What did Jesus look like? Isaiah in the 53rd chapter describes him as unimpressive physically. He was not a Grecian God, no contender for the arena, no cover story as the “sexiest man alive,” no billboard picture -- he would not have been played by our best known, most applauded actors. Not Bruce Marchiano or Jim Caviezel. Eugene Peterson captured Isaiah’s language in a way we lean away from: “nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look.” What a description for this man of miracle and word!
What might it have been like for Isaiah to pen these words? How did the word come to him? What had he felt as he saw, heard, received this picture of the Messiah not as super powerful but as super ordinary, super defeated, super beaten, as killed even?
He had just written of the degradation of this servant, called the “leper messiah,” since he would heal lepers. This one would be beaten so badly, Isaiah wrote, “He didn’t even look human-- a ruined face, disfigured beyond recognition” (52:12). And now at the start of the 53rd chapter, the most famous description of the anticipated Messiah in Scripture Isaiah wrote of this one’s beginning: he was ordinary, a “tender plant,” a “root out of dry ground.” He would have an ordinary childhood, “He grew up like a tender plant before God.”
No sales pitch. No shouts. No accolades. Just God saying through Isaiah, “Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?” (Isaiah 53:1).
How much do we like the ordinary? All around us people vie for the ability to be extraordinary. The movie industry tells us story after story of various super powers -- not just in the Mr Incredibles of the world and other actual superheroes, but stories of people like Mr Rogers, Harriett Tubman, and the soldiers who saved the day in 1917. These were ordinary yet extraordinary people at the same time. We make heroes of actors, sports figures and politicians. We want to achieve something, to be remembered, to have success, and win, if winning is possible. Perhaps that is what keeps us cheering on our favorite teams, hoping we might “win” through them!
And then we find this description of Jesus, well, “The Messiah,” this “Faithful Servant” captured in print by Isaiah, as not extraordinary, but as beginning as very ordinary. He grew up just like the rest of us, an ordinary child, an unremarkable looking boy, the “tender shoot growing up out of dry ground.”
Perhaps beginning here we can learn just how extraordinary, how super, the ordinary in life is. Jesus is described as so unremarkable looking that we would not even glance twice. Yet, in this chapter Isaiah tells just how incredible this man was and would be.
Come to worship this amazing Savior on Sunday. Come check into how Jesus alone makes the ordinary extraordinary.