Jesus has come: Isaiah’s prophecies of the Lord’s ministry

Isaiah chapter 53 shows a most unexpected Savior carrying out the most unexpected of saving acts.

Take a moment to look up Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and you will get to see exactly what Isaiah describes in chapter 53. The central panel features a painting of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus’ skin sags and has a hue of death. His body is marred with blood, scars, slivers, and thorns. His hands are wrenched, and his feet are disfigured. His head is slumped. It is hard to look at. John the Baptist is at the viewers’ right, pointing and calling us to take it in. “This is the Lamb of God,” he says. “This is your hero.”

A hero who is not what we expected

This painting is hard to look at because there is a stark contrast between what we see and what is being proclaimed. Try to forget what you already know about the outcome of Good Friday and grapple with the man on the cross, the event you see before you, and what John is saying. The way Grunewald paints it and the way Isaiah describes him, our hero looks like a loser. Losers, by definition, can’t be heroes because heroes are supposed to win. Jesus on the cross doesn’t look like a hero.

The most beautiful of stories are those that take the storyline from a disastrous conclusion to a deliverance that could never be repeated. A reader of such a story should be able to identify both the rescuing event and the hero. When a vast host of knights suddenly rides over the horizon, a reader knows rescue is at hand. When a superhero comes sweeping in, a reader can easily identify the hero and the heroic event. But what happens when the hero doesn’t look like a hero? And what happens when the act of rescue itself looks anything but heroic?

ISAIAH 53:1-5
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD
been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
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.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

These are the questions that Isaiah has us consider in chapter 53. In verse 1, Isaiah wonders, Will people believe this message of salvation even when they hear about it? Will anyone even notice when the saving arm of the Lord shows up? He asks these questions because the Servant of the Lord will not be like anything people would expect in a Savior.

Isaiah’s question is answered in part when the gospel of John applies Isaiah 53:1 to Jesus’ ministry (John12:37,38). Jesus had performed miracle after miracle for the benefit of the people. These miracles were signs pointing to his divinity and his ability to deal with the effects of sin on people’s lives. But, John says, people still would not believe in Jesus. Part of the problem was that Jesus, miracles and all, didn’t look like the hero people were seeking. They got their health back and moved on.

Jesus is a peculiar hero. Imagine Jesus in a lineup with the world’s most famous religious minds and philosophers. If people want Jesus to be a moral teacher, there are far easier ways to feel moralistic than to follow a call to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow after him. If people want Jesus to be a model for a better way of life today, then what will they do when they hear Jesus say, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33)?

Such revulsion over Jesus should come as no surprise. Isaiah said as much: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him . . . we held him in low esteem” (Isaiah 53:2,3). The human heart has set a pattern of expectation for what heroes should look like, particularly religious and spiritual heroes. We want heroes who can help us be our best selves. We want heroes who can help us with any and every temporal problem. The effects of sin on our lives are real and can be painful, but if that is all Jesus came to save us from, then we are still hell-bound creatures.

A hero who is exactly what we need

Humans aren’t very good at determining the core problem of life, and as a result we expect all the wrong kinds of heroes. We fail to grasp fully the catastrophe that sin is. We think that God’s decrees are flexible, that morality is community-defined, and that goodness is whatever makes an individual feel good. Revulsion over Jesus makes sense. If sin isn’t so serious, then there must be another, more attractive way to salvation.

Jesus Christ is a hero unlike any other because he was willing to do what no other hero was willing to do. Jesus defies all expectations of a common hero because he is not content with just fixing the effects of sin. Sin is real. It is a real and lasting offense against our Creator-God. Dealing with sin could not be done with a magical snapping of fingers. Dealing with sin could not be something beautiful. Sin is violence. It is violence against God and his created order. The effect of sin is even more violence done to peace and well-being.

A hero who would be willing to deal with the cause and effect of sin head-on would have to be willing to take the violence of sin upon himself. And that is exactly what Jesus was willing to do. He was able and willing to take on a task so repulsive that no other hero was able or willing to do it.

Jesus Christ is a hero unlike any other because he was willing to do what no other hero was willing to do.

Isaiah describes our hero as “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3). Isaiah is describing Jesus’ life. Jesus is familiar with suffering and pain because he lived on earth with sin’s cause and effects swirling about him. Our hero took on the problem of sin with all its violence, pain, and suffering—and this sin, as Isaiah points out, was not his own.

One might think that a hero would take on this task begrudgingly. Jesus is such a different kind of hero because he sees stepping into the catastrophe of sin and taking it on as his glory. Jesus even said that dealing with sin’s source would be his glorifying act (see John 12:23). This was his honor. This was his privilege. This is the kind of hero we have.

What happens when the hero doesn’t look like a hero? You get a hero you desperately need. Here is your knight. Here is your hero. And more than that, here is your Savior, who took on sin and its consequences and calls it his glory.

What happens when even the act of rescue itself looks anything but heroic? There in Isaiah and on the cross is the most unexpected Savior carrying out the most unexpected of saving acts. There in the middle  of the violence of dealing with sin is peace after all. “It is finished,” he cries. And in the resounding echo there is peace between you and God and healing from all your sin. What happens is the culmination of a beautiful story of salvation that will never need to be done again.

This is the final article in a series on Isaiah’s prophecies. Read the first, second, third, and fourth articles.

Author: Aaron Goetzinger
Volume 112, Number 03
Issue: March 2025