Spit on. Struck. Slapped.

There’s an awkward part of Handel’s Messiah where the alto sings, “Despised. Rejected,” over and over.

In that section, she also repeats, “He gave His back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair…”

It is always a little uncomfortable to think about Jesus having hair on his face. Perhaps it is because it is so earthy and everyday. 

As we listened to the Messiah this year, I wondered why Handel would have wanted to emphasize the rejection of Christ. 

In his first letter, Peter identifies himself as “a witness of the sufferings of Christ.”

It brought to mind a time when I went to visit a neighbor, and as I approached her house, I could see several police cars. The police were out of their cars and yelling at the woman to stop walking towards them. Her children were watching. She did not do what they said, and they tased her. 

I will never forget the screams and convulsions. I was a witness to her sufferings. 

Jesus, who had never done anything wrong, suffered even more than that. Peter watched as the religious leaders spit on Him. He probably cringed as they struck Jesus and demanded that He tell which one of them did it. Peter couldn’t get the sound of the slaps out of his mind, so much so that he would always identify as one who had seen the sufferings of Christ.

It’s easy to skim over the rejection of Christ because we have all rejected Him. It is so much easier to look at the smiling Jesus sitting on a green mountainside blessing children.

“Then, they spit in His face and struck Him. And some slapped Him,” Matthew writes. The Gospel writers did not want us to skim over it. They wanted us to be witnesses to His suffering too. They wanted us to know that it wasn’t all lilies and sparrows.

Peter, that original witness, tells us why: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you might follow in His steps.”

At the Last Supper, Jesus told His followers, “I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world, you will have tribulation, but take heart, I have overcome the world.”

While we may want 2025 to be the year where we have it all together, we feel great, and we don’t experience any suffering, that is not the reality that Jesus foretold for His followers. He said, we would “have tribulation.”

He walked through suffering so that we could learn how to do it. “By His wounds, we have been healed,” so that we can trust Him when we, in turn, are wounded, so that we can draw near to Him when we are lonely, so that we can run to Him, our Good counselor, when we are in need of counsel. 

When He rose from the dead, He left death, sin, and suffering in the grave, so that we could have the hope that one day, we too, will rise to walk in newness of life. Then, the suffering we experience here will only be remembered as a light and momentary affliction, and the victory Jesus won for us will be ours in full.