Sunday 8th March – The Samaritan Woman

8-3-2026, Isaiah 53:4-6, Jesus and the Samaritan Woman, John 4:5-42, Lent 3A, pastor adrian kitson

Isaiah 53:4-6 The Servant takes our sin in himself

⁴Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

I like a good sign. I don’t mind motor vehicle signs, motor oil and fuel signs. I like neon signs. Visiting Times Square in New York City and Picadilly Circus in London is a sign lovers delight!

These words from Isaiah are a gold-standard sign for people of faith in Jesus.

They point to this beautiful big truth

“God’s power is at its greatest not in his destruction of the wicked but in his taking all the wickedness of the earth into himself and giving back love^[1]”.

Luther agrees. When reflecting on this golden passage, Luther comments:

These words, OUR, US, FOR US, must be written in letters of gold.^[2]

These words should be a golden neon sign!

^[1] Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. and R. Kent Hughes, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 350–351.

^[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 17: Lectures on Isaiah: Chapters 40-66, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 221.

⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
… by his wounds we are healed.

Everyone knows that God rewards the good people and punishes the bad people. That is his job, isn’t it? Well, not so here and into the gospels. Isaiah says God forgives and justifies the bad people. The first witnesses of the Suffering Servant in action (Jesus) agree. Paul puts it simply…. ‘God justifies the ungodly’ (Romans 4:5)

I am so glad he does! When I finally know that I have been one of those sheep who have strayed from the love of my heavenly Father, these words are the beginning of the way back for me.

These words tell me that something has been done for me. Someone has already taken my pain, my wounds, my wrongs, my regrets, my rebellion against living the way of love.

No matter how shamed I feel, how wrong I have been, how harmful I have been, how silly I have been, there is somewhere to take all of that and let it go where God wants it to go – out of me!

But, I struggle to trust what God has done in this Servant King Jesus. For some reason I hang on to my wrongs and regrets and unease. It seems that I would rather carry all of the guilt, doubt, fear and shame around with me than hand them over.

I wonder why?

Maybe I am good at deceiving myself about what defines my relationship with the Lord? It is easy to fall back to me defining the relationship: being very, very good in order to be accepted by the Lord. If my goodness defines my relationship with the Lord, then I don’t need to repent. I just need to try harder to be good.

Maybe we just get a bit sleepy on this long Christian journey. We cruise along. We don’t have any deep convictions about our brokenness or God’s goodness. C.S. Lewis famously said;

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

If I settle for a faith that ‘moderately important’; if my sin is not that bad and God’s love is not that grand, then why repent and come to him?

Of course, this old heart of ours wants to protect itself from anything uncomfortable too. So, making excuses by blaming others, or the conditions, or whatever we can grab as a way to avoid being found out, surely stops me coming to the Lord with an open heart. Like the batter blaming the pitch for getting out we avoid the truth about our bad form.

And I suspect, a lot of us a lot of the time generally are not sure what the goal of all this ‘coming to God’, this ‘repenting’ is anyway. It is easy to believe that repenting is really about self-improvement rather than turning back to the Lord in humility and love – about good behaviour than the restoring of love in a relationship.

And, in our culture, apologising, backing down, even compromising on a thing is often regard as being weak. “Never back down and never apologise’ is a mantra I sometimes hear. Why would you repent if you did not want to be seen as being weak, unable to cope….? You only repent if you get caught red handed, not before!

You certainly cannot hear Isaiah and believe any of these things about God’s goodness or our complete badness!

Sin creates pain and suffering untold, from the kitchen to the mall right to the UN, we are broken and we hurt. Hurt people, hurt people.

⁴Israel, you are a sinful nation loaded down with guilt.
You are wicked and corrupt and have turned from the Lord,

the holy God of Israel.
⁵Why be punished more?
Why not give up your sin?
Your head is badly bruised, and you are weak all over.
⁶From your head to your toes there isn’t a healthy spot.
Bruises, cuts, and open sores go without care
or oil to ease the pain. (Isaiah 1:4-6)

Sin is not doing bad things but being badly diseased at your core. As we have said, Isaiah sees sin as essentially rebellion: rebellion against the goodness and love of God; a breaking of the life-long covenant of love that God chose us for.

To be indifferent about our sin and God’s grace is to be slowly dying. Shifting the blame for our idol making and chasing only avoids its wonderful cure on offer; staying in our pain, carrying that big backpack of guilt, lashing out at others when challenged, spiralling further into disordered desires rob us of the life we have been given by this Servant.

How do we broken and rebellious people find that holy love and acceptance and receive the Servant’s hope and life again?

Luther sees that is all about where you place that brokenness and rebellious heart of yours.

Therefore beware, as you place your sins on your conscience, that you do not panic, but freely place them on Christ, as this text says, “He has borne our iniquities.” We must clearly transfer our sins from ourselves to Christ. If you want to regard your sin as resting on you, such a thought in your heart is not of God but of Satan himself, contrary to Scripture, which by God’s will places your sin on Christ. Hence you must say: “I see my sin in Christ, therefore my sin is not mine but another’s. I see it in Christ.” It is a great thing to say confidently: “My sin is not mine.” However, it is a supreme conflict with a most powerful beast, which here becomes most powerful: “I behold sins heaped on Christ.”^[1]

^[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 17: Lectures on Isaiah: Chapters 40-66, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 223.

Can you say that now? “My sin is not mine. They are on Jesus”?

Luther famously named this word of Isaiah as revealing ‘the wonderful exchange’.

Note the wonderful exchange; One man sins, another pays the penalty; one deserves peace, the other has it. The one who should have peace has chastisement, while the one who should have chastisement has peace.^[1]

I know we all know this. But it can be hard to do more than just know it. It can be hard to really trust this love, this acceptance, this hope for yourself.

Luther gets it:

For when a Christian hears these supreme consolations and then sees how weak he is with regard to his faith in them, he soon thinks that they do not apply to him. In this way Satan can turn consolation into distress.

And then the beautiful news for you and anyone else around you:

But as for you, however weak you are, know that you are a Christian, whether you believe perfectly or imperfectly, even while weakness and a feeling of death and sin remain with you. To such a person we must say: “Brother, your situation is not desperate, but pray together with the apostles for the perfection of your faith.” Paul also struggled with this problem and was deeply disturbed.

A Christian is not yet perfect, but he is a Christian who has, that is, who begins to have, the righteousness of God.^[1]

“My sin is not mine because they are on Jesus”

He is where we throw our sins because he is there to take them from you.

“My sin is not mine because they are on Jesus”