Who Is This Man?Sýnishorn

He’s here! He’s the one fulfilling God’s promises.

What was their decision? “They all condemned him as deserving death” (Mark 14:64). Does that seem rather intense? Why did Jesus’ statement cause such a stir? Because with those few words, Jesus made an earthshaking claim. He claimed to be the Messiah (Christ in our English New Testaments. In our modern context, we’re likely to miss how huge of a shock it was to the Jewish leaders for Jesus to assert that he was the “expected king and deliverer of the Jews,”[1] the king that God had promised to send in the line of David to deliver his people and usher in a time of blessing.

When people encountered Jesus of Nazareth and discovered he was (or even just that he claimed to be) the Messiah, they lost their minds. Either negatively, like the religious leaders who called him a blasphemer who deserved to die; or positively, like the Samaritan woman at the well, who went in excitement to tell everybody in her village about her encounter with Jesus.

The account of her conversation with Jesus in the Gospel of John is epic. It begins with an innocent question prompted by Jesus’ claim that he could give her better water than Jacob’s well: “You aren’t greater than our father Jacob, are you?” (John 4:12). Little did she know! After Jesus reveals the secrets of her heart, he tells her that “an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:21, 24). The woman then says: “I know that the Messiah is coming . . . When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” And Jesus drops the news: “I, the one speaking to you, am he” (John 4:25-26).

Numerous times, and just as explicitly, Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people. When he told the high priest, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61-64), he was referring to Daniel’s vision of “a son of man . . . [who] was given dominion, and glory and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:13-14). Wow. If it wasn’t true, it would be blasphemous indeed. But John wrote his Gospel for this very reason: “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

As Christians today, we have the privilege of seeing what “many prophets and kings wanted to see . . . but didn’t” (Luke 10:24).

[1] “Messiah,” in Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary.