Isaiah 53:1-6
Not My Will, But Yours

Who has believed what we have heard?
    And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
    and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
    a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities
    and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
    struck down by God, and afflicted.
But 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.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
    we have all turned to our own way,
and the LORD has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

New Revised Standard Version

Look at the first line if this passage again. Isaiah, in the midst of writing down powerful images and messages from God, pauses to ask an eternally profound question: "who will believe this?"

The people of his time did not believe that they had left God; they thought they could live their lives as they wished and placate God by following many of the rules of the Law, but they were wrong. Isaiah himself probably choked at this message about the Messiah who would come to suffer, to be rejected by people, and to take on all our sins. Isaiah would have thought of the heroes of his people -- Abraham, Moses, Elijah -- and have to reconcile their greatness with the humility and suffering that God would place on the Messiah. But Isaiah was faithful to write the message God had sent, to believe that message, and to live his life by that promise to come.

More often, people have rejected that message. The religious leaders of Jesus' day were so interested in a Messiah to conquer the Romans--what they wanted--that they never seriously considered that Jesus might have been sent from God. The disciples argued in Mark 10 when James and John tried to politically manipulate themselves into positions of power in the kingdom to come, when Jesus contradicted their concept of what he was sent to do. We can see Judas Iscariot standing in the temple in Matthew 27, throwing the silver pieces back at the priests and yelling, "this isn't how I wanted it to be!" We see Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, ready to fight their way out of the ambush, when Jesus tells him to put away his sword. Peter must have been stunned by that command. It would have been just like him to argue, "Jesus, you must be crazy! We can defeat this band of thugs! Why, you even defeated storms at sea! What are you waiting for?!?"

If Peter had been awake just minutes earlier, and if he had listened carefully to the words Jesus whispered to his Father, he would have heard the answer, "Not my will, but Yours, God."

From 2000 years later, we can answer our children's questions about why Jesus had to die, but we cannot begin to fathom what it really meant--what it means--for Jesus to have taken all our sins from us and carried them to the grave. We, like Peter, deny that we have anything to do with his death, but when we can't run from that truth any more, we have to face that our sin, our rationalizations, and our assertion of our will against what God wants us to do, is why He had to die. That's not the way it should be!

But it was, and it is, and God's Way is the only perfect way. Ours is to believe, to give ourselves completely to God in obedience, and follow. Not my will, God, for my life, for today, for now in this moment, but Yours.