“Who has believed our message? To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm? My servant grew up in the Lord’s presence like a tender green shoot, like a root in dry ground. There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected—a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we didn’t care. Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down… He was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.” Isaiah 53:1-5
Lord Jesus, this passage both takes our breath away and gives us eternal life. You aren’t the “reason for the season.” You are the meaning of life and all history. You don’t need us to “put you back in Christmas.” You put us where we couldn’t otherwise be—in Abba’s family and favor.
You are the “tender green shoot” of Isaiah’s vision—the vital root emerging from the parched earth for the “greening” of our arid hearts and fallen world. You created beauty, yet you became the one with “no beauty” for us. You took the vileness and ugliness of our sin, that we might become beautiful and cherished.
Jesus, you are the fountain of pleasures and your joy is our strength. As surely as your laughter fills heaven, your cooing was heard in Bethlehem. But you came to us, to become for us, “the man of sorrows—’acquainted’ with deepest grief.” Our “weaknesses and sorrows, our rebellion and sins”—you have taken them all on yourself. You are the lamb of God, the God of love, who suffered for us. We don’t want a “merry little Christmas”; we want you, Jesus—to love and worship you as you deserve. So Very Amen.
