The Messiah We Need

In describing the birth of Jesus the writer of the Gospel of John said, “He came unto his own but his own received him not.” As the Christ – the Anointed One who would redeem the world – Jesus was a “bridge too far” for his contemporaries. This is neither a condemnation of those who lived in Jesus’ immediate day nor an aggrandizement of those who have chosen to celebrate him all these years later.

It is simply what might be called, “perceptional blindness,” a psychological term that describes the phenomena of missing the conspicuous: It is shockingly easy to miss the obvious if we are not looking for it. By looking over “there,” likely for what we so desperately desire or for what we have been told for our entire lives to anticipate, we miss what is clearly going over “here.”

Who or what were those in Jesus’ day…