No Form or Majesty
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 18, 2003
Isaiah 52:13-52:12
I. INTRODUCTION
‘Crucified Messiah’ is an oxymoron. We Christians sometimes forget that because we’re so used to proclaiming Jesus’ crucifixion. It is clear from the welcome that Jesus received on Palm Sunday that he was expected to assume the role of a king who would liberate the people from Roman oppression.
King David was the greatest king Israel had ever had. After David’s son Solomon died, the kingdom was split in two: Israel in the North and Judah in the South. 150 years later the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians. 150 years after that, the Southern Kingdom was destroyed by the Babylonians and its people carried off into exile. When the Jews were allowed to return from Exile two generations later, they were under the rule of the Persians. Then after them came the Greeks, first under Alexander, then under a succession of ever more brutal kings. For a brief period, the Jews managed to gain independence under the Maccabees, but internal divisions soon led to intervention: by the Romans. And the Romans ruled in Jesus’ day. It had been almost 100 years since the last Jewish independent kingdom. 600 years since the fall of the Kingdom of Judah. 1,000 years since the glory of King David.
That Palm Sunday, the crowds shout “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” They were looking for the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom. The promise of an independent nation for the Jewish people, so long suffering under one empire or another. And here comes a man, riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey, entering the city of Jerusalem to palms and hosannas, and who speaks about the ‘coming kingdom.’
II. ISAIAH
So, when Jesus was arrested and crucified, it was a shock to those who had expected so much from him. To those who had looked to Jesus to release them from Roman oppression, crucifixion on a Roman cross was a devastating blow to their hopes and prayers. A devastation that could only be undone by the Resurrection, only by proof of God’s vindication. But they still had to interpret Jesus’ death: what did his death mean?
They did what people of faith have done for millennia: they turned to Scripture, in this case, the only Bible they had: the Hebrew Bible. And there they found those words that we heard earlier:
He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity…
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed…
Those early Christians found in the writings of the prophet Isaiah a figure they recognized. They had not been looking for such a person, but they had found one in Jesus. The found a man who had suffered and died and who they came to believe had been “stricken for the transgression of my people.”
III. THE MESSIAH
Jesus spoke about the coming kingdom—but he wasn’t talking about kingdoms as we understand them. He was talking about the Kingdom of God. And he showed us something about that kingdom. A kingdom where the king of glory suffers a humiliating death on a cross. A king who has “no form or majesty that we should look at him.” But in whose self-sacrifice we come to understand the heart of God and the nature of love.
And it tells us something about those whom we see today who have no form or majesty—the poor, the homeless, the prisoner, the outcast, the marginalized, the suffering. The ones whose suffering Christ took upon himself. Christ did not die for the sake of middle-class suburbanites alone, but for the redemption of all.
In the poor and the disenfranchised and in the lowliest ones we see those without form or majesty we see the image of the King of Glory, who for our sake was afflicted, to the point of death on a cross. In Christ we see one who shows us the true meaning of kingship and majesty, who shows us the heart of God and what it means to live in the Kingdom of God.
