Pastor Thomas Terry preaches on the profound beauty found in the ugliness of Christ's crucifixion, drawing from Isaiah 53:3-5. In our culture obsessed with curated beauty and polished appearances, Thomas argues that we have been trained to see beauty only in the obvious places, causing us to miss the deeper beauty found in the ordinary, messy, and even broken aspects of life. This sermon explores how Isaiah's prophecy, written 700 years before the crucifixion, reveals the stunning paradox of the cross: the most gruesome and shameful event in human history is simultaneously the most comprehensively beautiful. Terry walks through Isaiah's description of the suffering servant who was despised and rejected, showing how the crowd saw only ugliness while missing the substitutionary beauty underneath. The cross is beautiful not because it is pleasant to look at, but because it represents perfect justice and perfect love intersecting as Christ bore our griefs, carried our sorrows, and was pierced for our transgressions. The wounds of Christ are not regrettable scars but eternal beauty marks that prove the price of our redemption.
Transcript
Opening
Good evening, family. This evening we’re going to be looking at Isaiah chapter 53, verses 3 through 5. If you would please turn with me in your Bibles there. If you don’t have a Bible, there should be some Bibles in the front seat in the basket beneath that seat. You’re welcome to use that Bible tonight.
We are a culture obsessed with beauty. We see it in almost every facet of our life: skincare routines trying to preserve what is already fading, home renovation shows where something unlivable gets transformed into something stunning, perfectly curated Instagram feeds, filters on every photo before it ever sees the light of day. We are constantly editing reality in an attempt to curate beauty. We’re always adjusting the frame, the lighting, the angle, and I get it. I’m not above it. I can appreciate a well-designed space. I notice good typography and horrible fonts. I spend more time than I’d like to admit looking for the right angle for a photo.
But here’s what all that curation has done to us. It’s trained us. It’s formed us to believe that beauty only lives in the obvious places, in the polished, in the produced, in the things that are manufactured to stop the scroll and make you feel or buy. We’ve been discipled to expect beauty to be loud and performative. And because of that, we’ve lost the ability to see beauty elsewhere.
But if you slow down and really pay attention, the most beautiful things in your life are almost never the curated ones. It’s in the ordinary. The older couple in their 70s walking slowly down the street, hands interlocked. No one’s filming that. No one’s posting that. It doesn’t trend. But there’s something deep down inside where everybody knows that is real beauty.
We can even see beauty in the messy. Think about a baby eating his own food for the first time. Have you seen that experience? Sweet potato all on the forehead, pushed deep into the nostrils, smashed peas on the bib, on the tray, on your shirt. It’s a disaster. There’s nothing Instagram-worthy happening here. But you cannot take your eyes off of it. Because something real is happening. A tiny person is discovering the world has flavor and that someone will keep putting the spoon back in front of them no matter how many times they knock it away. That’s messy, but it’s beautiful. And if you’ve only been trained to see the beauty in the polished, then you will most certainly miss it.
Push a little further and you will see beauty in the broken. Think about an old barn. And I’m not talking about the restored ones that someone turned into a wedding venue with the Edison bulbs and the reclaimed wood. I’m talking about the real kind of old school barn, left alone for 40 years, boards bent by the rain, paint peeling back to show four different decades underneath, a roof that’s given up on one side and then folded over the other. You know, photographers drive hours to find barns like that. I’m married to one. They long for those kinds of broken photos because there is something about a thing broken by time and still standing. The history pressed into the wood, the way light comes through the gaps at a certain hour makes you feel like you’re standing inside of something sacred. It’s not beautiful in spite of the brokenness, it is beautiful because of it.
And then there are the places beauty shows up and it literally makes no sense. A hospital room where a family is gathered, praying through tears. Or a person who finally decides to stop hiding their sin and turns in radical repentance. The scene is messy and honest and costly. You will see the tears and think grief. You will see the confession and think weakness. We will see the brokenness and not know that we are standing in the middle of something holy.
You see, real beauty doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need perfect lighting, it just is. And you either have eyes to see it or you’ve been trained not to. But if it’s true that the deepest beauty in this world is found in the ordinary, in the overlooked, in the messy and the broken, then it’s also true that beauty can be found in the ugly and I would say even in the gruesome.
And tonight my hope is simple. I want to help you to have eyes to see the beauty of the cross and to see the glory in an instrument of Roman execution. Because there has never been anything more offensive to the eye, more brutal, more shameful, more visibly ugly, and yet at the same time there has never been anything more comprehensively beautiful in all the world.
