Not
That Kind of Messiah
October
6, 2021
In chapter 7 of
the Gospel of Luke we read that John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to
Jesus to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for
another?” The text doesn’t expressly say so here, but by the phrase “the one
who is to come” John clearly meant the Messiah. He sends his disciples to Jesus
to ask Jesus if he is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. The Jews of the first
century CE had long awaited the coming of one they called the Messiah. Messiah,
Mashiach in Hebrew, means the anointed one. The Jews of Jesus time—he was one
of those himself of course—longed for God to send one whom God had anointed as
a new King David. We see that expectation in the Mark’s version of the story of
Palm Sunday. There the people shout as Jesus rides by on his borrowed burro:
Hosanna!
Blessed is the
one who comes in the name
of the Lord.
Blessed is the
coming of the kingdom of
our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the
highest heaven! Mark 11:9-10.
These people who welcomed Jesus
into Jerusalem thought that Jesus was bringing them “the kingdom of our
ancestor David.” That’s who they thought the Messiah would be, a direct
descendant of King David who would reestablish David’s kingdom.
David lived
roughly one thousand years before the time in which this story is set. He had
created a unified Hebrew kingdom that was the largest state the Jews have ever
had. The last remnants of that kingdom had been destroyed roughly six hundred years
before Jesus when the Babylonian Empire (actually the Neo-Babylonian Empire
though in the Bible it is usually just called Babylon) conquered and terminated
the Hebrew kingdom of Judah. Except for a brief time after the revolt of the
Maccabees in the second century BCE the Hebrew people had been ruled by foreign
empires from Babylon to Rome ever since.
One common understanding
of what this messianic descendent of David would do was that he would raise an
army, drive the foreign Roman oppressors into the sea, and reestablish the
Kingdom of David (probably as they imagined it to have been rather than how it
really was, but never mind). That’s why the people in Mark’s Palm Sunday story shout
“Blessed is the coming of the kingdom of our ancestor David!” They apparently
thought that that was what Jesus we all about. (That he wasn’t about that at
all may be why by the end of the week they had all turned against him, but that’s
an issue for another day.) These people apparently thought that Jesus was going
to free them from Roman occupation and exploitation by military force and would
establish an independent Jewish kingdom like David’s supposedly had been. We
can assume, I think, that when John sent his disciples to ask if Jesus were the
one to come he meant is it Jesus who is going to rid us of the Romans and
establish a free and independent Jewish state.
Jesus hardly
gives them a yes or no answer to their question, but then Jesus hardly ever did
that for anyone. Instead he said to them:
‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the
dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is
anyone who takes no offense at me.’ Luke 7:22-23.
I’m quite sure John’s disciples weren’t
expecting an answer like that. I can imagine them saying something like, “Say
what? The man didn’t answer our question! What are we supposed to tell John?” I
sympathize with them. Many of Jesus’ responses (or really non-responses) to
questions leave me saying, “Say what?” That’s just how Jesus was.
Yet it isn’t hard
to understand why John’s disciples and Jesus are talking past each other here.
We can assume that John’s disciples had one understanding of who the Messiah
was to be and Jesus had quite a different one. Many Jews understood the Messiah
to be a coming secular ruler who would do what secular rulers nearly always do,
namely, go to war to try to achieve some desired result. Jesus may have
understood himself to be the Messiah, but he certainly didn’t understand
himself to be that kind of Messiah. Jesus never raised an army and never
tried to. He critiqued and condemned the worldly ways of empire, but he never
went to war against one. In his response to John’s disciples he is saying I may
be the Messiah, but I am a Messiah who is about care for people in need not
about the misery and devastation of warfare. I don’t so much bring bad news for
the Romans as I bring good news to the poor. I may be the Messiah, but I am not
the kind of Messiah you thought you’d get.
Now, it isn’t
that Jesus had no plan for dealing with the Romans. He did, but it certainly
wasn’t the plan the people expected. We see how Jesus wanted to deal with Rome
in a story from chapter 5 of the Gospel Mark. It’s also in the Gospel of Luke.
See Luke 8:26-33. The text of this story doesn’t call it a parable, but I find
it helpful to think of it as one. In that story Jesus has crossed to the
eastern, Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee. A man came out of “the tombs” to meet
him. The man was possessed by an unclean spirit. That unclean spirit made the
man so strong that no one could contain or control him. The man comes to Jesus,
bows down before him, and shouts, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of
the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” Mark 5:7. I always
find it strange that an unclean spirit would use obscure words like “adjure,”
but never mind. We’re told that the unclean spirit said that because Jesus had
already ordered it to come out of the man.
