Matthew 16:13-16
In Mark’s abbreviated account, Peter’s response is more pointed; he says, “You are the Messiah.” Peter would come to understand his words more fully later.
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Many students of this major world religion, both inside and out, have said a defining mark of Judaism has been the expectation of the Messiah, the Anointed Redeemer sent by God.
For many centuries Christians have claimed Jesus of Nazareth was this Messiah.
For many centuries most Jews have denied that claim.
Those three truths have largely determined the relationship of Jews and Christians for twenty centuries.
No serious attempt the answer the question “Who is Jesus?” can avoid dealing with the claim made by his followers and the denial made by his own people.
The idea of an anointed Leader who would come to do God’s great work of redemption was old, going all the way back to the promise God made after the Fall: I will make you [the serpent who had tempted Eve] and the woman hostile toward each other. I will make your descendants and her descendant hostile toward each other. He will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel.
As you know that promise was repeated over the centuries, gathering more and more detail. The picture of the One Who Would Come became more and more complex. Through it all, for hundreds of years the people of Israel waited and waited for the promised Redeemer, the Messiah, who would be born into the family of David, the royal family. They were waiting for the One who would undo the curse of the Fall.
Even after the ministry of the Old Testament’s final prophet, Malachi, the promise continued to develop. During the nearly 400 years before the birth of Christ the promise of the Messiah was embellished greatly. By the time of Jesus’ ministry it had become difficult to distinguish what the inspired writers had said and what the rabbis had said. This would contribute to the conflict and confusion during Jesus’ ministry. After many years of living under the Greeks and Romans, the picture of the Messiah as a conquering king became uppermost in the minds of many.
As a consequence, the decades before and after Jesus’ death saw many who were acclaimed to be the messiah and who managed to gather a following among those who hoped to overthrow the hated Romans. This willingness to follow anyone who promised to overthrow the Romans would be a factor in the revolt leading to the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in A.D. 70. And keep in mind this yearning for a military messiah when we look at the early Christian’s claims regarding Jesus as the Messiah.
Who says Jesus was the Messiah?
So, who says Jesus was the Messiah?
The claim appears in several layers of evidence in the New Testament. We’ll take a brief look at some and a fuller look at others.
--Although the title wasn’t used the angelic announcements to Mary and Joseph hint that their child would be the Messiah. The angel calmed Joseph’s fears by saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.”
--Years later John the Baptist would take up the role of the Messiah’s forerunner. He seems to have clearly understood that Jesus of Nazareth was the one who would fulfill that task. When Jesus approached John who was baptizing near the Jordan, John pointed and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” Andrew, who had been one of John’s disciples, followed Jesus and, after dialoguing with him was prompted to encourage his brother to meet him, saying, “We have found he messiah.” Clearly, at this point the disciples didn’t understand how Jesus would fulfill that role but the recognized something distinctive about the teacher from Galilee.
--The most significant testimony to Jesus as the Messiah came from his own mouth. Reread the gospels to look for the hints he gives. As you do, keep several things in mind.
1. Jesus was more open with his claims later in his ministry than in its early days. Most likely he did not want to trigger a hostile response before the proper time.
2. Jesus sometimes revealed himself to the marginalized rather than to those in more privileged positions. John tells us that Jesus spoke plainly about his identity to the Samaritan woman at the well: The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”
Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” This woman who had a limited understanding of the messianic hope, seems better prepared than many of the Jews to embrace Jesus for who he was.
Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” This woman who had a limited understanding of the messianic hope, seems better prepared than many of the Jews to embrace Jesus for who he was.
3. Jesus took special care to teach his closest followers a clearer understanding of his role as the Messiah. Immediately after Peter’s great confession, Jesus began to clarify the kind of Messiah he would be. Matthew says, “From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” This was important because his disciples still harbored faulty ideas about his ministry.
One incident seems especially designed to underscore Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah. It came only days before the crucifixion and was a turning point. No more would the “secret” be a secret.
I’m talking about the Triumphal Entry.
