Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. – Isaiah 53:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (June 29, 2017): Isaiah 53

Abraham Lincoln was once asked what it felt like to lose and election. His response was that “he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark.” He said that “he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.” While we want to be on the winning side of life, most of us end up understanding the emotion that Lincoln was trying to describe more than the elation of the win. We lose much more often. Life sometimes seems to be just a balance sheet of wins and losses.

I am competitive. I love to play the game. And even as a child playing adult games with my father and grandfather, I learned the art of losing. It was years before I ever really won competing against them. And maybe that is why I am convinced that losing is more important than winning. I am not sure that I have lost enough. Even I have to admit that sometimes I don’t try because I am not sure that it is possible for me to win. It is in the losses that I learn the game. It is in those moments when I feel like a child who stubbed his toe in the dark, too old to cry yet in too much pain to laugh, that I learn the secrets to winning. Losing, sometimes, is the more significant achievement. It just doesn’t feel that way.

Life creates its winners and losers. Because of my competitive nature, I have never really understood the idea of playing just for fun. Fun was winning and losing was a chance to learn. If you remove the loss, you remove the win – and the fun – and so, under those circumstances, I never really could understand the point in playing the game.

I think that Isaiah 53 is one of the most beautiful passages of Scripture in the Bible, and it teaches us a different lesson about winning and losing. Sometimes you lose so that others can win. The description of the Suffering Servant, and for Christians, the description of the Messiah, is that he will be the one who loses. And the loss is total. Not only will he suffer, but we (the human race) will consider him to be punished by God. But the pain will not be his own; it will be ours. He will lose to give us a chance to win. It is a beautiful concept that God would dare to leave his throne to be beaten and scarred by us, that the God of all Creation would become that scared little child stubbing his toe in the dark, too old to cry yet in too much pain to laugh.  

But the reality of Isaiah 53 goes beyond the idea of the Suffering Servant and extends to us, the ones responsible for carrying the message of Christ to the world. We are the ones called to suffer on behalf of the world, to be like Christ – to lose so that the world can win. But that seems hard for us to do. We appear to be hard-wired to win, to be right. Our pride is strong, and we do not even want to appear to be weak. And yet this is the model that Jesus Christ has left for us.

We are to be willing to lose so that a world in need can win.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 54