By bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows, the Messiah’s atoning mission comes into focus as the mark of his first coming. He comes not to rule the world, but to redeem the individual. Isaiah highlights the poignant incongruity that Israel rejects the very one who had come to lift their burdens. As Barney notes, the Hebrew word for “sorrows” could be rendered more literally as “pains,” while “sickness” is a more literal translation of the word rendered in King James English as “grief.”
Barney also suggests that the reversal of the two elements “sorrows/pains” and “grief/sickness” creates a tighter poetic coupling between verses 3 and 4, with a chiastic reversal of the elements from one verse to the next. This structuring suggests that a poetic point is being made, probably on the meanings of “pains/sickness.” The Atoning Messiah is a man of pain and sickness because he is mortal; his understanding of our pain and sickness allows him to carry those burdens for us. We may be seeing here the tendency among the King James translators to emphasize Christ’s perfection, distancing him from physical ailment, sickness, or perhaps even the sweat and fatigue of manual labor. This tendency in traditional Christianity to mask Jesus’s humanity but exalt his divinity does not correspond with Isaiah’s Messiah, who was both human and divine, a God subject to physical ailments. That contradictory image of humanity and divinity lies at the heart of Isaiah’s declaration.