When the rabbi from Nazareth rode into Jerusalem everyone who saw him thought of the prophecy of Zechariah.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.[1]
The crowd would have know the prophecy referred to the coming Messiah, God’s appointed redeemer who would be the fulfillment of the promise the Jews had clung to for centuries. Jesus seemed to be saying, “Here I am, your Messiah. Do you accept me?” The shouts of “Hosanna” seemed to say their answer was “Yes,” but by the end of the week many were saying, “No, this is not the Messiah we want.” We may never know if any in the crowd shouting “Hosanna” were in the crown shouting “Crucify,” but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that official Judaism rejected Jesus as the Messiah.
By the end of the week, Jesus would be dead. The priestly caste that saw him as a threat to their authority, the Pharisees who resented his popularity, and the Sadducees who had pretty much explained away the Messianic promises anyway, believed just another trouble-maker was out of the way.
But he wouldn’t go away.
Something We Shouldn’t Forget
Because of what happened in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday we sometimes say “the Jews rejected Jesus.” But there’s something we shouldn’t forget. If we mean by the statement—“the Jews rejected Jesus”—that during the past 2000 years the Jewish people have largely rejected Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah, then the statement is true. But if we mean that Jews never found Jesus appealing, then the statement is clearly wrong. In the years following the Day of Pentecost the response of the Jews to the gospel was phenomenal. The very day the church had grown to at least 3000. And it continued to grow. And it continued to grow. In Acts 6:17 Luke reports that “the number of disciples in Jerusalem very greatly increased.”
The number of Jews who had been converted was so great that the authorities became alarmed. That’s part of what prompted their efforts to increase the pressure they put on the Christian leaders.
And, consider this, we tend to think of the early Christian preaching appealing especially to the common people. Indeed, the early leaders of the church had humble backgrounds—fishermen and such. But Luke also mentions that “a great many priests became believers.” Priests were part of the establishment but something prompted them to accept the gospel preached by the early church.
Within a few years, a highly trained rabbi, Saul of Tarsus, would join the Christian cause. In the coming centuries we would know him as Paul. Luke’s account of the early church also mentions an Alexandrian Jew named Apollos who believed Jesus to be the Messiah. Saul was carefully trained in Jewish thought—a student of the highly regarded Rabban Gamaliel. Apollos seems to have been a careful student of the Scripture
There were also the members of the synagogue at Berea in Greece. Although Berea was by no means the most prominent city Paul and Silas would visit they found there a synagogue that was distinguished by both its open-mindedness and its commitment to measure any teaching against the standard of Scripture. These characteristics were so pronounced that “Berean” has become term describing a commitment to carefully examine the Bible before embracing any new teaching. Keep that in mind, because upon being convinced that Paul’s teachings about Jesus were valid, many of these Jews in Berea believed (Acts 17:11-12).
The context of this story makes it clear that Paul and Silas had preached to the Bereans the same message they had preached in Thessalonica. Paul “…addressed them from the scriptures, explaining and demonstrating that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead, saying, ‘This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ.’” (Acts 17:2-3) The word translated “addressed” came from the practice of Socratic debate among the philosophers. Robertson points out that by this time the word referred to any discourse but it still maintained “…the idea of intellectual stimulus.” In other words, Paul didn’t convince these Jews by touching stories about puppies and kittens or fearsome threats about perdition. He convinced them by marshalling the Scriptural evidence.
I’ve taken the time to outline these features of the early church’s story because it’s important. We might appeal to stereotypes and claim that the common folk among the early Christians were especially gullible. That’s almost certainly unfair, but we can’t say that about these Jews I’ve just been talking about. They required convincing before they bought the claim that a carpenter from Nazareth was the Messiah.
The time would come when fewer and fewer Jews would trust Christ. There were probably several reasons for this. Jerusalem was leveled in A.D. 70 and in the words of historian Philip Schaff, “The destruction of Jerusalem…marks that momentous crisis at which the Christian church as a whole burst forth forever from the chrysalis of Judaism….” For good or ill, the church seemed less and less Jewish and more and more Gentile. Then, too, the second century began to see an infection of anti-Semitism arise within the church. Near the end of the second century Tertullian would declare that “the synagogues of the Jews are the fountain of persecution.” It didn’t foster evangelism or dialogue.
