jesus was under the curse of God, being punished for his many sins. What they saw was true—there was a cross, a man upon it, shame and suffering, and no one came to the rescue—but the conclusion was wrong. Jesus was under the curse of God, but not for his own sins. He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. The cross was not proof that Jesus had failed; it was proof that he had succeeded—not because he escaped suffering but because he endured it, not because he avoided our guilt but because he took it upon himself.
The wounds were real, the suffering was real, the judgment was real—but it was not falling on the guilty; it was falling on the innocent. Jesus was innocent not just because he never did anything wrong—there’s an easy way to never do anything wrong: never do anything at all—but because he always obeyed his Father’s will. By his words and actions, by his choices and values, Jesus showed he truly was who he claimed to be: God’s beloved Son. He showed this preeminently by obediently walking the path to the cross that his Father placed before him.
On that cross Jesus did not suffer for his own sin but so that sinners might be forgiven. He bore our sin, carried our guilt, and endured the judgment that should have fallen on us. On the cross Jesus became the lightning rod that received the full brunt of God’s condemnation on evil and sin to spare those who take shelter in him. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
As Isaiah said, We all, like sheep, have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Like Paul, Isaiah says All—not some, not many, but all of us like sheep. We do the worst possible thing to escalate a conflict; we act in ways that hurt ourselves and the people we love. Each of us has gone our own way and been lost, far from God, falling short of the glory we were made for—until our good shepherd Jesus came to be with us and to find us, and upon him was laid the punishment for the iniquity of us all.
Our guilt, our rebellion, our wandering—everything that separated us from God—was laid upon him. It’s a challenging message that cuts to the heart of who we think we are and who we want to be. I don’t want to be a sheep; I’m not proud of the ways I’ve gone astray, and it hurts to think that what I call my mistakes, God in his Word calls my iniquity. But finding the courage to see myself in the mirror of God’s Word, accepting responsibility for what I’ve done wrong, and owning my sin is not only the path to maturity but the way towards healing. We waste so much of our lives hurting ourselves and hurting each other, nursing grudges or pretending everything is fine so the wounds that stand between us never heal.
But God has intervened. He has not ignored our sin, pretended it doesn’t matter, or swept evil under the carpet. The wounds that stand between us and God are real. The guilt is real. The judgment is real. Which is exactly why Jesus went to the cross. Paul says we are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. To be justified is to be forgiven, found not guilty, treated just as if one had never sinned. To find redemption is to experience salvation—to be set free, rescued from our sin and all its terrible consequences.
As Paul says, God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood.
The cross is not God overlooking sin; the cross is God dealing with sin. The punishment fell; the judgment came; it fell upon the one who became one of us, who shared our humanity and walked the path of obedience that we had failed to walk. Because he was one of us, he could represent us. Because he was righteous, he could save us without having to save himself. And because he loved us, he chose to give himself for us.
What he achieved by his sacrifice is atonement—the making amends that restores a broken relationship, bringing two parties at one, moving from hostility to friendship, bringing peace. God did this for a very good reason: he is not like us. His ways are above our ways. He will not hold onto a grudge unnecessarily and will not pretend that nothing is wrong to keep the peace. Instead, he did what he must to make peace with us.
As Paul said, he did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
He did it to demonstrate his justice—not merely to show us his judgment but to show us how serious he is about making things right. A God who simply overlooked evil would not be good; he would be indifferent, and an indifferent God could never be trusted with our lives or our world.
But our God is just. He takes evil seriously, takes our sin seriously, and takes the wounds we have dealt and the wounds we carry seriously. So he dealt with them at the cross—completely, finally, once and for all—so that he could be both just and the one who justifies: both the righteous judge and the merciful Father, both the one who does not ignore sin and the one who freely forgives sinners.
This is the God Isaiah saw from a distance: a servant suffering, wounds that should have been ours, judgment falling on the innocent to set the guilty free. And this is the God Paul declares plainly: that in Christ Jesus the God who made us for good has done everything necessary to bring us home. The wounds are real. The healing is real. And his name is Jesus.