The first of a two-part series.
As Christians immerse themselves in the deeply holy rituals of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I decided it was time to get an answer to a question that has dogged me. Across millennia, many cultures have awaited the arrival of a God-sent messenger. In Jesus, Christians found theirs. As millions worldwide will commemorate this weekend, Jesus is said to have been born in Bethlehem, preached the word of God in the Holy Land and been crucified by the Romans. Now Christians wait for the Second Coming.
My question, which put crassly could be somewhat offensive to believers, is: Why does the Christian messiah have to come a second time? Why didn’t he get it right the first time?
I got my answer from the tolerant and thoughtful Harry Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus.
“We have to go back to the Jewish expectation of a messianic reign,” says Maier. Messiah — Moshiach in Hebrew and Christos in Greek — means “the anointed one,” or “the one that is sent.”
In the Jewish tradition, of which Jesus was a part, the idea of a coming messiah had been around since the reign of King David, around 1,000 years before Jesus’s time.
In the 500 years after David died, his impressive kingdom suffered two massive tragedies, defeat first by the Assyrian Empire and later by the Babylonians. In both cases, the Jewish people were dispersed from their holy city of Jerusalem.
These tragedies didn’t fit the narrative of the Jewish scriptures, in which God is said to have promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the grains of sand on the seashore. Likewise, says Maier, in the book of Samuel, God makes a promise to King David that his descendants would see power and rule.
“So that means that God's got two promises that God's got to keep,” he says. “So what happens after this period, especially after the second conquest under the Babylonians, is that there are prophets who say that God is going to send another anointed figure, the sent one, the messiah, the anointed, who is given a special power by God to restore Israel to its fortunes. That's where the Jewish understanding of the messiah comes.”
For Jews, the messiah has not come yet, Maier notes. But the claim by Jesus’s followers that he represents the fulfillment of that Jewish expectation caused division among the Jewish people, but more importantly, fear and loathing among the Roman overlords.
Every Christian and most others know how this story ends. On Friday, people worldwide will commemorate the crucifixion and on Sunday the resurrection. But, according to Maier, the Romans’ fears of Jesus’s power over his followers was misguided.
The Romans feared Jesus was coming to Jerusalem to overthrow the empire and lead a military conquest in order to bring about the fulfilment of all the promises to Israel.
“However,” says Maier, “Jesus’s understanding of the kingdom of God is not the kingdom of God which takes its form as the overthrowing of enemies. Jesus’s understanding of the kingdom of God is represented not by the conquest of enemies but rather by the love of enemies. He says that whenever you love one another, whenever you follow the teaching that he represents, you are in fact living out the fulfilment of the promises to Israel… It's a very, very radical reinterpretation of this entire complex of ideas.”
The Romans’ misinterpretation of Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of God is evidenced by their ritual mocking of him as a false king. Crown, sceptre and robe are the three signs of royal power, and the Romans ridiculed Jesus by placing a purple robe on him, a crown of thorns and giving him a branch of a tree as a sceptre. He is then led to his death.
“Those who are followers of him understand that, in fact, when they see his crucifixion, that he's been faithful to God with his message of love, that leads him even to the cross,” he explains. “This is the expression of the alternative kind of reign of God in the world that is not centred in violence and the destruction of enemies, but is rather centred in the love of enemies, even if such love of enemy leads you to die.”
OK, I concur, but even so, the gospel says he did die and then rose and took his place at the right hand of God. And now Christians wait again for a Second Coming. I still want an explanation of why a messiah has to make two trips. With admirable patience and intellect, Maier guides me through some complex and fascinating theological terrain, which I will share with you next week.
@Pat604Johnson