Of course, the Jews themselves would begin to develop counter-measures to the efforts of the Christian evangelists. Some would say the gospels were full of lies or that Jesus manipulated the situation to seem to fulfill messianic prophecies. Though it’s difficult to understand how he might manipulate the situation to the degree that he could become history’s most famous Jew. Nevertheless, the efforts were effective.
For many of today’s Jews the most telling argument against Jesus being the Messiah is his failure. He failed to restore Israel to its former glory. Christians have responded to that charge in a variety of ways: Some say that phase of his work will not be completed until his Return; others say Jesus never intended to establish a political domain, being more concerned with a spiritual kingdom.
It seems to me the most telling response is to point out that Jesus gave Israel a greater glory than the nation had ever known. For the first time in the history of the Jewish people the lofty promise to Abraham was fulfilled: The promise that said through Abraham’s offspring the whole world would be blessed.
The Evidence
You might have expected me to mention fulfilled prophecy as proof that Jesus was the Messiah. That certainly is a part of the story but I want to mention what the earliest preachers seemed to have believed to be the most convincing evidence of Jesus’ claims.
On the Day of Pentecost in the first Christian sermon, Peter presented Jesus’ claims. Here’s a summary of what he said.
With the help of lawless Gentiles, you nailed him to a cross and killed him.
But God released him from the horrors of death and raised him back to life, for death could not keep him in its grip. God raised Jesus from the dead, and we are all witnesses of this. So let everyone in Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, to be both Lord and Messiah!
But God released him from the horrors of death and raised him back to life, for death could not keep him in its grip. God raised Jesus from the dead, and we are all witnesses of this. So let everyone in Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, to be both Lord and Messiah!
Did you get that? The most compelling evidence that Jesus is the Messiah is the Resurrection. Those who plotted his death thought anyone who claims to be the Messiah deserves to die. But what if the person making that claim really was the Messiah? I told you he wouldn’t go away.
So What?
Jesus is the Messiah. So what? What does it mean?
1. God keeps his promises.
For a millennium and a half Israel had harbored the hope of the Messiah. It became part of who they were. In Jesus, God kept that promise.
2. We owe a debt to the Jewish people.
We Christians have often forgotten this. To the church’s shame we have sometimes fostered anti-Semitism and then been surprised when Jews did not accept the gospel.
We honor that debt by praying for the salvation of the Jewish people and demonstrating respectful love for the people who gave us Jesus. Our love for them should be genuine love for those for whom Christ wept and died, not because we hope to speed the Second Coming.
3. We should pray that our churches might be the vehicles for Jesus the Messiah to carry out his mission.
The Old Testament pictured the Anointed One in carrying out three roles: He was Prophet, Priest, and King. Christian thinkers would say divide Jesus ministry according to these offices. In his years of teaching, he was a Prophet. In his passion, he was a Priest. Now, in his post-Easter glory, he is a King.
But Jesus plays these roles in our lives as well.
Recently I ran across the testimony of Alma White. White was a Christian writer and teacher whose ministry spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Listen to her account of the night 1878 when, at a revival meeting in rural Kentucky, she found peace with God and an assurance of her salvation.
…I was so inwardly absorbed and crushed I could scarcely hear the voice of the preacher who was speaking in his usual tone. Trying to arouse me from this death-like stupor, he said, ‘Daughter, will you take Jesus for your Prophet, Priest, and King; your Prophet to teach you, your Priest to forgive you, and your King to rule over you?’ I told him that this was the desire of my heart. He asked me then to rise to my feet. I said, ‘I must be saved tonight, and I cannot leave this bench until the work is done, if I have to stay until morning.’ ‘But you have taken Jesus, have you not?’ I hesitated but finally said, ‘Yes.’ He helped me to rise to my feet. Instantly, my burden rolled away, my heart opened, and heaven came down and filled and thrilled me until my whole being was tremulous with new life.
Studying the messianic hope and counting fulfilled prophecies is merely an academic exercise unless we allow Jesus the Messiah to be our Prophet, Priest, and King.
