A prophet, that’s what people figured Jesus was after He died. After everything He had done: casting out demons, healing sick people, giving sight to the blind, baffling religious authorities, walking on water, bringing enough food to feed five thousand men out of nowhere, even raising the dead… His followers figured He was a prophet. Check it out for yourself. Jesus is walking with some men on the road down to Emmaus and, acting like He doesn’t know, He asks them what they’re talking about…
19 And he said to them, “What things?” And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20 and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened.
Now, to be fair, they had initially figure that He was going to redeem Israel. They thought He was something more. They may have even thought that He was the Messiah, the coming King who would restore everything. I don’t know exactly what their eschatology was, records of 1st century Jewish eschatology are hard to find because so much was destroyed in 70AD. I’ve studied what is available some, but I’m by no means an expert. Anyway, it’s clear that at least some of Jesus’ followers thought that He was the Messiah (cf. Mrk. 9:29; Luk. 23:35,36,39) and that He would redeem Israel (as we saw in Luk. 24:21). Anyway, here’s a guess at what might have been running through their heads.
All of those hopes were dashed now. It was never expected that the Messiah would die. No one ever thought that the one who would redeem Israel would have to die for its sins. Worse still, a crucifixion? God would not redeem Israel through something so vulgar, so disgusting and hideous. The Messiah would come in power and break Rome with a rod of iron (cf. Psalm 2:9). Why would the Messiah have to die anyway? It doesn’t make any sense.
No. Jesus couldn’t have been the Messiah. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, other such passages depicting suffering, those weren’t about the Messiah; maybe they were about the enemies of Israel. The Messiah can’t die! God promised:
34 I will not violate my covenant
or alter the word that went forth from my lips.
35 Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;
I will not lie to David.
36 His offspring shall endure forever,
his throne as long as the sun before me.
No, death wasn’t in the picture. Lots of prophets had died. Evil people killed them because they didn’t like their message. Jesus must have been some kind of prophet. He said some weird things, but maybe prophets are able to say wrong things sometimes. Or maybe they were just misinterpreting Him; Jesus was pretty hard to understand sometimes. Prophets died in the Bible; even John the Baptist died. Even Jesus had talked about the prophets dying at the hands of wicked people (cf. Luke 11:37, 39; 13:34). God must have had someone else in mind for the restoration of Israel, right? Or maybe they killed their last chance. God had promised a Messiah, but what if Israel had killed Him in their wickedness? Could that even happen? Nothing was certain anymore.
