Daily Manna · Day 310 · November 6
Healed by His Stripes
“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”
A man in a Roman household undresses in the evening and there are marks on his back from that afternoon, and this letter is read aloud in the room where he is sitting.
That is not a device. Peter has been addressing household servants directly six verses earlier, telling them what to do under masters who are froward, and using the word for being struck with fists. Then he writes: by whose stripes ye were healed. He is quoting Isaiah, and he is quoting it to people who had literal stripes, in a world where a beaten slave had no legal complaint to make and no court to make it in. Peter does not soften it and he does not explain it away. He puts the marks on Christ's back next to the marks on theirs.
Our version of the sentence is quieter, and it is a different sentence. Most of what we bring to it is invisible: the thing done at nineteen, the marriage we stopped fighting for, the words thrown at a child in a kitchen last month. Wounds nobody can see, mostly self-inflicted, in a society that would at least let us complain about them. It would be dishonest to pretend the man in that room and the person reading this are in the same position.
But the grammar carries across both, and the grammar is the thing. Bare our sins in his own body. Not arranged for them to be dealt with; carried them, himself, on the tree, which is the word Deuteronomy uses for a cursed death. And then the tense: ye were healed. Past. Finished. Not held out pending improvement.
Which means whatever you are still carrying, you are carrying a second time.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 310 is Before the Commands (Exodus 20:2).