We are at the end of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week.  The last of our love songs depicts the brutal reality of the Jesus’ Passion.  However, we miss the point of Jesus’ love for us if we recoil and dismiss the cross.  Read these words as a LOVE SONG, an expression of grace, forgiveness, and new life that Jesus’ resurrection opens up to the world.  Remember:

Out of his anguish he shall see light;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.     — Isaiah 53:11

Scripture:

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.

He 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,
    so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
    Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
    stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
    and there was no deceit in his mouth. 

 — Isaiah 53:4-9