Thank you very much, Alice and Al. Good morning, everyone.
Really good to have you with us, whether you're in the building or watching at home.
You may not immediately see the connection between the two passages we've just read.
Hopefully that will become reasonably clear as we go along this morning.
We're finishing our series this morning that we've been following for the last four weeks,
which has been called The Christmas We Should Have Seen Coming,
looking at some of the prophecies from the Old Testament and how they were fulfilled in the life of Jesus.
And this morning, our topic is A Despised Life.
That might not sound very jolly and Christmassy. Indeed, it isn't.
This isn't going to be a particularly jolly sermon.
But it's really important that we recognise that the Lord Jesus came into a world that was hostile to him,
that was hostile to what he stood for, that was prejudiced against him,
and that he was despised as a result.
And we're going to be thinking about that this morning.
I think one of the things that very easily missed as we go through the Christmas story
is this last section we've read this morning.
And in particular, the fact that we all know, I'm sure,
but maybe don't think about very much,
that Jesus' hometown where his family were,
where he lived for almost all his life,
was Nazareth, a small town in Galilee,
probably no more than about 500 people living there.
And throughout his life, Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, in some ways, that was just an easy way of identifying him.
They didn't have surnames like we do in those days.
And so Jesus of Nazareth was a fairly straightforward way of identifying Jesus
from a large number of other people who would have been called Jesus.
It was a relatively common name in that time.
But Matthew, as he looks at it, sees quite a lot more in it than that.
And what I want to do fairly simply, and hopefully quite quickly this morning,
is just three things.
We're going to start by walking through the passage in Matthew
and completing, if you like, the Christmas story,
trying to understand what is happening and what Matthew is saying to us.
I'm then going to have a little bit of a digression,
and I'm going to talk a bit about prejudice.
And that is as a preliminary, it's important in itself,
but also as a preliminary as we think about the prejudice
the Lord Jesus suffered as he led a despised life.
And we'll finish as we're talking about that in the passage in Isaiah
that Alice read to us.
So first of all, let's get up to speed with what's happening in the Christmas story.
So remember, Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea.
The wise men came, and last week we were thinking how they were warned
that Herod was out to kill the newborn king.
And so Mary and Joseph fled with Jesus to Egypt
before Herod slaughtered all the babies that had been born recently around Bethlehem.
And they stayed there probably for a reasonable length of time,
perhaps a couple of years even.
And then they heard that Herod had died,
and they thought they could go back to Bethlehem.
They seemed to have made their home there in Bethlehem,
despite having originally come from Nazareth.
Now Herod, who is referred to in the Christmas story,
the Herod we were hearing about last week,
is commonly called Herod the Great.
There are a number of Herods in the New Testament.
This Herod is commonly called Herod the Great.
That may sound a rather strange description of someone who was very cruel
and who was paranoid about others wanting to take over his kingdom.
But actually Herod, alongside his cruelty, was a competent ruler.
Among other things, he built a temple in Jerusalem,
a really grand temple that he built for the Jews there,
although he also built a temple to Caesar Augustus,
so it wasn't that he had any strong convictions about the God of the Jews,
but probably saw it as that kind of political thing.
But he was a competent king, albeit a very cruel one.
It was expected that when Herod died,
that his son, another Herod, Herod called Herod Antipas,
would take over his throne
and would be the ruler of all of what we now call Israel,
and probably a bit beyond that as well.
But at the last minute, Herod the Great decided he wanted to split his kingdom up.
He had three remaining sons.
He had already killed three because he thought they were plotting against him.
He had three remaining sons, and he divided the kingdom among them.
So the area of Galilee, and one or two other bits and pieces,
went to his son Herod Antipas.
And Herod Antipas is the Herod we read about in the life of the Lord Jesus,
and in connection with John the Baptist later in the Gospels.
There was another son called Philip,
who got a bit of territory we don't need to bother ourselves with.
And then the third son was called Archelaus.
And he got, I suppose, the prime territory,
the area around Jerusalem,
the area that would have been called Judea.