Then Rome enters
the story. Jesus asks the unclean spirit what its name is. I find it surprising
that Jesus would ask the spirit its name. I mean, the unclean spirits in Bible
stories don’t usually have names, and if this spirit had one wouldn’t Jesus
already know it? In any event in this story Jesus asks the spirit its name. The
spirit responds, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Mark 5:9. The spirit
begs Jesus “not to send them out of the country.” Mark 5:10. The spirit asks if
it (they) could instead enter a herd of pigs on a nearby hillside. There wouldn’t
have been any pigs in Galilee, but remember that this story is set on the
Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus agrees that it could, the spirit(s)
Legion enter the pigs, about two thousand of them we’re told, and the pigs rush
down a hillside into the Sea of Galilee and are drowned. The formerly possessed
man returns to his right mind. Mark 5:11.
OK, but how does
this story get to be about how Jesus dealt with Roman occupation? Well, what is
a legion? The word has come just to mean a lot of something, but in Jesus’
world a legion was something quite specific. It was a basic organizing unit of
the Roman army. It was roughly equivalent to a modern division though not quite
that big. Everyone in the world who heard this story would know what a legion was
and would immediately associate the story’s unclean spirit with that occupying
army. When Jesus exorcized the demon named Legion out of the possessed man he metaphorically
exorcized Rome out of him.
There are lots of
references to Rome in this story in addition to the demon’s name too. When
Legion possessed the man he was so strong no one could restrain or control him.
The Roman Empire was so strong that no one could restrain or control it. The
demon Legion didn’t want to get sent out of the country. Rome didn’t want to
get expelled from any territory it occupied. Legion enters pigs, unclean
animals to the Jews. The Romans were unclean Gentiles. The pigs rush into the
sea and are drowned. Yes, it was the Sea of Galilee, which is really a lake not
a sea, but that doesn’t matter for our purposes. In this story Legion infests
pigs that rush into a body of water and drown. Most of the people in Jesus’
world would have loved to see the Romans literally driven into the sea. These
parallels with Rome are not obvious to most of us today, but they would have
been obvious to everyone in Jesus’ time and place. Those people would have had
no doubt that this story is about how Jesus wanted to deal with Rome.
So what does this
story tell us about how Jesus would handle the Roman occupation of the Jewish
homeland? Well, just what was the possessed man’s problem here? It wasn’t that
Rome was out there in the man’s world. It was rather that Rome was in here, in
the man’s body, heart, mind, and soul. He didn’t need to be rid of Rome out
there as much as he needed to be rid of Rome in here. That’s how Jesus intended
to deal with the problem of Roman occupation. He wanted the people to be free
from Rome, but he wasn’t going to urge them to resist Rome violently. He
certainly wasn’t going to lead them in a military battle with Rome the way
people thought the Messiah would. He saw that the people’s problems with Rome
all began inside each person. Their foundational problem with Rome was that
they had internalized it. They had internalized the ways of Rome, that is, the
ways of empire and of the world generally. For Jesus the way to perform the
messianic task of freeing the people from Rome was to start by having the
people cleanse themselves of the internal contamination of Rome. To free
themselves from the contamination by the ways of the world, the ways of
violence, greed, and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. If enough people,
both Jews and Gentiles, would solve the interior problem of Rome, the external
problem of Rome would take care of itself.
So Jesus was the
Messiah, but he wasn’t that kind of Messiah. He wasn’t an earthly ruler,
he was a divine one. He would never use violence to try to solve a problem, he
would use inner transformation. He wasn’t about creating new worldly power
structures like kingdoms, he was about caring for the poor and the
marginalized, the people power structures usually oppress. He was about
assuring those most in need of it of God’s unfailing love for them as God’s
especially beloved people. Yes, he was his kind of Messiah. He was
Messiah in the way of God not in the ways of the world.
And that he was his
kind of Messiah not the kind people expected is very good news for all of us. A
Messiah of the kind people in Jesus’ day wanted would be a Messiah for a
specific time, place, and historical situation. He would have been a Messiah
for the Jews only. The kind of Messiah Jesus actually was made him Messiah for
the whole world. For Jews and for Gentiles. For ancient people and for modern
people. For ancient Judeans and for today’s Americans. The Messiah the people
expected might have been good news of a sort for the Jews of Jesus’ time,
though war is never really good news for anyone. The Messiah Jesus was is good
news for all people of all times and places. So yes, Jesus was the Messiah, God’s
Anointed One. And no, Jesus was not that kind of Messiah. For the
Messiah he was not and for the Messiah he was let all the people say, “Thanks
be to God!”
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