Podcast: Episode 3: The Reluctant Messiah
In this episode we explore the notion of Jesus as Messiah. Even though the gospel writers portrayed him in this way, we explore some of the reasons Jesus himself might have rejected the role.
“Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:15).
He would have known that every self-proclaimed messiah had met the same tragic fate. Recalling that Jesus was a Jew, we look at the differences between Jewish and Christian concepts of the Messiah. Modern scholars know that the Christian Messiah was pieced together from various Old Testament passages those early followers of the Jesus movement insisted supported their belief.
Many sayings attributed to him suggest that Jesus was not the typical apocalyptic prophet but a Jewish mystic, a teacher whose ministry was dedicated to the mission of helping “break every yoke” and lift open-minded members of his peasant class from the drudgery of daily life. He introduced his audience to a new, spiritually empowering way of thinking of the kingdom of God as an underlying, ever-present reality, whose point of contact was centered in every individual. Because the region in which Jesus was raised was Hellenized—imposed Greek culture, language, and philosophy—it is not inconceivable that his understanding of the kingdom of God was influenced by Plato’s Theory of Forms. This major paradigm shift required a new birth, a new way of seeing and thinking of themselves and their relationship of oneness with God. This mission he drew from Isiah, which, according to Luke, he read at the outset of his public ministry.
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?” (Isiah 58:6)