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 53 (ESV)
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
Family, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Opening Prayer
Let’s pray. Our Father and our God, we do thank you for your word. And we pray tonight that you would be our tour guide. Turning our eyes, turning our hearts, turning our affections to that which is the most gruesome thing in this world. But at the same time, the most beautiful thing in this world. And that is the bloody cross on which our beautiful Savior died. Help us to see the beauty tonight. We pray these things in the name of our suffering servant Jesus, amen.
Main Point 1: Understanding the Prophecy
What we’re looking at tonight is a fascinating passage. It’s hard to describe exactly what this is. But if I was to try and simplify it, this passage is in part a kind of prophetic poem written by the prophet Isaiah about the crucifixion. 700 years before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. 700 years before Jesus enters into human history. Before the Roman Empire. Before the Romans even invented the concept of the crucifixion. And Isaiah describes the scene as if he’s standing right there watching it happen in real time.
Now at first glance, that kind of predictive precision might seem like the most remarkable part of the story. But it’s not. The amazement of a 700-year-old prophecy being fulfilled is quickly eclipsed by the unsettling, almost disorienting beauty of what’s actually being prophesied. Isaiah in a dark and beautiful poem pens with the intention of pointing us forward to Jesus, the suffering servant.
Main Point 2: The World’s Response to the Suffering Servant
Notice Isaiah doesn’t open up this poem with theology. He doesn’t begin with titles or with doctrine. He actually begins with a kind of social commentary by focusing our attention on the people and how they treated the suffering servant. He writes that he was despised and rejected by men, that he was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised and we people esteemed him not.
Every word he pens is specific and it’s packed with meaning. And so what I want to do is spend some time to deal with these very specific words that Isaiah chose to use to see exactly what he means.
He begins with the word despised and when we hear that we assume that he means that he was hated by men. But in the original language that word is more of a settled indifference, not fierce rejection but a deliberate dismissal of what’s in front of you. Which means the people didn’t glance at him with hatred, they glanced and they kept moving. They looked, they took in, they evaluated what they were seeing in front of them and then they made a decision. This man and his situation is worthless. They saw his suffering, they considered his condition, they weighed it and decided that it wasn’t worth any of their attention.
And notice Isaiah says despised twice. He was despised and we esteemed him not and that’s not by accident, that’s the prophet pressing the point with his pen, driving it deep down so as to reveal that their rejection was not partial. It wasn’t a misunderstanding, it was complete and it was deliberate. They saw and they deliberately turned away.
Isaiah then describes him as a man of sorrows which is not simply a man full of sadness, it means a man of many pains. So when they saw his pains, they looked long enough to know that he was in excruciating pain. And so they saw him with indifference while knowing every single detail. It is to look away having seen enough of this situation.
Isaiah also writes that he was acquainted with grief, a phrase describing someone who has a disease. In other words, his suffering was so severe and so prolonged that he looked like he was sick with the disease.
And then the phrase, as one from whom men hide their faces, you know what that is? That is social death. That’s what happens when suffering becomes visible and ugly. No one knows what to do with it. The situation is so raw, so uncomfortable, so outside the frame of normal life that people close their eyes and cross the street. They look down, they turn away, not because they’re angry but because it’s too gruesome and ugly to look at.
Family, I want you to sit in that ugliness tonight because this isn’t just Israel’s failure 700 years ago, this is humanity’s failure today. The world wants triumph and strength. We want a Savior who looks like a Savior but God sent a suffering servant who was despised, who was rejected, whose appearance was marred beyond human semblance. The world looked and made a decision. They esteemed him not. That’s not an uncomfortable truth. That is an honest reality. We see the ugliness of what’s happening and rather than take time to see what’s underneath it, to see the beauty, we just look away.
Main Point 3: The Beautiful Reality Beneath the Ugliness
But look at what happens in verse 4. Here the poem flips everything upside down. You see, up to this point, Isaiah has been describing the servant from the outside, what he looked like, how people responded, all of its surface. But now the camera shifts and we’re brought underneath to see what’s actually happening.
He writes, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. That word borne is not a casual word. It’s the same word used in Leviticus when the scapegoat bears the sins of the people and carries them out into the wilderness. It means to take something up, to lift a burden off of someone else and place it squarely on yourself. So this is no quick exchange, no momentary handoff. This is sustained and intentional and costly. He doesn’t just notice the burden on our back or touch the burden on our back. He picks it up and carries it, which is really the quite opposite of what the people did to him. They noticed his burden and they walked away.
And then notice the possessives, our griefs, our sorrows. This is not grief in general, not abstract suffering somewhere out there. It’s ours. It’s personal. It’s specific. And rather than leave us with it, he carried it. This isn’t just a description, family, of suffering. This is a description of substitution.
