“Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was. He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised, and we didn’t value him.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The coming of the Son of God seems like something that should have been heralded with great fanfare. Announcements of His arrival should have been shouted from the rooftops. Emperors and kings should have rejoiced at His delivery. His parents should have been living in the lap of luxury. Everyone should have known so they could all celebrate the news with joy and gladness. Their king had come. And yet, while there was the angelic chorus, their audience was not what anyone would have expected. And the wise men did come, but not until years later, and nobody really believed them anyway. What gives? How could we all miss this? Because, as it turns out, everything was happening just as God had planned it.

Today is officially the third day of the season of Advent, and today we are going to begin our annual Advent journey together. We’ll shift gears away from Romans for a few weeks to give attention to the arrival of Jesus into the world for the first time, yes, but into our lives much more generally and fully than that. Thankfully we paused our Romans journey at a natural break at the beginning of last week, so I didn’t leave us all on a cliffhanger. We’ll come back and finish walking through the last two chapters on the other side of Christmas

For the next few weeks we are going to reflect together on some Scriptures that highlight the themes and the story of the coming of Jesus into the world. Some of them will be pretty traditional. Some of them will come from places we don’t normally associate with that particular story. All of them will have something to say about how we can better handle the waiting for Jesus to arrive once again in full to claim the kingdom that is rightfully His.

Jesus’ arrival on earth was and was not a surprise. That seems like an odd statement considering we are talking about the arrival of the eternally preexistent, second member of the triune Godhead, having stepped down from His throne in heaven to take on human flesh and throw open wide the doors to a relationship with Him. His arrival was a shock in the sense that no one was expecting it, but it should not have been a surprise because God had been telling everyone He was sending someone, that He was coming Himself, for a very long time.

We can go all the way back to Genesis 3, when the dust of the first explosion of sin into the world was still settling, to find the first recorded instance of God’s announcing His intentions to come as a “seed of the woman” to fix the problem of sin by crushing the head of the one who first tempted humanity into it. From there God continued dropping clues of His arrival and hints of the hows and even some of the whys. Many of these were delivered in ways that weren’t necessarily perfectly clear at the time (although they meant something to their original audiences or God wouldn’t have spoken them through His prophets), but seen backwards through the lens of Christ were obvious.

Some of the most obvious pointers to Jesus and what He would be like came out of the ministry of the prophet Isaiah, who served the Lord among the people of Judah about 700 years before He arrived for the first time. A couple of those were about Jesus’ birth (famously in Isaiah 7 and 9), but one series of prophecies about Jesus speak of the Messiah more generally. These are the four servant songs scattered throughout the second part of the collection of prophecy. The most famous of these – famous because of its remarkable specificity regarding Jesus’ life and ministry and mission and death. The great prophet helps us understand – again, 700 years before Jesus actually got here – why His arrival was such a surprise when it should have been anything but that.

In Isaiah 53, the prophet says this: “Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” In other words, nobody is going to buy what he is saying. He is delivering a message that is so unbelievable, so counterintuitive, that it took God’s active revelation of it to make sure we didn’t miss it entirely. Isaiah might have more simply declared: “You’re not going to believe this!”

He goes on from here to describe what God’s servant – who we understand now to be the Messiah, Jesus – was going to be like. And while he goes on for quite a while about Him, giving special attention to His mission to take away our sins and His death as the means by which that was going to happen, the first couple of versus offer a physical description that is simply shocking. Check this out: “He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was. He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised and we didn’t value him.”

Pause for just a second after reading that again and take in what Isaiah is describing. He is describing Jesus. Let me ask this: How many pictures or live depictions of Jesus have you seen that have portrayed Him as unattractive? We’re not talking about just a little bit unattractive either. We’re talking so ugly that you could hardly stand to look at Him. My guess is that the answer to that question is none of them. Not a single one. We have trouble imagining Jesus as anything other than a prime specimen of humanity. He was God in a bod, after all. How could He be anything other than incredible? Yet that’s not how Isaiah describes Him.

“He didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him.” There was nothing royal-looking about Him. He wasn’t easy on the eyes. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. Nothing about Him screamed “Look at me!” He had “no appearance that we should desire him.” Nobody looked at Jesus and thought, “That guy must be God.” Most people didn’t pay any attention to Him. At least, they didn’t until He started saying and doing amazing things. Even then, if they didn’t know who He was, they wouldn’t have guessed He was the guy everybody was talking about.

Jesus, in spite of being the most amazing man to ever walk the face of the earth, was mundane in every way in terms of His appearance. People didn’t follow Him because He looked a certain part. And this painful normalcy extended all the way back to His birth. Matthew and Luke both tell the story of Jesus’ birth, one from the perspective of Joseph, His earthly father, and the other from the perspective of Mary, His mother. And while the stories themselves are pretty incredible, when it comes to Jesus’ actual birth, their reports are incredibly mundane.

There was no crowd waiting with baited breath. There was no fanfare at the stable. There was no luxury. There was just a decidedly unsanitary barn (do you think Mary wound up with any postpartum complications from delivering in such a dirty environment?) and an animal feed trough. And among all the very ordinariness of the whole scene, there lay the Savior of the world as an entirely helpless baby.

What kind of a God does such a thing? What kind of a God makes Himself so small for our sake? One who is humble. One who is kind. One who is gentle and gracious, and who wants more than anything else to have a relationship with us. We have to take Him for who and what He is. We have to take Him on His terms. But rather than totally overwhelming us with His glory to the point of forcing us to bend our knees in compelled devotion, His love for us is so great that He was willing to set all of that aside for a moment in order to meet us on our level so that before we rightly fear Him as God, we simply love Him as Savior.

That’s the God who came. That’s the God who is coming again. That’s the God who makes Himself available now if we will place our faith in Him and receive His Spirit. The Christ whose mass we still celebrate was not someone to whom we would naturally give any attention if we saw Him, but if we will give Him our lives, He will give us eternal life in His perfect kingdom. This Advent season let us turn our attention to preparing for and celebrating the arrival of this God. He is worth it.