Now the best way to describe Archelaus
is that he had the cruelty of Herod,
but didn't have his competence.
He was a very cruel man,
but he was a very bad king as well.
And he only lasted a few years.
There were complaints to Rome.
He got removed,
and they put governors in place.
And again, if we think forward in the story of the Lord Jesus,
by the time he had his ministry and his trial,
of course, Pontius Pilate was the governor.
But what we need to know about Archelaus
was he was as cruel as his father,
and it would have been as dangerous
for Mary and Joseph and the young Jesus
to go back to Bethlehem
as it was when Herod was still alive.
So we have the two dreams in the passage.
The one telling them that Herod has died
and that he had to go back.
And then the second one saying,
don't go to Bethlehem.
Go and make your home in Nazareth.
In some ways, that's all quite straightforward.
But then Matthew sees some deep significance
in the fact that Jesus grew up in Nazareth.
It wasn't just somewhere where he happened to grow up.
Nothing in the story and the life of the Lord Jesus
was just something that happened to come about.
And so Matthew says,
at the end of the passage that we read,
that as he came back to me,
they went to a town called Nazareth.
So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets
that he would be called a Nazarene.
As I said, our series has been called
the Christmas we should have seen coming.
I think this bit of Christmas
would be very difficult to see coming.
You can read through the whole of the Old Testament.
You won't see the town of Nazareth mentioned.
You won't see the word Nazarene mentioned.
There's a word called Nazarite,
but that is something quite different.
And so you look at this passage, this verse,
and you think, well, how can he say
that the prophets had forecast,
had prophesied that Jesus would be a Nazarene?
And there are a number of explanations.
In some ways, you could say
none of them is entirely straightforward.
Certainly not one that's clearly right or clearly wrong.
But there are two explanations,
which I think most of the scholars
look at these things think are possible.
One is that the word Nazarene
has the same root meaning
as a word that's used in the Old Testament
for a branch.
And the significance of that
is in the book of Isaiah.
We were looking at Isaiah earlier in the year
in our Sunday evening services.
And Isaiah chapter 11 and verse 1 says,
And that will be very clearly understood by the Jews
and should be understood by us
as being a messianic prophecy.
Looking forward to the one
who would be great David's greater son
and would restore the kingdom of David.
And as I said, the root word for branch used here
is essentially the same as the word for Nazarene
used in Matthew chapter 2.
So that is one possible explanation.
The other explanation is to do
with the town of Nazareth itself.
Nazareth, I've said, was a small
and relatively insignificant place.
But for such a place,
it actually had quite a bad reputation.
And as you go through the Gospels
and you find references to Nazareth and Nazarene,
it is clear that people of Nazareth
weren't well thought of.
In John's Gospel,
in some of the discussions about Jesus
that the religious leaders had,
one of the things they said was,
well, he comes from Galilee.
No prophet has ever come from Galilee.
In other words,
someone from Galilee could never be the Messiah.
And Nazareth was in Galilee.
But even within Galilee,
it was looked down on.
In John chapter 1,
one of the first disciples of the Lord Jesus,
Philip, goes and speaks to his friend,
Nathanael, and says,
we've found the Messiah.
He's Jesus from Nazareth.
And Nathanael says,
Nazareth?
Can any good thing come from Nazareth?
So the thought then,
that people would suggest,
is the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth
meant that people were naturally prejudiced against him.
Nazareth was seen as a place
that nothing could came from,
so how could the Messiah,
God's chosen one,
possibly come from a place like Nazareth?
A backwater in a part of Israel
was quite a long way from the capital in Jerusalem,
and a town that itself was looked down on,
even by those who lived in neighbouring parts of the country.
He was called a Nazarene,
and as a result,
he was despised.
And that, I think,
is the thought that Graham had
as he put together this series.
And the two probably come together
in the passage we read in Isaiah,
because it talks about the Lord Jesus being despised.
It also talks about the fact
he grew up like a tender shoot
and like a root out of dry ground.
And that, I think,
is the connection between the two passages we've read.
Now, as I say in a few minutes,
I want to talk through the passage in Isaiah
and to learn some things from it
about the prejudice that the Lord Jesus suffered.
