German theologian, Franz Delitzsch, wrote the following about Isaiah, Chapter 53:
It is the most central, the deepest, and the loftiest thing that the Old Testament prophecy, outstripping itself, has ever achieved.
I share this version here, as I find it beautifully expressed.
Isaiah 53:2b-7 (NLT)
There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance,
nothing to attract us to him.
He was despised and rejected—
a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.
We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.
He was despised, and we did not care.
Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;
it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
We thought his troubles were a punishment from God,
a punishment for his own sins!
But he was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole.
He was whipped so we could be healed.
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.
He was oppressed and treated harshly,
yet he never said a word.
He was led like a lamb to the slaughter.
And as a sheep is silent before the shearers,
he did not open his mouth.
In his final moments, Jesus does receive the sour wine—having refused it earlier— offered on a long reed. With his body drained of fluid, it is the only way he will manage that final cry:
It is finished! Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.