He is despised and rejected. — Better, for the last word, forsaken. This had been the crowning sorrow of the righteous sufferer of the Old Testament (Job 17:15; Job 19:14). It was to complete the trial of the perfect sufferer of the New (Matthew 26:56).
A man of sorrows... — The words “sorrow” and “grief” in the Heb. imply the thought of bodily pain or disease. (Comp. Exodus 3:7; Lamentations 1:12; Lamentations 1:18.) Men have sometimes raised the rather idle question whether the body of our Lord was subject to disease, and have decided on à priori grounds that it was not. The prophet’s words point to the true view, that this was an essential condition of His fellowship with humanity. If we do not read of any actual disease in the Gospel, we at least have evidence of an organisation every nerve of which thrilled with its sensitiveness to pain, and was quickly exhausted (Luke 8:46; John 4:6; Mark 4:36). The intensity of His sympathy made Him feel the pain of others as His own (Matthew 8:17), the “blood and water” from the pierced heart, the physical results of the agony in Gethsemane (Luke 22:44; John 19:34), indicate a nature subject to the conditions of our humanity.
We hid as it were... — Literally, As the hiding of the face from us, or, on our part. The words start from the picture of the leper covering his face from men, or their covering their own faces, that they might not look upon him (Leviticus 13:45). In Lamentations 4:15, we have a like figurative application. (Comp. also Job 19:13-19; Job 30:10.