Isaiah 53:1-3 18 March 2018 Introduction If you go online sometime, you can find an extraordinary video filmed in 2007 in a metro station in Washington DC. The video is of what seems to be an ordinary busker only the violinist is Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world, and he s playing Bach, some of the most intricate violin pieces ever written. Two days before he was playing in Boston, to a packed-out theatre, with tickets starting at $100. In that station, however, over his entire recital, just six people stopped and he collected a total of $32. People just missed him. They just didn t think him worth their attention. Nothing was wrong with his performance. I guess he just didn t look like he was worth much. In John s account of Jesus, we find something similar. John 12:37: Even after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. That doesn t mean they necessarily rejected Jesus. It could just mean they ignored him they just didn t think that much about him. And John points out this is amazing, because before their very eyes Jesus had done some amazing things: turned water into wine, healed a boy close to death, enabled a life-long invalid to walk, fed five thousand people, given sight to a man born blind, raised Lazarus from the dead pretty good signs (you d think) that this is someone worth paying attention to. And yet people didn t. It s interesting to me because what I often hear people say today is, Brian, I would listen to what Jesus has to say, if there were more evidence: if he did a miracle for me or something like that. Only here in John s gospel, we re told that lots of people did see such miracles and yet still didn t believe. Why? Why did they ignore the message about Jesus? And why in actual fact do so many today? Well, that s what we re going to be learning this morning. According to John, the answer is found in a prophecy made some 700 years before. John 12:38, 1
This was to fulfil the word of Isaiah the prophet: Lord, who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? And of course that s quoting v1 of Isaiah 53, which we just heard read. So, let s turn our attention to it now. Just a reminder that between now and Easter we re taking a slow walk through this poem. It s the fourth in a series of poems about someone Isaiah calls the Servant of the Lord. In the first of those poems, Isaiah prophesies that this Servant of the Lord will bring justice to the nations. In the second, that he ll restore Israel to God and be a light to the nations. In the third, that he ll be a prophet of God who knows God perfectly and speaks to sustain God s people. And in this fourth poem, well we saw the beginning of it last week: that this servant is going to be the greatest man in history. So, he s a really big deal. But if you turn to Isaiah 53 now, and look at the first three verses, can you see that they are written from the perspective of people who for the longest time didn t see this servant as anything special but then they did. So let s get into it, and our first point: (1) Why people ignore the message about Jesus And what we discover is that the problem is not at all with evidence there are no shortage of signs. The problem if I can put it like this is with him. The problem is that people just find him not very impressive. That s what v1-3 are saying: Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He [the servant] grew up before him [God] like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. The leaders we generally like the leaders we are impressed by tend to be very similar: they tend to be tall, dark and handsome; to have strong jawlines and deep voices; the right pedigree and a track record 2
of success. There might be the odd exception (Jeremy Corbyn for instance), but nevertheless I think the generalization is fair. But this servant of the Lord is none of those things. v2, he has the wrong background: like a plant in unpromising soil. v2 still, he has the wrong bearing: no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him in the Hebrew, those words for beauty and appearance are used to describe Rachel, whom Jacob famously fell in love with. She had the right bearing this servant has the wrong one. v3 he has the wrong career progression: he doesn t seem to rise, to win, to soar above all difficulties. No, he sinks, and is hammered by difficulties. And v3 he has the wrong level of popularity: we held him in low esteem means literally, we deemed him unworthy of our attention. It s not that we rejected him as such. We just didn t think about him, says Isaiah. We didn t think it worth our while. After all, what s there to see?, we thought. Now, friends, isn t that exactly people s issue with Jesus? It was at the time: From Nazareth? A carpenter s boy? Uneducated? Hangs out with the down-and-outs? Oh, we re pretty safe ignoring him. And it is today. Does it give most people even a moment s disquiet to ignore the claims of Christianity? I suspect not. And it s not because there are no signs we thought last week about the pretty impressive signs that point to Jesus being special: human history dated by his birth, one in four humans today worshipping him as God, in his name millions of schools and hospitals founded, even our Parliament daily praying for his mercy. It s not because there are no signs. It s because of him. It s because he s so meek. A servant for goodness sake! And who pays attention to servants? That s why people feel safe ignoring him. Like the commuters in that DC Metro station, the greatest ever is right before them and they just walk past. Isn t it interesting to see that 700 years before his birth, all this was predicted? So, if that s why people ignore the message about Jesus, second point, let s consider: (2) How anyone believes it And will you see for yourself the answer Isaiah gives in v1? Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 3
Isaiah is saying that Jesus is impressive very, very powerful, the arm of the Lord but the only way anyone will see him as such is if the Lord reveals it to them. God has to help us to see Jesus for who he is. In particular, God has to open our eyes to the way his power works the way God thinks you really get things done. And it turns out that it s not by standing on your dignity, asserting your authority, relishing your titles or insisting upon the respect of others. The way to really get things done in God s kingdom is to serve: to go to the bottom to allow yourself to be a nobody. That s what Jesus did, and next week on Palm Sunday we will see just how low our king really went and why and what it achieved for us. But the point is that unless God himself helps us to see this stuff, it will always seem like nonsense to us. And what that means for us, practically, is this: that however much of Christianity we think we see, if we want to see more, we ve got to pray. I hope you want to do that. Who wants, after all, to be on the outside? Remember that guy from Decca Records who famously failed to sign the Beatles, because he couldn t see it? Or the eight publishers who knocked back Harry Potter because they couldn t see it? There s a mistake that lives with you! Who wants to be like that with the kingdom of God. But if we want to see it, Isaiah 53 and John 12 are united in telling us: we need God to reveal it to us. And, friends, we ve got to pray for that. Perhaps you re here as someone who feels like you ve got an idea of the message of Christianity, but when you see others here really shaping their lives around it, and giving most of their money to it, and so on honestly, it makes no sense to you. Well, will you recognize that maybe that s because, you know, they re mad, but also maybe it might be because there s something they see that you don t yet? And you won t see it without God s help. So will you dare to pray something like this? God, will you help me to see? I m here, Sunday by Sunday. If there is something more in this than I am seeing, please don t let me miss it. That s a step of faith, isn t it? And it s humbling. But in a sense it doesn t cost you much and I think you won t regret it. While I rabbit on, why don t you just talk to God in the quietness of your mind now? Others of us, who would say we do understand the cross, and maybe we ve taught it to others, maybe we ve been around the block and we 4
