You raise the point that many have raised. Why didn’t Jesus simply come out and admit to being the Messiah? It gives the impression that he did not think he was the Messiah. This whole matter has now been labeled as the Messianic secret.

There were many opportunities for Jesus to address and answer the burning question in the hearts of the disciples – are you the Messiah? But Jesus seemed to have another idea in his mind. Even during the miracles that he performed, he shied away from the acknowledgement of himself as Messiah. When Simon Peter acknowledges him as the Christ, Jesus reprimands him. At the transfiguration, the disciples witnessed an amazing sight and yet they were once again called on not to divulge Jesus’ identity. All this raises a nagging doubt in the minds of those reading the Gospels – maybe Jesus was not the Messiah?

Caiaphas and Annas have Jesus standing in front of them and they are searching desperately for some way of condemning this ‘prophet’ from Nazareth to death. Theirs was a cunning plot to bend Rome to the wishes of the high priest and to rid the country of this rabble rouser. What had offended them so much? In their view, this vagabond was not satisfied in performing a few miracles, curing a few people. But he had gone too far in claiming to construct a new temple in three days. The whole raison d’être of the high priest was the Temple. And if the purest cast of the Hebrews – the pharisees – were vilified by this itinerant preacher, what was to become of all those in power? What role would they now serve? This man was a threat to the whole social order and there was only one fate that awaited him.

The approach was very sly but it burned deeply in the hearts of many in Israel – who are you, Jesus? The question was raised at the Transfiguration by the disciples. It was raised many other times as the disciples argued amongst themselves but Jesus always demurred – he would not answer them outright. But the question was answered in the strangest of places, in the high priest’s house. Here, where Jesus is humiliated, totally powerless and at the whim of his judges, when his role and the meaning of Messiahship could not be misconstrued to serve political agendas – it is at this moment that he openly states that he is indeed the Messiah. The reason is clear – at this point there was no chance of misreading the role of the Messiah. Seeing him bound, humiliated, totally weak and incapable of resisting, deserted, nobody would dream of taking him for a conquering political messiah come to vanquish the Romans. Now comes the question crystal clear and almost absurd in its striking inappropriateness – “Are you the Christ?” The questioner Caiaphas did not expect an answer because, he, the high priest already knew the answer, he knew that this despised and bound man could not be the Messiah and yet the answer he got shook him and those around him. “Yes. I am”.

This is the Christ that God had sent as opposed to the illusory Messiah of human thirst for power. He is the one who came to die and we would read this as defeat. He is one who came to be crucified and in this the world sees failure, embarrassment and foolishness. And there is a loud and important message here for the Church of our age. What are we to make of the edifices that we erected and now stand near empty and almost totally abandoned? What of our claims to influence the powers of the world through our council and through our communion with them? We still pursue these goals although they are evaporating from our grasp like water turning into steam that we cannot clutch onto. This glorification of power and its attributes are all excluded in that chamber of the high priest’s house. They are still rejected but we still insist on clinging to them and we will fail and we will ask ourselves why did we fail?

We can’t seem to get away from the allure of power and aggrandisement. And the Church has not been immune to this enchantment. The paradoxical thing is that as we make ourselves greater, we lessen God. In a sense we have boxed God in and limited Him in terms of where He is and where He is not. Whenever we see someone in Church who may not achieve the sanitary conditions that we expect, whenever we meet someone who may not be dressed properly for a service and may not be behaving as we think they should, and many, many other circumstances where we judge and find the person lacking, we are limiting God. We are saying that God is absent in that encounter and by doing this, we will fail to encounter Him at all. Maybe the lesson the Church is being taught is that we are looking for God in the wrong places.

Just imagine that we were there at the high priest’s house when Christ was brought there. What would have been our reaction? Would we not have missed the importance of what was going on by concentrating on this forlorn and abandoned figure before us and the outward appearance that he presented? Would we have sided with the high priest and with those in power against this vagrant that stands before us? These learned men were standing in front of the Incarnate God clothed in a flesh as corporeal and limited as the language of the gospels. Sadly, they did not even suspect what this man manifested. They believed religiously that he was a demon. I wonder if our answers to the questions of Christ’s identity would have been as clear as we sometimes imagine.

One frequently hears about the ‘demise’ of the Church, about the dwindling number of members, that the world is becoming more secularized. The outward evidence seems to support these conclusions, but we need to go back to the conversation that we read about at Caiaphas’ house.

The picture that we have of magnificent churches and cathedrals, ornate to the nth degree is not reflective of what Christ asks of us. This seems to be one of the lessons that we are being taught through what we see as the plight of the Church for today. It seems that what the Church is being called on to forget are the ideals of power and earthly glory and splendor that was so common in past centuries.

Through all this what was forgotten was the misery and scandal of the cross. And out of our search for this ‘glorious’ Christianity we forgot what is central to our faith. We were told not to judge and one area where this could apply is in our relations with those who do not share our faith. We have every right to say that God is here, but we have no right at all to declare that He is absent in other places. In a sense, we have cut down God to dimensions that are manageable by us and when we have done this, we are puzzled why we find ourselves in the quandary that we find ourselves in. We have created an idol and are puzzled why this idol does not hear our prayers. We have closed our arms in a defensive posture and thereby we have cut ourselves from much of the world and from God who loves the world, all of it.

We have slipped into a religiosity which is foreign to our faith. Religions thrive on pomp and circumstance, on connections to those who hold earthly power. We have become comfortable with what religions all teach about the crucial importance of things that are of secondary value. The central declaration of Christianity is not some moralistic judgement which condemns many to hell – truly a strange version of the good news – and for how many centuries has this corrupted message been proclaimed? And then, why do we wonder that people turn away from this message of good tidings?

Faith is not some intellectual assent to statements made about issues of God and man. The Greek roots of the word faith – pistis – implies something richer than just an intellectual acknowledgement. What is central to faith is trust, trust in Him who made the cosmos and who cares and loves each one of us, without exception. In religions, the gods do not care about man nor about his fate. They are capricious and use man as a plaything.

This is where the good news comes in, not about a new religion, but about a new way to live and to be. What was being judged at the high priest’s house was not Jesus but the religious temptation of man which causes man to make idols in a more subtle way than that of material statues. The main reason for Christ’s coming, for Christianity, is to finally defeat the scourge that has plagued humanity for countless centuries. Christ came to abolish death and to proclaim this victory. Death is the sin, the terrible passion, that has enveloped humanity in its icy grip, and man now is finally free.

But how can that be? We still die. What has really changed? This will have to wait for the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas