Every one of us is broken at some point or another. When we hear the word healing, we often think first of physical sickness, but there is physical sickness, mental sickness, emotional sickness and spiritual sickness. We need healing in all these areas of life. The important thing is that we desire to be healed and that we come to God with hope. If we sit as though half the battle is already lost, then half the battle is already gone. Hope means believing that Jesus can touch us, heal us and work in our lives.
But hope itself rests on something deeper: the love of God. Love is the foundation of every genuine relationship, and it must be the foundation of our relationship with Jesus. We all search for love. Sometimes we even narrow the word until we speak of “falling in love” only in a romantic sense, but love belongs also in our relationship with parents, children, relatives and the people God places in our lives. Yet when it comes to our relationship with God, Scripture turns our usual way of thinking around. The First Letter of John says, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
The relationship begins not with what we have done for God, but with what He has done for us. If we want to understand His love, that is where we must begin.
Do Not Calculate God’s Love by Your Blessings
We all want to experience God’s love, but very often we also want to calculate it. We look at the blessings we have received and say, “God loves me. That is why I have been blessed.” But then what happens when brokenness comes into the same life?
If blessings are the proof that God loves us, logically we would have to say that brokenness means He does not love us. We know that cannot be true. This is why we should never calculate God’s love according to the blessings we have received. When brokenness comes, that calculation leaves us without an answer. There has been, and there will be, one decisive indication of God’s love for humanity: the Cross.
John 3:16 tells us that God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son. And for what was the Son given? He was given to die a humiliating death on a cross. The Cross is the greatest sign and the greatest revelation of God’s love. If you want to know how much God loves you, look at the Cross. Do not look first at your blessings. Blessings are a by-product. They are not the main thing.
The difficulty is that Christians can become too used to the Cross. We see it in churches and homes, we wear it around our necks, and over time we can take it for granted. We no longer feel its intensity. We lose its meaning and depth. Isaiah forces us to look again.
Isaiah 52:14 speaks of the Servant whose appearance was so marred that He was beyond human semblance. We are often used to seeing a neat and clean Jesus on the Cross, perhaps with a few trickles of blood. But Isaiah gives us nothing neat. He describes a body so broken and disfigured that He hardly looked human.
That is why I have always been taken up by the portrayal of Jesus’ death in The Passion of the Christ. Many people have said that the violence is exaggerated, that there is too much blood, that no one could survive something like that. But Isaiah describes the Servant as marred beyond human semblance. The Cross was not something beautiful to look at. Jesus was broken and shattered.
Isaiah then says, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2). Jesus was a King, but there was no visible majesty on that Cross.
The King Who Carried His Own Throne
I remember visiting the palace in Jaipur and seeing the king there. I had expected something grand. He wore his turban and certainly looked like a king, but people moved around him almost as though he were an ordinary man. It struck me because when we think of kings, we expect splendour, ceremony and majesty.
Jesus was truly a King, but look at the kingship given to Him at Calvary. His crown was a crown of thorns. The sceptre of a king became the nails driven into His hands. The royal purple became His own blood. And the throne given to Him was the Cross.
Have you ever heard of a king carrying his throne? Kings are carried on their thrones. In earlier times even popes were carried in that manner. The heavier the person, the harder the work for those carrying him, but the king himself did not carry the throne. Jesus is the only King who carried His own throne. He carried the Cross and then He was hung upon it.
Isaiah continues by describing Him as despised and rejected, “a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity” (Isaiah 53:3). He was not broken because of His own sin, His own mistakes or His own faults. The prophet explains why He looked so shattered: “Surely He has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases” (Isaiah 53:4).
You and I were supposed to carry this brokenness. You and I were supposed to carry the consequences of sin. If Jesus looks so shattered on the Cross, it is because of you and me. That is God’s portrayal of love.
Yet Isaiah says that we accounted Him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. We may say that we would never think like that. But whenever Jesus’ death on the Cross makes no impact on our hearts, we begin to behave as though it is somebody else’s matter. It happened long ago. It is over. It is God’s problem. It has nothing to do with me.
Isaiah will not allow us to keep that distance. “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the punishment that made us whole, and by His bruises we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Everything portrayed on the Cross was for you and for me.
If you and I can speak of being whole and complete, it is not because of family traditions, educational qualifications, wealth, beauty or health. None of these things can make us whole. If there is one reason we can speak of wholeness, it is because of Jesus’ death on the Cross. If there is lasting meaning in our lives, it is because He died for us.
Whenever you look back at your life and ask, “Lord, where can I find Your love? Why can I not experience Your love?” do not look everywhere else. Look at the Cross. Isaiah says that by His bruises we are healed. By someone else’s bruises, you and I have been healed.
Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). What kind of friends has Jesus found in you and me? Friends who have betrayed Him, friends who have lived lives of sin, friends who have pushed Him onto the Cross, and yet He calls us friends.