Look at the second half of verse 4. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. The crowd is watching someone die under what looks like divine judgment. And they draw the obvious conclusion. God must be punishing this man. He must have done something wrong to deserve this.
And here is the deepest irony of this entire passage. They were right about the mechanism, but wrong about the direction. God was striking. There was real, righteous, holy wrath being poured out on the cross, but it wasn’t for the servant’s sin. It was for ours.
Verse 5 tells us, but he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
Family, every single word here is load-bearing. He was pierced, which is a word used for a sword wound, when a dagger drops deep into the chest. This is a body being punctured and broken open. And then the intensity only escalates from pierced to being crushed, from a wound to demolition. What Isaiah is saying here is that he was pulverized, ground to dust.
And then we get these prepositions. For what reason was he pulverized? Why was he pierced? For our transgressions. For our iniquities. Because our sin, not his. God did not look at our sin and decide to let it aside. He didn’t overlook our sin. He didn’t wave it off. He demanded that it be paid, and then he sent his only beautiful son to pay it.
The chastisement that we deserve because of our sin fell on him, and the result, family, is peace. We should have gotten divine wrath, but instead he got wrath, and we got peace. And to be clear, this peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but wholeness, full relational restoration. Everything that sin had fractured has been healed.
His chastisement, our peace. His wounds, our healing. Paul says it this way in 2nd Corinthians 5
, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Our sin laid on him, his righteousness given to us. Our guilt laid on him, his healing given to us. This is not just beautiful poetry. This is beautiful salvation, the great exchange.Main Point 4: The Gruesome Beauty of the Cross
But this beauty, this stunning life-giving beauty, comes through the most gruesome, violent, and shameful event in human history, and I don’t want us to move past the ugly. I don’t want you to turn your eyes away. Listen, we tend to sanitize this story. We have turned the crucifixion into gold jewelry and stained glass. And so what I want to do tonight is to help you see, with eyes wide open, the beauty, to hear this poem written 700 years ago, fulfilled in the passion.
The God of heaven looked at humanity he made, hopeless and dead in their sin, and he sent his son, his only son, his beautiful son. In fact, the glory of God, the very beauty of God is found in the face of Jesus Christ, his son. And in love, the Father sent that glory into the world and the world hated him for it. He was rejected by his own people and handed over to the machinery of an empire by the religious establishment that was supposed to be waiting for him.
After this mock trial, Pilate, the Roman governor, had him scourged. Matthew gives it one word and moves on, but a Roman scourging was a leather whip embedded with metal and bones designed to shred flesh down to the rib cage. Men died under it. Then the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and pressed it into his head, and they put a reed in his hand as a mock scepter. They knelt before him in a pantomime of worship. Then they took the reed back and used it to drive the thorns deeper. Every gesture of adoration performed as desecration.
He was too broken to carry his own cross, so the soldiers pulled a stranger from the crowd, Simon of Cyrene, and forced him to carry it. An unwilling stranger did what the 12 disciples should have done.
On the road to Golgotha, women were weeping for him, and Jesus turned to them mid-collapse, blood running down his face, and said, Don’t weep for me. Weep for yourselves. The man walking to his own execution is still pastoring women.
At Golgotha, they nailed him to wood, iron spikes through his wrist and his feet. And while the nails were still fresh, Luke records that Jesus prayed, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The intercession doesn’t happen after the atonement, family. It happens during it, as the nails are piercing through him.
The soldiers gambled for his clothes at the foot of the cross. John tells us his tunic was seamless, woven in one piece, the garment of a priest. They didn’t tear it. They cast lots for it. Soldiers unknowingly fulfilling a psalm written 1,000 years before it even happened.
Criminals beside him hurled insults. But then one thief looked over and said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus, suffocating, answered, Today you will be with me in paradise. On his way to death, he receives a sinner. The first man welcomed into the new Eden is a dying criminal.
At noon, the sky went black. Three hours of darkness at midday. It wasn’t an eclipse. Passover is always a full moon. This was something entirely different. And out of the darkness came the most devastating prayer ever prayed. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The eternal son, who had never known a single moment of separation from the father, experienced the full weight of God’s wrath. This is what Isaiah meant when he said he was smitten by God.
Near the end, Jesus said, I thirst, and they lifted a sponge of sour wine on his lips on a hyssop branch. Do you understand the significance of hyssop? The same plant used to paint the blood of the Passover lamb on the doorposts in Egypt now touches the lips of the final Passover lamb.
