Jesus Bears our Burden
The Bible makes it clear that Jesus bears our burden. And if we believe that the Old Testament foreshadows the coming and the work of Jesus, we see burden-bearing even there. For instance, we can rejoice with the psalmist, saying, “Blessed be the Lord, Who bears our burdens and carries us day by day, even the God Who is our salvation! Selah [pause and calmly think of that!]!” (Ps. 68:19 AMP). Or we can lament with Isaiah over the pain of an innocent man and recite, “Surely he has born our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted” (Isa. 53:4). Remember, just because we thought God struck him down doesn’t mean God really did.
In the New Testament we see that Jesus “bore our sins in his body”—after all, in our sinfulness, we nailed him to the cross! (1 Pet. 2:21-24). We can say with the writer of Hebrews that Jesus “offered [himself] once to bear the sins of many” (9:28). Jesus carried the burden of our sin by allowing us, in our sinfulness, to put him to death. And we can almost feel his compassion for us as he says, “Come to me, all who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). But what does all this mean? How does Jesus bear our burden? . . . As the embodiment of God’s love, and true to the nature of that divine love, Jesus entered into our miseries. He took upon himself all the burdens of our human condition and suffered in solidarity with us and, out of love and compassion, identified with our sufferings, adversities, pains, and evils. He plunged himself into the depths of all our misfortunes, brought upon us and upon him by our sin. Jesus reveals that he shares our burdens by spending his life healing and working miracles on behalf of the downtrodden. He takes on our infirmities and bears our sicknesses (Isa. 53). He partook of our sins by bearing the consequences for them—consequences we inflicted on him.
These metaphors do not mean that he literally took on our sin or our infirmities as a mysterious imputation or had our punishment transferred to his person and, consequently, by his suffering satisfied the justice of God. That kind of penal suffering would only satisfy the very worst injustice. And think about it. If Jesus did take on the punishment for our sin, why would anyone need to suffer in an eternal hell? According to the penal and satisfaction theories, Jesus suffered for all humanity. He paid the price, satisfied the debt, and said “it is finished.” So it would be a grave injustice if God required two punishments for sin—one paid by Jesus and one paid by eternal suffering. Instead, Jesus took upon himself our sinning enmity by bearing all the abuse we handed out to him. He was painfully burdened by our fallen and broken condition, and he agonized with us in the most profound way possible—he suffered on account of our sin. Jesus knows how to treat his enemies—he suffered on account of our sin. Jesus knows how to treat his enemies—he suffers with them (us) as a friend. He suffers all our wickedness in order to win with his love.
Jesus took the burden of our sin, the heavy weight that sin incurs, as he suffered our sinful wrath on the cross—not God’s wrath, our wrath! Ephesians 2:3 calls human beings “children of wrath.” We’ve most often interpreted this verse backwards, as “we are sinners who will suffer God’s wrath.” But if we read it in context, we see that the wrath applies to us—it is our wrath toward each other (and even toward all creation), our wrath that works itself out through violence. Yes, as much as we don’t like to admit we, are children of wrath who resort to violence whenever the opportunity or the whim strikes us. We aimed our violence at Jesus. And we sinned by killing him. Our sin put him there. Our sin cursed him to suffer an unjust, horrific death. Out of love he did so (Gal. 3:13). He died in order to reveal the greatness of God’s grace, love, and desire to save us from the sin that executed him. By exposing sin, Jesus redeemed it. By loving us, Jesus forgave it. By submitting to it, Jesus stands in solidarity with all who suffer—he bears our burdens in a redemptive way—by exposing and hindering the cycle of sin and violence.
Jesus exposes the nature of human brokenness and our inclination to restore to violence at very turn. He let human beings execute him. He didn’t run away; he didn’t call down myriads of angels to smite the Romans or the Jewish leaders; he didn’t fight back with his own sword or let Peter lop off anyone’s head. He even fastened a slave’s ear back on after Peter’s first attempt and told him to stop the violence. He “fought” back with peaceful protest and allowed himself to be killed by the world’s wrath—by the children of wrath. In doing so, he exposed the heinous nature of our sinfulness and forced us to come ace to ace with the gravity of our own sin . . . Let’s look at how the people before and during the lives of Jesus and Paul might have understood substitution. In 4 Maccabees 5:1-6:30 . . . we have a story about Eleazar, a priestly leader during the Maccabean revolt. The tyrant king, Antiochus, knowing that the law forbade Jews to eat pork, commanded Eleazar to eat a pig. Of course he refused. So Antiochus tortured him by flogging him until his flesh hung in bloody strips from his body. He kicked Eleazar and beat him, burned him with fire, and poured horrid liquids into his nose. Finally Eleazar spoke his last words before dying. He lifted his eyes to God and said: “You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am dying in burning torments for the sake of the law. Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs” (6:27-30; I added the italics).
What did Eleazar mean? In essence he’s suggesting that his suffering substitutes for those who come after him, that his shed blood purifies them, and his life is given to they don’t have to give theirs. Finally, we see that “the tyrant [Antiochus] was punished, and the homeland a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel . . . “ (4 Macc. 17:21-23). Now this does not mean that Eleazar paid the price for the sin of the nation, or that he was punished in the place of the people. The writer used the metaphor of substitution and ransom in order to communicate an important truth. The deaths of those like Eleazar exposed the violence and sin of the oppressors and led to their downfall, cessation of sin, and violence against the people. His suffering (and other martyrs like him) helped to stop the suffering of people in the future. By exposing the cycle of violence in those times, he helped to end it. In essence, he died so that many others didn’t have to. (Sharon L. Baker, Executing God: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About Salvation and the Cross [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013], 135, 136-37, 150)
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