But it's been on my mind this week,
and I thought it was worth highlighting
the general thought about prejudice
and the danger that we have,
that we are prejudicial towards others.
And bear with me,
I think this is quite important,
even though it's not directly from the passage.
You'll see it's significant as we come to
think about Jesus in a few minutes.
I want to make two statements,
and you can think about whether you agree with them.
The first statement is that
if we're not very careful,
each of us is likely to be guilty
of prejudicial thoughts and actions.
If you're in the business role,
or probably in the world of government as well these days,
you will get training on something
that is called unconscious bias,
which is the thought that
although you may not deliberately
look down on particular groups
or treat them differently,
in practice it's very easy that we do.
And so we need to be careful.
There's no place for prejudice in the church.
We need to be careful
that we're not guilty of prejudice,
and we need to be actively making sure
that's not happening.
And the second thing,
and I suppose the reason for that,
is that I believe we most easily identify
with people who are like us.
And the corollary of that could be
that people who are unlike us,
people who are different,
we sometimes tend to look down on
and not treat as well.
Let me give you just a very trivial example.
One of the contestants in the recent series
of Strictly Come Dancing was Dan Walker.
Dan Walker, broadcaster,
breakfast television, sports news,
also known as a Christian,
and particularly for not working on Sundays.
And I was hoping that Dan Walker
would do well in the competition,
even though he wasn't, by a long way,
the best dancer.
You might ask, well, why is that?
Is it perhaps,
because I look at Dan Walker,
and I see a white, heterosexual,
male, evangelical Christian like me?
And because he's someone
who is in some ways similar to me,
it's easy for me to identify with him
and to hope that he does well.
Now, you may or may not think
there's any harm in that.
Where the harm comes
is if we go beyond that
and say, yes,
I identify easily with some people
because they're like me,
but there are some people
who are unlike me,
and I don't want anything to do with them,
or I want to treat them differently,
or I look down on them
and despise them.
And that is where
the danger of prejudice comes in.
Whether it's because of their race,
their religion,
their physical and mental health,
or whatever else,
as soon as we start looking down on others
because they're different from us,
then we're guilty of prejudice,
and that should have no place in the church.
Everyone who comes through the doors of our church
should be treated with the same respect
and dignity as everyone else.
They are people who are made
in the image of our creator.
They are those for whom the Lord Jesus died
and who, if they trust in him,
can be our Christian brothers and sisters.
And if we want to know an example
of how we shouldn't be prejudiced,
then we just have to look at the Lord Jesus,
perhaps most clearly in John chapter 4.
John chapter 4,
Jesus comes across a Samaritan woman
who is, let's say,
probably has dubious morals.
And he is an upright Jewish man.
And most upright Jewish men
would have run a mile
rather than associate with a woman like that.
And yet Jesus takes the time to speak with her,
to help her,
to show her who he is,
and she becomes a great evangelist
for those in her town.
No prejudice,
treating everyone with dignity and respect.
And that is how we should be as a church.
And we need to be careful
that people who are different from us,
we don't treat in a lesser way
from people who are like us.
Now with that digression,
I think it's quite important,
but let's think about how that applies in Jesus.
And we're going now to the passage in Isaiah,
Isaiah chapter 53.
And Isaiah chapter 53,
I think it is saying,
Jesus came into this world,
he was different from those,
particularly the religious leaders in the day,
and they looked down on him,
they were prejudiced against him,
they despised him.
Not just because he came from Nazareth,
although that was part of it,
but because in many ways,
he had different values
and different attitudes from them.
So three simple things,
and then we're finished.
Three things I think we can learn
from this passage.
And the first of these
is that Jesus showed different attributes
from others round about him,
particularly the religious leaders.
That comes across, I think,
with this picture that Isaiah gives us
of the root coming out of the dry ground.
In other words, he's saying,
this is something that is unlikely to happen,
something where you've got arid land,
you wouldn't expect anything to grow,
and you get what looks like
a very tender shoot coming up,
something that's different,
something that demonstrates life.
