‘He is despised and rejected, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief. Isaiah 53”:3
The most cutting word in that sentence is the
word rejected. It means to be turned down, dropped out, unaccepted; it
implies that one is unfit, unusable.
When Michelangelo was twenty-three years old he
was working on the figure of Bacchus. Before he finished it Cardinal
Groslaye asked him if he would make a monument to go in a niche in the chapel
of the Kings of France in St. Peter’s Cathedral. The young sculptor was
more at home with pagan subjects but he immediately thought of the Pieta, the
mother and her dead son on her knees.
He went to look at the niche. He searched
the stone yards for a block seven feet wide, six feet tall, and three feet
deep. Block after block was rejected, either because it wasn’t the right
size, or because it wasn’t pure enough, not white enough, not glistening enough
for so noble a statue.
It’s one thing for a block of marble to be
rejected; for a person it’s quite another thing. To be acquainted with
sorrow and grief is part of life; everyone has a share of it. It’s not
easy; it’s hard to take. To be bitterly disliked, to be despised is
harder still. But to be rejected sent back as undesirable unfit,
unwanted, is the hardest thing to take,
You may be wondering who this rejected man was.
I don’t know; as a matter of fact, no one knows. Some think the writer
had an individual in mind, and some have even gone so far as to suggest that it
might be Jeremiah who lived not long before and who in many ways fits the
picture.
Most people, however, think that he was
describing the nation as a whole, who in their exile and in the suffering which
they encountered, were the people who were despised and rejected, intimately
acquainted with sorrow and grief.
When we hear the words we instinctively think of
Jesus. Handel, I’m sure is responsible for that; his music in the Messiah
is so much a part of our culture, that we can hardly hear the words without
hearing the music. “Despised” – “Rejected” – “Acquainted with sorrow and
grief.” Whoever the man was, whenever and wherever he lived, the
experience of rejection is something we do know about.
Different people know it in different ways.
A parent, who does everything for a child, is
rejected by the child. The child doesn’t run away from home; she goes her
own way. She pays no attention to her parents and rejects everything that
her parents have stood for. And a child is sometimes rejected by his
parents: it isn’t that he’s left on a doorstep. That happens occasionally
when a mother abandons her baby. It’s just that he’s left out, not paid
much attention to; lost in the busy activity of his father and mother.
A person in public life is often rejected by
people one has served; not because the person hasn’t done the best one knew
how, but because one doesn’t appeal to the people, or because another man or
woman undercuts him or her. They don’t like him or her; for reasons that
may be good or bad; they don’t vote for him or her. And sometimes people have
the feeling of being rejected when they really aren’t. There are people,
who for reasons which are too deeply buried for us to understand begin to say
to themselves, nobody likes me; I’m going to the garden to eat worms.”
And the experience of rejection can go even
deeper than this. People are rejected not only by other people but by
life itself. There’s a young man who lives a good life and in a flash he’s
paralyzed, rejected by life, and as far as anyone can see at the moment,
unusable for any further activity. Or less spectacularly, he simple doesn’t
go anywhere. Everything he tries to do fails, and as time goes on he
feels like a piece of life’s excess baggage. Or he’s too old to be of
further use in the world. There are a great many people like that.
They say: why is it that this young person is taken and I’m left behind? There
may be some people who have never experienced anything like this. I hope
there are, but I fear they are few and far between.
The important thing therefore, isn’t that we
feel rejected. The important thing is what it does to us and what we do
with it. Nine times out of ten we’re tempted to say: What’s the use?
A man or a woman who has put one’s life blood into one’s work and realizes that
everything one stands for has been rejected by people is tempted to say, “What’s
the use? The person who is constantly plagued by pain and disease comes
to the point, when he or she says: What’s the use of fighting the battle any
longer?
Was there, do you suppose a moment when the
question flashed through the mind of Jesus? May this be what he meant
when he said, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Did he, just for an
instant, ask himself, if after all I’ve done and said it comes to nothing but
this: What’s the use? Yet, even though this kind of thought may have
flashed through his mind he would be the first to tell you that rejection is
part of the suffering woven into the fabric of life. I don’t know why,
but I know that it is, and I know that some people are embittered by it, and
some are enlarged by it. And I believe that it’s true to say that in a
figurative sense, every nail driven into the body of Jesus deepened his
compassion, made him more understanding of humanity, more forgiving, more
all-inclusive in his love, more perfect in his being.
What’s the secret of this? Why is it that
some are shrunken by rejection, while others are stretched by it? I can’t put
my finger on it, but I think it’s to be found in that area where a person comes
to the point where he or she can say, no matter how often people reject me, or
how cruelly life rejects me, God never rejects me. What other people think of
us or do to us, whether they accept us or reject us isn’t the decisive thing.
The decisive thing is what we do. If we accept rejection as part of life’s
strange, mysterious, creative way, we’ll be enlarged. Gradually our
feeling of rejection will be crowded out by the conviction that we can be
useful as we are: young or old, success or failure, sick or well. And
remember how Jesus, most cruelly rejected, reminded the people of words written
by the Psalmist that they had never heard before: “The stone which the builders
rejected is become the head cornerstone.”
The way that Jesus met his rejection is the very
thing that makes it possible for you and me to take our rejection and let God
use it in the grand design. It makes it possible for one of the small
stones that the builders rejected to be used somewhere in the structure of
life. And now in the silence, let us thank God for Jesus, who was
despised and rejected and who died that we might live.
Dr. John Sullivan
Former Officer
Oshawa, Canada
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