are in positions of leadership, well, do you know what? Maybe we should also be open to the possibility that there is more to see in the cross than we yet see? Especially if truth to be told this stuff about service and racing to the bottom and making yourself nothing still feels crazy to us and so, perhaps, we like being a leader, but we don t like being a servant quite so much or at least, not serving quite so much, or at least, why aren t people thanking me more for my service, or at least, surely they should pull their weight and why s it always me?) are we open to the idea that maybe we feel these ways because we too aren t quite seeing stuff about Jesus himself and his power and greatness that we need to. And so will we pray? Again I want to acknowledge that these prayers aren t easy prayers to pray. They are humbling and they are scary. But they are great prayers, because what we struggle to see is amazing. Let s go to our final point: why a Jesus like this a Jesus who suffers as a servant, so that he has the wrong background, bearing, career progression and level of popularity - (3) Why a Jesus like this is actually beautiful Friends, we live in an awfully broken and painful world, don t we? I know that the image we project is better than that, through Facebook and Instagram and so on. But our actual lives aren t that tidy, are they? In fact in this life they probably never will be. And when we follow Jesus, it doesn t make it any better: he calls us to humble ourselves, to get our hands dirty, to take up our crosses, to stick with all kinds of deeply painful experiences, that he says he has redemptive purposes for, but it s often hard to see them. Friends, given that this is the reality of grown-up life, what kind of leader do we want? Do we really want a glamorous one? Tall, dark and handsome; strong jawline, deep voice, born into privilege and experience only of success? They might impress us, but can they comfort us? Can they walk with us? Can they bear our burdens for us? Can they really help us in the ways we most need? Now consider Jesus. And consider in particular the sufferings of his life. There were the sufferings, to begin with, of his general life. Born into poverty, born in fact into a family that had to beg. In his life often he was hungry, often he was thirsty. Throughout his ministry he was 5
exhausted the demands placed upon him by those around him were such that every spare moment he just fell asleep. As for status in this world, he was a nobody person, from a nowhere place, doing in most people s eyes a nothing job. Jesus knew what it was to grieve and mourn. His step-father apparently died on him when he was young. Friends died on him. As for other so-called friends, he loved them deeply but they just didn t get him; when he tried to share things with them, they didn t understand; when he said important things to them, they didn t believe him; and at the great crisis of his life, they left him. As for others, they laughed at him, they called him mad, they questioned his motives. It seemed like every time he tried to step towards them in kindness, they spurned his efforts. Friends, do you know some of these experiences? Well, so did Jesus. And they hurt him. Deeply. Like they hurt you. He suffered from them, like you do. He was in pain over them, like you are. Consider, next, the sufferings of his godliness. You see, Jesus was tempted to sin in every way as we are. Yet he didn t. And that means he went through a kind of suffering we can barely imagine. For most of us, when we are tempted, it s really hard, isn t it, not to yield. And then probably we do yield, and we might feel guilty or remorseful but at least the pressure of that temptation has been lifted. But Jesus never yielded: the pressures for him built and built and built over an entire lifetime. Can you imagine that? Jesus suffered also from being surrounded by the sorrow and sin of others. Now I know we feel grieved by those things themselves, but nothing like as it was for Jesus, because we are able to harden our hearts to these things. So when we see someone starving, say, or grieving over a loved one, we are perhaps moved at the time, but then (honestly) we quite quickly forget about it. Likewise, if we are Christians, and we see someone dishonouring God, perhaps there s a stab of pain for us at the time, but we get over it. But Jesus could not harden his heart. He saw the sin and suffering around him better than we can, he felt it deeply (often we are told that he was deeply moved ) and then, here s the crucial thing he couldn t stop feeling it. Again, can you imagine that? And then Jesus knew the suffering, fourthly, of bearing the sin of the world upon himself and more on that next week. 6
The point is that Jesus suffered. He suffered in ways we never will. He was, in fact, v3, a man of suffering what a striking expression! Do you want to sum God s servant up? Was a man of standing? A man of influence? A man of power? A man of love, even? No, preeminent of all: he was a man of suffering. Likewise, familiar with pain. What an expression! Jesus didn t just know pain. He didn t just shake hands with it once at a party. He was familiar they were best mates. Him and pain you always saw them together. And do you know what the gospel is? He went through all that for you. He did it to save you, to raise you up, to deliver you ultimately from your suffering, to restore you to God. And so he became unclean to make us clean. He became ugly to make us fine. He became a nobody to make us before God somebodies. He was despised so that we could be loved. More on all that next week. The point for this week is this: that given that our lives are hard, given that our lives, whether we re Christian or not, are full of pain and suffering, is not this man exactly the one we want to lead us? When we are down in the dumps, we cast around, don t we, for someone, anyone, to be a friend to us. May I say: here he is! This is your friend, your friend indeed, who at your need his life did spend. And whatever you are going through, he knows what it s like in a way noone else does, and how to lead you forward through it. Don t you love him for that? Don t you want trust him? Don t you want to invite him in and talk with him about it? Don t you want to follow him? For this is the kind of leader we really need. He s beautiful. 7