What Men Found

Did these people find in Jesus the Messiah they were looking for?

Not by a long shot.

Perhaps some of them did at first. They may have felt at the very beginning that Jesus would turn into this kind of Messiah. Judas, perhaps, was one of those who became progressively disillusioned because Jesus would not be Judas' kind of Messiah. And one disciple, Simon the Zealot (not Simon Peter), seems to have been a member of a fanatical band who were trying to start open revolt against Rome, and who had joined up with Jesus, hoping that he would lead in the fight.

But Jesus had his own conception of what the Messiah should be like, and it turned out to be very different from everybody else's conception. He was not willing to be a tool for the nationalist ambitions of the first century Israelites. God had something more profound to reveal to men through the Messiah than that. What we find, therefore, is that the Messiah whom Jesus claims to be is not the Messiah who was expected by the people. Jesus put his understanding of Messiahship in terms that were shocking and unthinkable to people of his day, shocking and unthinkable even to the most intimate of his followers.

It all came out into the open shortly before the end of his life. After a brief ministry around the Sea of Galilee, Jesus and his intimate followers went north for a while, probably to take stock of the situation. Things weren't going too well. A crisis was at hand. And Jesus, after asking his disciples what opinions they had heard about him, put the question point blank to them, "Who do you say that I am?" ( Mark 8: 29). Peter was the one who answered, "You are the Christ." He meant by this, "You are the Messiah, the Anointed One sent from God."

But it soon turned out that what Peter meant by this term was something totally different from what Jesus meant. Jesus combined two notions which had heretofore not been combined in Jewish thought. The first was the notion of the "Son of Man," which probably meant, not what it appears to mean-a simple human being -- but rather the heavenly creature pictured in the Daniel passage referred to above. The second was the notion of the "Suffering Servant," the one who suffers on behalf of others, who takes upon himself the consequences of the sins of those who are persecuting him (see especially Isa. 52: 13 to 53: 12). Jesus combined these two notions in the electrifying statement, "The Son of man must suffer. . ." ( Mark 8: 31).

Now this was sheer nonsense to Peter. The Son of Man suffer? Preposterous! The Son of Man might come on the clouds of heaven, or he might be a great warrior king, or he might be a nationalistic leader, but suffer and die? Never! That would be precisely what he would not do. How could he accomplish the great things God was going to do through the Messiah in that fashion? And Peter's bewilderment and amazement were underlined by the rest of the people who came into contact with Jesus. If he went to his death, if he did not accomplish all that the people had dreamed of for centuries, then he was obviously not the Messiah after all. He must be a crank, an impostor, someone who should be put out of the way.