When Jesus came to this earth,
by and large,
there was little or no life
in the religious establishment.
Yes, they knew the Old Testament.
They could quote huge sections of it.
They would try to be obedient to it
in the real minutiae of things
and make their own rules up
to go along with it.
But there was no real love of God.
There was no real concern for others.
And Jesus came,
and he was different.
He was different because as he spoke,
he spoke with vitality,
he spoke with life,
and he didn't just look back
and refer to lots of ancient authorities
and say, this is what's said here,
this is what's said there.
He says, here is what I say.
And he spoke with the authority
that comes from God.
He also claimed very clearly
to have a relationship of a father,
a son to a father with God,
and to be speaking himself
the words of God.
He was different in the way he was
and the way he lived
and in what he said
from the religious leaders of his day.
And rather than listen to him
and accept what he said
and believe the word of God,
as many of the common people did,
the religious leaders looked down on him,
they despised him,
and they wanted rid of him
because he was different from them.
And definitely what we would look back
and say was a good way,
definitely what they would say
was a bad way
because he exposed their hypocrisy
and because of that
would turn the common people
against the religious establishment.
He grew up like a tender shoot,
like a root out of dry ground.
Second thing I want to say
about the way in which
the Lord Jesus
led a despised life
was that he saw
different attitudes towards him.
He showed different attributes.
He saw different attitudes.
Now when we say
Jesus led a despised life,
you can find lots of instances
in the New Testament
where that's not obvious,
where actually people looked at Jesus
and they recognised something in him
that was really good,
that was worth following
and worth believing in.
So when he preached
the Sermon on the Mount,
you've got this group of people
listening in rapt attention
as he says these words
which have changed history
in many ways.
I saw a description that says
they're the basis of Western morality,
perhaps right.
And the people listened
and they marvelled at what he said
because they said
he speaks with authority.
He's not like the teachers of the law
who just refer to other people
and don't have any authority
of their own.
And because of that,
the people,
common people in Galilee
flocked to him
and they loved listening to him.
When the Lord Jesus fed the 5,000,
when he did that marvellous miracle
of taking a small amount of bread
and of fish
and of feeding the multitude,
the people were so impressed
and so enthralled with him
that they wanted to make him their king.
They didn't despise him.
They loved him
and all that he was
and all that he stood for.
Now, John 6,
they very quickly changed their attitude
but at that point,
they loved him.
By and large,
the common people,
the ones who weren't religious leaders,
had a lot of time for Jesus
and were those
whom he was able to help
and to bring into God's kingdom.
And he did, as we said,
without prejudice.
It didn't matter who they were.
If they were willing to listen to him
and to believe his word,
he would receive them.
But then you have the other attitude,
the attitude of the religious establishment.
And they very much saw Jesus as a threat,
as someone they didn't want to have among them.
And they despised him.
They looked down on him.
They wanted to have nothing to do with him.
And so the prophecy in Isaiah,
verse 3 of chapter 53,
we have it in front of him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering
and familiar with pain.
That certainly was true.
Jesus, during his lifetime,
was despised by those
who should have known better,
who should have known
and be able to interpret
the word of God.
Ultimately, he was completely rejected.
And he went alone to suffer on the cross.
So he saw different attitudes.
And then finally,
Jesus,
he showed different attributes.
He saw different attitudes.
And then the final thing,
he suffered different attacks.
And there's a progression,
I think,
isn't there,
as you go through Isaiah 53.
Verse 2,
and people are looking at him
and saying,
well, he's not much, is he?
Just like the tender shoot,
like the root of the dry ground,
nothing particularly attractive about him,
nothing in his appearance
that makes him special.
And perhaps that was originally
how the religious leaders
would have thought of him.
He's a prophet from Galilee.
He's not going to come to very much.
Let's just ignore him
and maybe he'll go away.
He's no one special.
Then in verse 3,
you get the progression.
He's not just being looked down on
and thought to be nothing.
He is actively despised,
and rejected.
He is held,
says the writer Isaiah,
in low esteem.
