Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah in Christian Sources

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Undoubtedly, one of my greatest challenges today is to restrict myself to the twenty minutes allotted me and thus try and succinctly sum up what can be said about Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah in the Christian sources. Due to the time available, I will limit myself to the earliest collection of Christian sources we have on the subject of Jesus the Messiah, the collection of twenty seven writings known as the New Testament (NT). In the New Testament, early believers in Jesus the Messiah (or the “Christ” as Messiah is translated into Greek, the original language of the NT) write about him and what his appearance in the world means for them, their communities and the world at large. It is important to point out the “Christ” is not Jesus’ surname but rather the title that is attributed to him by those that believe that he is the promised anointed one of God.

Before even trying to summarize the teaching about the “messiah” in the NT, it is necessary to point out that the interpretive context of the NT is established by the Scriptures of the Jewish people in biblical times, what Christians came to call the Old Testament (OT). Without the OT, the NT makes little sense. This includes what Christians mean when they refer to Jesus of Nazareth as “messiah”. In the OT, the word “messiah” derives from the Hebrew verb (mashah) meaning “to anoint”. The word is used 39 times in the original Hebrew text of the OT and 49 times in the Greek translation of a more extensive collection of OT texts that was formative for the earliest Christian community. This is very limited use when it is compared to the more than 500 times the word “messiah” is used in the NT. In the OT, the one anointed (usually with special oil) referred to a variety of figures within God’s revelation to humanity. For example, in the Torah (Leviticus 4), the anointed one is the priest who makes the sin offering for a sinner. In the Historical Books (eg. 1 Samuel 24), the anointed one is the king, appointed by God to lead the people in the way of His holy law. Interestingly, once in the OT (Isaiah 45:1) a foreign king is referred to as “messiah” – King Cyrus of Persia, anointed by God to put an end to the exile of the Jews in Babylon. Prophets too are referred to as anointed (eg. Isaiah 61:1), they being the chosen communicators of the word of God. In one biblical text, it seems that the entire people is referred to as the anointed one (Habbakuk 3:13), stressing the special vocation of biblical Israel.

In later literature, dating from the second and first centuries before the birth of Jesus, the messiah became a figure associated with salvation at the end of time. This is apparent in the Book of Daniel ( 9:25-26) and other texts, outside the canon of the OT. As expectation of God’s salvation became more and more central, many OT texts became associated with the figure of the expected savior known as the “messiah”. This figure was understood as being the exemplary priest, king, sage and prophet, the one who would institute God’s rule, judge the people and reconcile them with their Father, King and Creator. In this sense, the Messiah would be the ideal “son of man”, restoring the human person to the divine “image and likeness” of God in which he or she had been created. Restored to perfect “image and likeness”, the Messiah would also show what it meant to be a “son of God” – a child in intimate relationship with a God revealed as Father.

Through his life, his death and his resurrection, Jesus’ disciples recognized in him the fulfillment of the promises of God made in the Old Testament. They saw Jesus’ life poured out for them as a manifestation of God’s love for the world. John, one of Jesus’ disciples, formulated it thus: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1John 4:9-10). The disciples understood that Jesus as Messiah gave his life and his being for all those who betrayed him – for Jews, for Romans and for his own disciples.

The oldest texts in what came to be known as the New Testament are the epistles of Saint Paul. Traditionally, Christians speak of fourteen such epistles. For Paul, Jesus of Nazareth, a man he had not known in the flesh, was the Messiah. Paul focuses on only two aspects of Jesus’ life – the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as a criminal and the fact that he was raised to new life by God. For Paul, Jesus the Messiah is the one who reconciles humanity with God. His death on the cross, a scandal for all who expected a powerful king as Messiah, is the event which brings about the reconciliation of a humanity locked in sin with a God who through Jesus comes in search of the sinner. Jesus’ perfect obedience to the will of the Father that leads him to his death on the cross restores the image and likeness of the human person created as a child of God. God’s fidelity to His promise leads to the astonishing resurrection of Jesus to eternal life, a life that is the destiny of all humanity when death, the consequence of sin, is conquered through obedience to God’s will. The Letter to the Hebrews, stresses the importance of the priestly context for understanding who Jesus is. Jesus the Messiah in this context is both anointed priest and sacrifice, a perfect offering that is made “once and for all”, rendering all other sacrifices obsolete.