Isaiah says that all of us have gone astray and turned to our own ways. That is not difficult to recognise. We often justify our own way because the world around us says it is acceptable, and then we persuade ourselves that it must therefore be acceptable in our own lives. But the prophet does not leave the burden with us alone. He says that the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
He Bore Our Iniquity
Isaiah 53:6 says that all of us, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned to our own ways, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Think for a moment about what that means. Would you punish your own child for something another person’s child had done? No parent wants a child to suffer for somebody else’s wrongdoing.
I remember a family at the Divine Retreat Centre whose children were attending the children’s retreat. The older child was involved in pulling another child’s dress, and the dress tore. She was not the only child responsible, but when the teachers told her father what had happened, he disciplined his daughter in front of them. Afterwards he came to me and said that he had not liked what he had done because his daughter was not the only one at fault. He felt the pain of putting the blame and punishment on his own child when another child shared the responsibility. If an earthly father can feel that pain, how much pain would the Father have felt when our iniquities were laid upon His Son?
I have often wondered how much pain the Father must have had seeing Jesus broken on that Cross. If there had been a flood of rain over Calvary, I have imagined it as the tears of the Father crying for His Son. He knew that His children would find salvation through the humiliation and death of His Son.
Isaiah then says that the Servant “was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent” (Isaiah 53:7). That image of the lamb has always been very concrete for me.
During my seminary years we sometimes slaughtered goats and pigs for food. Before anyone becomes too shocked, remember that many people are willing to eat what somebody else has had to prepare. The pigs resisted fiercely. The lambs were different. They came quietly. They trusted the person leading them.
I also remember seeing sheep being shorn near Perth. To someone visiting from India, the whole thing looked almost like a show. Once the wool had been removed, the sheep looked clean. But underneath there could be cuts and blood. It remained quiet, and only that sheep knew how much pain it was carrying.
Isaiah uses exactly that image. Jesus accepted the will of the Father. Silently He hung on the Cross. He bled and died for you and for me.
If you want an indication of God’s love, you will not find a greater one. You can spend your life counting every blessing you have received, but it will never compare with what God has done for you on the Cross. And remember one thing: He did not wait for your holiness before doing it.
Romans 5:8 says, “God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” He did not wait for us to change. He did not wait for us to undergo a transformation. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. I call that unconditional love.
He Loves Us Before We Change
Human love is very often conditional. We love when people respond to us. If I speak to you and you ignore me completely, I will feel it. You may look at me and say, “That priest has an attitude. He thinks he is something great.” And if you treat me in the same way, I can feel exactly the same. I may be a priest, but I am also human. We human beings are like that.
As long as we receive the response we want, it is easy to be good and sweet. When the response changes, our love is tested. We see it in marriage. We see it between parents and children. We may speak of unconditional love, but when a spouse changes, when a child grows up and makes choices we dislike, when somebody becomes difficult or embarrassing, we quickly discover the conditions we had placed around our love.
I once met a young married woman at the retreat centre whose story showed how terrible conditional love can become. She had fallen in love with a man from a Hindu family. Believing that her parents would never permit the marriage, she married him civilly and began living with him. A few months later her father and brothers found her. They persuaded her to come with them by saying that her mother was ill and wanted to see her. Instead, they abducted her and confined her in a remote farmhouse.
She was pregnant with twins. Her family regarded her marriage and pregnancy as an embarrassment and tried violently to end the pregnancy. Eventually they brought in a doctor who performed an abortion against her will. Afterwards she had to endure the physical and emotional horror of losing the remains of her children over several days, and she buried them herself.
When she spoke to me, she wept. She told me that she had been the only daughter, a high-achieving student and a source of great pride to her family. They had been proud of her as long as she lived according to their expectations. The moment she chose a man they did not accept, she became an embarrassment. They were even prepared to endanger her life in order to protect their reputation.
Human love can be very conditional. We wait for people to change before we give love, or we withdraw our love when they no longer meet our conditions. But Jesus loves you just the way you are.
He loves you with your holiness, your brokenness, your pain, your sadness, your sickness, your weaknesses, with everything. He took up the Cross even while we were sinners. This does not remove the call to change. It shows us why we change.
We respond to God’s love. We do not change because we want God to love us. We change because we love God. If there has to be a change in our hearts, it is because we love God, not because we are trying to make God love us. God did not wait for us to become worthy before Christ died for us. Even if a person refuses to change, Jesus would still say, “My child, I love you just the way you are.” That is what I call pure love.
So when you look back over your life and ask, “Lord, where can I find Your love?” do not look anywhere else. Look at the Cross. By His bruises we are healed. He carried our infirmities, our transgressions and our iniquity. He took up the Cross even while we were sinners. If you want to change, do not change because you want God to love you. Change because you love God.
Let us never take the Cross for granted or lose its meaning and depth. What Jesus has done for us will not go to waste. He took up the Cross, He was humiliated and He suffered. If you and I have any salvation, it is because of Jesus’ death on that Cross. It is because Jesus loves you.