Isaiah 53:2b-3

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.

When we were reading Chapter 49 I said that the Servant was visually unimpressive – if you’d walked past him in the street in 1st Century Palestine you wouldn’t have given him a second look. But actually, it’s worse than that. Today’s verse tells us that rather than being merely ignored, the Servant would be despised and looked down on. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, because he was not beautiful, and secondly, because he suffered pain.

Both of those things made him uncomfortable to be around, in his own day. And both of those things are still, at the very least, awkward today. We live in a society that worships physical beauty.    Yes, there’s a lot of talk about loving yourself and your body, whatever your shape or size, but that doesn’t stop us being bombarded by messages encouraging us to pursue greater physical beauty. There’s the occasional marketing campaign that features ‘real women’ rather than airbrushed models, or models which a visible disability, but they’re still treated as revolutionary, rather than being the norm. Even though we know it’s not really true, we’re still shaped by the assumption that physical beauty matters. That life would be better if I was more attractive.    And we easily assume that the effective, successful life, is marked by health and wholeness, rather than pain and suffering.

So, if we were in charge of selecting a man for this role of Servant, wouldn’t be want to pick someone who looks … well, attractive? Yet God very deliberately doesn’t do that. Jesus’ conception was utterly miraculous, so his appearance can’t have been the inevitable consequence of the combination of Mary and Joseph’s genes. However God did it, he created Jesus’ body deliberately and intentionally. If he’d wanted to make Jesus the most handsome man ever born, he could have done.

Similarly, when preparing the way for the Servant, surely God would want to remove every obstacle and difficulty that might interfere with his mission? Yet it turns out that the suffering and pain are essential to his mission. The coming of this Servant makes clear that - God’s eyes at least - physical beauty doesn’t count for much. And pain and suffering can accomplish things that health, wealth and happiness can’t.  God values the obedience of the Servant more than his physique. The suffering and death of the Servant bring more lasting good into the world than the exams he might have passed, the certificates he might have received, or his contribution to his country’s GDP.

What a complete reversal of the values of our world! How wrong must our value judgements be, for us to look at the Servant and despise him.

Let’s pray that God would be teaching us more and more to value what he values, and to worship and honour the Servant who so many looked down on.