The NT letters tell us little about the life of the man Jesus and it was left to other early followers of Jesus to compose the Gospels (meaning “good news”), which comprise the first part of the New Testament and are portraits of the man Jesus of Nazareth and his life. The NT begins with the Gospel of Saint Matthew and in the very first verse of this book, which is also the very first verse of the NT, Jesus is identified as the Messiah. “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1) – identifying Jesus as a descendant of the people of God and the royal dynasty within that people, well known from the Old Testament. Three of the Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke, follow a similar biographical narrative although each one constitutes a very original perspective on the man Jesus. All three writers are firm believers that Jesus is the promised Messiah and the exemplary Son of God. All three show how the man Jesus, after being baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan, slowly revealed who he was to a group of disciples (numbering twelve, representing the twelve tribes of Israel) and a wider audience. He was active as a teacher, a healer and a miracle worker in Galilee and then went to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life, where he was betrayed by one of his disciples, accused and judged by the Jewish religious authorities and sentenced to death and crucified by the Roman political authorities. The Messiah was put to death in a conspiracy that involved everyone: Jews, Romans and his won disciples – no one is innocent but he. The surprising end to the story though is not the burial of Jesus of Nazareth but the discovery of his empty tomb and the apparition of a risen Jesus to his disciples, announcing to them that death has been overcome as God remains faithful to his promise of life. The Messiah who represents the fulfillment of God’s promise of salvation not only emerges from the tomb but vanquishes death by his own death and sets those in slavery to sin and death free from their tombs.

A fourth Gospel is slightly later than these three, that of Saint John, known in the Gospel as the “beloved disciple”. John’s portrait of Jesus is different from the other three as he uses a language which is more theological and less biographical. The Jesus presented by John is identified as the Word (logos) of God, synonymous with God’s creative and loving presence in creation, yet existing even before the creation of the world (see Proverbs 8:22-31). This Word takes on flesh at a particular moment in history and engages in long discourses about who he is and what his identity means for his disciples and the world at large. Central to John’s presentation is the fact that Jesus is the long awaited Messiah and he is identified as such by his first disciples who tell others that they “have found the Messiah” (John 1:41). However, the man identified as the Messiah is also identified as “the Lamb of God” (John 1:36), a lamb that will be sacrificed like the lamb sacrificed for the Feast of Passover, the great feast of liberation from slavery.

The writer of one of the Gospels, Saint Luke, left us another book included in the New Testament, called “the Acts of the Apostles”. This tells the story of the earliest disciples of Jesus after Jesus had been crucified, died, rose and ascended into heaven. The Book of Acts begins with Jesus’ physical departure from the world as he ascends to his Father in heaven. After this the disciples, gathered together in this city of Jerusalem, receive the Holy Spirit, created anew, filled with the spirit by which God gave his original gift of life and which He gives now so that the community of followers of Jesus are filled with the same Spirit which animated him. The challenge to the disciples in the physical absence of their teacher is to emulate him so that through them and their acts in the world, Jesus is rendered present. The disciples have become apostles, from being seated at the feet of the Messiah, they are sent out into the world (apostolos in Greek means “one sent”) to live as Jesus lived, to teach as Jesus taught and to do the acts that Jesus did. In this sense, it might be said that they are called to become a community of “messiahs” and thus it is quite fitting that this book recalls that the disciples of Jesus were first called “Christians” (Messianics) in the town of Antioch – named for the one they followed – Jesus the Christ/Messiah (cf. Acts 13:26).

The NT ends with one of strangest and most difficult of biblical books – the Revelation of Saint John. This book evokes the final moment in the long story of God seeking out the human person, who seems so adept at running away from God’s presence. Here Jesus the Messiah is presented as both a sacrificial priestly lamb and a triumphant royal lion. He appears as both a prophetic lamp lighting up the world and a double edged sword cutting through the lies and deceptions of the darkness of a world lost in sin. He is presented as God’s word, who comes to rule the world as God’s son and closest collaborator, ultimately seated with God on His throne. The ultimate scene in this book is of a heavenly Jerusalem descending from above. Satan has been vanquished and the faithful are gathered together as a kingdom of priests, serving God and perpetually proclaiming His praise. There is no longer any need for a Temple in which to worship God because the temple of this city is “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22). The book, and thus the entire NT, ends with a call to Jesus to come again.

For Christians, Jesus the Messiah has already shown us the way we must go in order to do the will of God, revealed by Jesus not only as Creator and King but as Father. We await his Second Coming because the kingdom he came to proclaim is not yet fully among us.