I wonder what pictures the word “passion” brings up in YOUR minds. We generally associate it with sexual passion do we not yet that is not what the period we call “Passiontide” is about. It may be that you think of a “crime passionel “ in which a jealous lover kills  the loved one whom he/she feels has been guilty of betrayal. Certainly a reading of the daily papers reveals that this is not a thing of the past.  I believe that I am right in saying that until very recently in France this was considered  sufficient justification for murder for a man (although not a woman) to be let off the death sentence.
Interestingly such action is a direct opposite to the meaning of the word “passion” which is connected with the word “passive” and is something that you allow to happen to you, or which you can’t prevent happening like the suffering of unrequited love  or  which you “suffer” and this bring us very clearly into Passiontide when we remember what Jesus  suffered in the time leading up to His death.
However, I am not going to anticipate the coming week, Holy Week and Good Friday, this morning. Rather, remembering that the Lent groups have been studying  Chapter 40 from the book of Isaiah, I  am going to talk about the background to that Chapter and in particular “the Suffering Servant” with whom you are probably more familiar than you realise because he is the subject of so many of the arias from Handel’s Messiah.” It is very fitting that that is how you should know him because it was in poems or songs he originally became known.
The message is clear. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Captivity in Babylon  had been a punishment for the neglect of God by His chosen people, the Jews; the time of punishment is over, the time of comfort has come, God is coming to be with His people (Emmanuel= God is with us), there will be a new relationship between God and His people  who will return to their homeland while the other peoples of the earth will be drawn into the fold.
All this is described in the setting of a vision or dream the Prophet had of the court of God in Heaven. Try to picture God seated on his throne surrounded by the Heavenly Hosts, the Seraphim, Cherubim and all the other orders of Angels. Cherubim, incidentally, are not the fat pink babies we see hopping around in Renaissance pictures of the nativity; they are the angels with the flaming sword guarding the Tree of life and barring the way back to Eden. I mention this because we do seek to make religion cosy and comfortable when we are considering awesome matters.
The Heavenly Court is a court in both of the modern senses of the word; it is where the King receives His courtiers, ambassadors etc.; it is also a court in the legal sense and Judgement has been pronounced on the people of Israel. Here in Chapter 42, the Lord presents His Servant, the Chosen One. The role of this Servant is described in Four passages known as the Servant Songs.

In the first he is the Chosen One, the agent of Justice and the ideal King.
In the second he is the Prophet who will call the people back to God and other peoples...”the light to lighten the Gentiles” i. e. the non Jews. </li>
In the third, he is beaten and abused but follows without protest the path which God has chosen for him.
In the fourth song he is the Interceder, the one who takes on the punishment of others and is scorned and derided.

The people who heard and read this songs at the time (and scholars consider that the third Isaiah assumed a knowledge of them among his listeners), did not say “these foretell Jesus”. One interpretation of the Suffering Servant was, and is, that he was the personification of the Jewish nation.  It was the early Christian writers, particularly Matthew  whose ministry was among the Jews and Paul in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora Ephesians, Galatians etc., etc,  who looked to their Scriptures and said these prophecies have been fulfilled in Jesus.
He certainly was not the Messiah the nationalist Jews had hoped for. Let us look at the fourth song: “He was derided”. Pride whether of person, family or nation was a most admired quality in the ancient world; insults had to be avenged at all costs and it often was costly. We are so used to being told to forgive even if we find it hard that we do not realise how revolutionary this was to people of Jesus’ time. But it goes deeper than that. In our fallen world some people are afraid of goodness. You may have experienced this yourselves on occasions and surely there are some, when you have acted from motives of, say, a desire for justice even if you have nothing to gain from it, or true generosity and everything has gone wrong. You’ve been misunderstood or regarded with suspicion; and you will have suffered from this, may be materially, but certainly emotionally and sometimes you can regret your good deeds more than your selfish ones. It is painful.
In the case of Jesus people were faced were faced with goodness on an unprecedented scale and while there were those who were drawn to it.... there were those who were fearful and repelled and Jesus suffered because of their fear of this goodness.
He suffered also because he loved them. I referred at the beginning of this sermon to the suffering of unrequited love and what we are reminded of in the season of Passion tide is the unrequited love of God for  humanity , unrequited not only because of those who don’t know him and  those who don’t care, but even those of us who try to love him are feeble in our efforts.
Speak for yourself, you may say and I do. If I consider the first commandment, which I read out at the beginning of this service, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”, I know I fall miserably short of this; my efforts are feeble, my heart soul mind and strength often get distracted and I am, at best, inconsistent.
The suffering we should be thinking of in the coming weeks is not human suffering but divine suffering because God loves us so much and we love him so little