The Curious Case of the “Kick Ass” Messiah

Don’t be surprised if, during Advent, you hear a sermon that goes something like this:

The Jews wanted a political messiah, but Jesus brought a peaceable kingdom.

The Jews wanted someone to destroy Rome, but Jesus came to make peace.

The Jews wanted a military ruler, but Jesus inaugurated a spiritual reign.

I’ve heard this formula so many times that I’ve developed a gag reflex to it. Yet it keeps coming up. I was reading Christian Piatt’s Postchristian, for example, and came across this statement about Jesus and the Judaism of his day.

Yes, people called out to Jesus to save them, and he did indeed offer salvation. Just not in the way they had expected. They longed for a conqueror to ride in, kick ass, and take names, but instead he arrived as the Suffering Servant, vulnerable to the worst that humanity could bear to heap on him. (page 47)

The Jews wanted a kick ass messiah rather than a suffering servant. How’s that for misguided expectations?

In the next few weeks, during the season of Advent, of expectation, I’m going to identify what’s wrong with this view of Jewish expectations. In fact, I’ll debunk it altogether.

For starters, it’s historically unlikely, isn’t it? Is it likely that all Jews held to the same expectations for the messiah?

Think of it this way: Would we ever want authors hundreds of years from now to say, “Twentieth-century Christians expected the rapture.” Not those of us who write for the Progressive Christian Channel! We can’t lump all Christian expectations into the same ball of wax. Some Christians hope for a rapture. Some Christians don’t expect much of anything. Others are busy building justice as a sign of God’s coming reign.

If we know how unlikely it is in our day, then why would we homogenize Judaism at the time of Jesus? Was it really so monolithic that we can say Jews in Jesus’ day “longed for a conqueror to ride in, kick ass, and take names?”

All Jews? Jews in Egyptian Alexandria? In Rome? In Jerusalem? Did they share the same expectations?

Illiterate, rural Jewish farmers outside of Emmaus who worked other people’s lands? Literate urban Jews who attended Roman spectacles in the impressive amphitheater in the coastal city dedicated to Caesar—Caesarea? Did they share the same expectations?

Jewish tradesmen who inhabited the heavily Roman cities of the Decapolis to the north, around the Sea of Galilee? Jewish tent-dwellers who traversed the deserts of Beersheba in the far south? Did they share the same expectations?

Of course not!

We know from the writings of the late first-century Jewish historian Josephus that Zealots yearned for the violent defeat of Rome. Josephus certainly had his flaws (he was a Jewish general turned traitor, after all), but he’s probably right about the Zealots.

We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that some Jews expected a final battle in which the sons of light would fight against the sons of darkness. In this battle, the Kittim or Romans, would be destroyed. The Dead Sea Scrolls tell us, too, that this battle was primarily fought in the heavens, with angelic bands standing on their side. (Zealots, in contrast, fought squarely on the earth.) In the Dead Sea Scrolls, it wasn’t all about a kick-ass messiah coming as a conqueror. In fact, many of the expectations in the Scrolls have little to do with a messiah at all.

We know, also from the writings of Josephus, that the Sadduccees, on the whole, were happy to keep things the way they were. The Sadduccees represented the elite, who took care of the temple. They certainly didn’t want any disruption to the status quo since it was a lucrative and longstanding business that gave them financial security and social status.

You see? There was no single Jewish expectation for the messiah at the time of Jesus. So let’s stop caricaturing Judaism. They were not paper puppets who unthinkingly hoped for a violent regime change.

When we realize this, we realize that the life of Jesus is far more compelling than we may have thought. He didn’t rise and fall on a single set of expectations in his day.

His was a more complex life that was caught in the complicated game of expectations—all sorts of expectations—in his day.

His stories and sayings about the reign of God would have piqued the interest of his hearers—all sorts of interests—in his day.

His miracles would have sparked a range of hopes—all sorts of dreams—in his day.

The Word became flesh. And, truth be told, human flesh is complicated stuff, a mishmash of emotion, ambition, and expectation. So Jesus entered a complex world shaped by diverse–no, make that competing–expectations.

Stay tuned for a look at some of these during what remains of Advent.