Then Jesus says it is finished. Not the gasp of an executed man, but a cosmic declaration. A word stamped on paid invoices in the ancient world declaring the debt is canceled. And he bowed his head and he gave up his spirit.
The temple curtain torn from top to bottom, the earth shook, the rock split, and the centurion, the Roman officer who oversaw this whole execution, looked at the way this man died and said, truly, this was the son of God. The first confession of faith came from a man holding the hammer.
This is what happened at the cross. This is what Isaiah saw 700 years before it ever happened. And Isaiah says, this is it. This is the beautiful thing. The ugliness of the cross is not what God tolerated on the way to something beautiful. The ugliness of the cross is how the beauty happens.
Main Point 5: Beauty Marks
We have a tendency to talk about the cross like this. Yes, it was terrible, but. Yes, it was violent, but. Yes, it was crazy, shameful, but. As if the ugliness is an obstacle to the meaning. As if we have to get past the gore to get to the gospel, but Isaiah won’t let us do that. He takes us straight to the wounds, the piercing, the crushing, the stripes, and he says, this is it. This is the thing. With his wounds, we are healed. Not in spite of the wounds, but through them. The instrument of our destruction became the instrument of our restoration. The ugliest thing in human history is the source of the most beautiful outcome in human history.
And what this means, family, is that his marks of suffering are beauty marks. The cross is beautiful, not because it’s pleasant to look at. The cross is beautiful because it is perfect justice and perfect love at the same time. Because on that cross, sin was not dismissed as no big deal. It was punished precisely because it was a big deal. And that punishment was full, final, and completely laid on Jesus. The punishment fell on the one who chose to receive it, not the ones who deserved it.
If Jesus had come in power and comfort, if the cross had been clean, if there had been no grief, no piercing, no crushing, you could explain it away. You could call it a myth, a wishful story we tell others. But a God who enters the ugliness, a God who is acquainted with grief, a God who is smitten and afflicted and pierced, that God is hard to dismiss because that God looks like he actually came to do business with our sin.
And here’s the thing that undoes me every time. To this day, our Savior still bears his scars. He still has the beauty marks. In Revelation 5, John sees a vision of heaven, the throne room of God. Every angel gathered, every creature worshiping, and at the center of it all, a lamb standing as though it had been slain. The glorified, risen, enthroned Christ of heaven still bears the wounds. They are not healed over in glory. They are not erased. They are not displaced. They are eternally marked. They’re beauty marks.
The wounds are not a regrettable chapter in an otherwise triumphant story. The wounds are the proof and the price of our redemption carried into eternity. The ugly is not cleaned up on the other side. The ugly thing becomes the most glorious thing in the universe.
Conclusion
I want to close tonight by drawing your attention to this one word in this passage. It’s a small word, but one that happens and appears over and over again in different ways. The word is we. We esteemed him not. He bore our griefs. He carried our sorrows. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his wounds, we are healed.
Isaiah doesn’t say they. He says we. On Good Friday, Isaiah doesn’t invite us to watch from a distance. He invites us to stand in the we.
Maybe you’re here tonight carrying a weight you cannot name, a grief you don’t know how to put down. A guilt you won’t let go of. Isaiah says he bore that. He took it up, he carried it and he sustained it deliberately. This costly burden he bore, you don’t have to carry it anymore.
And maybe you’re here tonight and you’re not yet a Christian. You’re not sure what you believe, but something tonight has landed. Here’s what I want you to know. The cross is not asking you to feel a certain way. It’s an announcement. Something happened. A transaction was complete. The piercing was for your sins as well. And peace can be yours. Come to Jesus tonight and he will forgive you for your sins and he will give you peace with God.
Maybe you’ve been a Christian for a long time, you know this passage, you’ve heard it a thousand times. Don’t let what’s familiar insulate you from its weight. Stand in the we. Let it cost you something to say. My sin required this. My transgressions are why he was pierced. My iniquities are why he was crushed and my healing, my peace, my wholeness came through his wounds.
Good Friday is not a funeral. It is the day we stand at the site of the greatest transaction in human history and say, I am the we and because I am the we, I am healed.
Family, leave tonight with eyes focused on the beauty of the ugly cross because of what the cross has accomplished for us, the we.
Let’s pray. Our father and our God, we do thank you for the beauty marks, for the wounds that have healed us. We pray, oh God, that as we leave tonight, that we would think deeply about the great cost and the great pain of the cross and that you did it for us. We pray, oh God, that that thought would carry us into the silence of Saturday until Sunday. But until we get to Sunday, oh God, help us to worship the ugly, but the beautiful. Help us to worship our King Jesus who bled for us on that cross. Amen.