This was one of the marks by which Israel was to know his Christ. He was to be a Man of sorrows. The power by which He was to draw men to Himself, the charm by which He was to keep men near Himself, was not to be the charm of cheerfulness, not the pleasantness of His speech or the gladness of His character; it was to be just the opposite of this; it was to be His acquaintance with grief.
I. His own personal life was a sorrowful one. He was away from home, from His Father's presence. He was a Stranger in a strange land. From His childhood He was full of thoughts which He could not utter, because, if uttered, they were not understood. He was a lonely man. His sympathy with others by no means implied their sympathy with Him.
II. But His sorrows, like His labours, were for others. (1) Jesus Christ sorrowed over bodily suffering; (2) He sorrowed over mental suffering; (3) He sorrowed over spiritual suffering.
III. He was a Man of sorrows also, and chiefly, in relation to sin. (1) He had to see sin; (2) He had to bear sin.
IV. The subject teaches (1) that if it is as a Man of sorrows that Jesus Christ comes to us, it must be, first of all, as a memento of the fitness of sorrow to our condition as sinful men. (2) Again, only a Man of sorrows could be a Saviour for all men, and for the whole of life. (3) Sorrow, however deep, has its solaces and its compensations. (a) Whatever it be, it is of the nature of sorrow to bring a man nearer to truth, nearer to reality, nearer therefore to hope. (b) Sorrow makes a man more useful. It gives him a new experience and a new sympathy.
V. The question remains, How do we stand, we ourselves, in reference to this Saviour?
C. J. Vaughan, Christ the Light of the World,p. 88.
I. In trying to bring into view some of the leading sorrows of our Lord's life, it is impossible not to begin with one which lay at the bottom of them all that, namely, which arose from His close contact with the sin and defilement of this fallen and guilty world. The fact of our Lord's becoming a man involved the necessity of His living in immediate contact with what of all things in the universe was the most repulsive, hateful, and horrible to His soul. No doubt there were many beautiful things in the world, and even in men's lives, that could not but interest Him; but there was an awful drawback in the case of all. It was a world in arms against its Lord, a world divorced from its God.
II. The sorrow of unrequited love. "He came to His own and His own received Him not." There is something very sad in the repulse of a generous love and a love that seeks truly and disinterestedly the welfare of those loved; and we learn from Scripture that the rejection of His loving offers cut very deeply into the heart of Jesus.
III. A third grief arose from what is called, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the contradiction of sinners against Himself. He had to endure a great amount of keen, active opposition, often of a peculiarly trying kind. Looking at the number and variety of His enemies, He might have said, "They compassed Me about like bees." Hardly ever did He undertake an unembarrassed journey, or spend an easy hour. The contradiction of sinners became only more intense the longer He laboured. And it was the more trying because it was so successful.
IV. Among the sorrows of Jesus we notice, next, those which came from the infirmities of His own disciples. (1) There were vexations arising from their want of understanding, want of sympathy with Him in the great purposes of His life. (2) There were disappointments arising from their want of faith and of the courage of faith.
V. The last of the special griefs of Jesus was the sorrow of His last conflict; the grief, so peculiar and so intense, of what He often called His hour. It is apparent, from all the records of His life, that our blessed Lord looked forward to His last span of life as one of peculiar horror. At this solemn crisis of His life, more than at any other part of it, it was His lot to feel the position of the sinbearer and the scapegoat the position of one who stood in the sinner's place and bore the sinner's doom. It was then that God said, "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow."
W. G. Blaikie, Glimpses of the Inner Life of Our Lord,p. 151.
I. There is an instance in Scripture, but we believe it stands alone, of Christ feeling and displaying gladness of spirit. A solitary exception there is to the melancholy description, "A Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;" and by examining the exception we may get clearer views of the general character of Christ's sufferings. " In that hourJesus rejoiced in spirit" an hour in which there had been given Him such proofs of the prevalent power of His name as assured Him that through His sacrifice the kingdom of Satan would be finally demolished. In that hour the Saviour forgot the load of His griefs, and beheld Himself through His sacrifice exalted as a conqueror. For a moment He saw "the travail of His soul and was satisfied."
II. Christ seems to make it matter of thanksgiving that the Gospel had been "hid from the wise and prudent and revealed only to babes." And surprise might naturally be felt at this. Could the joy of the Redeemer have sprung from the thought that any were to perish? Is it not strange that an instance like this an instance in which gladness is associated with anything so fearful as the everlasting destruction of the proud and self-sufficient that this should be the single recorded exception to the accuracy of the melancholy description set forth in our text? It cannot be that Christ gave thanks because His gospel was hid from the wise and prudent; but He rejoices that though God had hid these things from the wise and prudent, He had nevertheless revealed them unto babes. Why might not the Saviour give thanks that the propagation of His gospel was to be such as would secure the honour of His Father? When with prophetic glance He looked onward to the struggle of His Church, and saw that in every land and in every age there would flow in multitudes of the mean and illiterate, while those excluded would be, for the most part, the mighty and the learned excluded only because too proud to enter; and when He thought how God would prevent the glorying of any flesh in His presence by thus choosing the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and the foolish things to confound the wise, and thus out of the mouths of babes and sucklings perfecting praise, we know not why He might not, in perfect consistence with that love which embraced every child of man, rejoice in the prospect on which He gazed ay, though this rejoicing was the single exception to that intense, that ever overpressing sadness which is indicated in the emphatic and plaintive description of our text "A Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2331.
References: Isaiah 53:3. W. Brock, Penny Pulpit,No. 693; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 79; D. Davies, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvii., p. 53; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1099; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 336; J. Keble, Sermons for Holy Week,p. 102; R. Milman, The Love of the Atonement,pp. 117, 138, 150, 171, 183, 202.