So at this point,
you have the religious establishment
attacking Jesus.
And you can see,
as you go through the Gospels,
how time and again,
the religious leaders would come
and they would say,
how can you do this?
Or how can you say that
if you are who you say you are?
How can you heal on the Sabbath day
when that is against
our interpretation
of God's law?
They came to him
with trick questions
and tried to catch him out
and to demonstrate
that he wasn't who he said he was.
And they failed miserably.
But they attacked him
and they tried
to turn the people
against him.
And then,
that didn't work.
Didn't achieve it.
So then,
they took him
and they tried him
and they nailed him
to a cross.
And that's in verses 4 to 6
in Isaiah 53.
Religious leaders thought
in some way
they were doing God's will
and this was God's punishment
for the Lord Jesus.
And they were willing
to hand him over
to the Romans
to allow him to be tried,
to allow him to suffer
the most horrible of deaths
as he was crucified
on the cross.
And they thought then,
this is the person
who we despise,
we've got rid of him now.
But the glorious truth
that Isaiah brings to us
is that it wasn't them
who were nailing Jesus to a tree,
although physically it was.
It was the Romans
leading him to a tree.
Rather,
he was there
so he could take
the punishment
of God
against sin.
And yes,
he led a despised life.
Ultimately,
he was completely rejected
by those who should have
known better
handed over
to the Romans.
And yet,
that life was lived,
a life of perfection,
a life of pleasing God
so that he could die
on the cross
and there he could take
the punishment
that should be ours.
And that is the ultimate
message of Christmas,
is the ultimate message
of Christian faith.
That Jesus came into the world,
he lived a life
where he was looked down on
by many,
he was ultimately rejected
and handed over
to be killed.
But he was doing God's will
and he was taking
the sins of the world
on himself.
As we look at Christmas
and as we come in a few months
to look at Easter,
the two are very intrinsically linked.
Christmas is the first step
on the road
that would ultimately lead
the Lord Jesus
to the cross.
And we need to recognise
that this baby
who came to Bethlehem
is lovely to rejoice
in Christmas,
to share presents,
to have time with family
and to think about
the birth
of the Lord Jesus.
But ultimately
it was so he could die
on the cross
and take the penalty
for our sins.
And so our message this morning,
quite simply,
do you recognise
recognise who Jesus is?
Do you recognise him
as the son of God
who came into the world
and who died
for your sins?
Or do you see him
as someone
who's not worth
bothering about?
Someone even
that you would look down on?
And I hope we'll be able
to see the error of that,
that we all should recognise
Jesus as God's son
and put our trust
in him.
There's a great hymn,
we sang it at the earlier
service this morning,
which I think summarises
a lot of what we've been saying.
Man of sorrows,
what a name,
for the son of God
who came,
ruined sinners
to reclaim.
Hallelujah,
what a saviour,
bearing shame
and scoffing rude,
in my place
condemned he stood,
sealed my pardon
with his blood.
Hallelujah,
what a saviour.
May that be
our experience
this morning,
that we see him
as the one
who came to save us
from our sins
and we put our trust
in him.
Let's pray together.
Father,
we thank you
for your word to us
this morning.
We thank you
for this final
bit of the Christmas story
and for the way
it points forward
to the life
of the Lord Jesus.
That as he was
rejected in many ways
at his birth,
as he had to,
our parents
had to flee
to save his life.
So he came back
and he lived
in a town
which was held
in no regard
and he lived
a life
where he was
rejected
and despised
by many.
But we thank you
that he came
to bear our sins.
We thank you
he died
and rose again
and today
he is in his
rightful place
at your right hand.
Help us
this Christmas
we come
to the end
of the Christmas
period
to be able
to look beyond
the trappings
and the rather
sentimental view
sometimes we have
of the Christmas
story
and help us
to understand
it was the beginning
of a glorious life
and it was
the beginning
of a life
that would
ultimately lead
to the cross
and the Lord Jesus
taking our sins
on himself.
We thank you
for your presence
with us.
We commit ourselves
to you now
in the name
of the Lord Jesus.
Amen.