#DailyDevotion Jesus Isn’t Your Typical Messiah. But He’s The Messiah We Need.

Lent Day 14

Mark 8:31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.

 

Peter confesses on behalf of the rest of the disciples that Jesus is the Christ. But they did not realize what it meant to be the Christ. So, Jesus starts explaining to them what that means. The Christ has to suffer, be killed and rise on the third day. Well that sounded pretty crazy to Peter. He was having nothing of it. What kind of messiah does that? It didn’t sound like any messiah he was looking for. Indeed, like Peter, we too probably aren’t looking for a messiah like Jesus. We’re looking for anything but Jesus: a politician with all the answers, Hare Krisna, or some other religious/political leader.

 

But Jesus is the only Messiah or Christ the Father has sent us. But why must he undergo the things he talks about? Well Jesus must fulfill all the prophecies he made about himself throughout the history of man and particularly the Israelite people.

 

In Genesis we are told the serpent would strike his heel. Isaac is a type of son-sacrifice but Jesus is the Lamb the Lord provided. David throughout the psalms, particularly 22 talks about his suffering, death and resurrection as well as Psalm 16 which says his Holy One would not see corruption. Well you’re not going be dead  much longer than the third day and not start to decay. Isaiah’s servant songs in particular chapter 53 describe the suffering the Messiah would have to undergo to save Israel and the whole world.

 

Now Jesus himself prophesies what will be waiting for him as he comes the mount of transfiguration. He will pick up this theme in his teaching in Mark until he comes to his death on the cross outside of Jerusalem. No one likes to hear of it. Suffering in our own lives is something we try to escape. We tell ourselves and others, “Certainly God wouldn’t want us to suffer.” Yet suffer is what Christ Jesus must do.  And there is the resurrection. The disciples don’t seem to comforted by it.. But it seems to be missing often in our own speech. When someone dies or we look to death and we talk about being in heaven with God and no longer experiencing pain. For Christians this is true. I can’t even imagine the suffering one who is not a Christian undergoes after death, but from the biblical witness it isn’t pretty. But the Christians main hope is the resurrection.

 

Like our Lord Jesus Christ, we look to the day that we are resurrected like Jesus. Our hope is our bodies which have undergone decay and corruption, even while we are living, shall be made incorruptible like our Lord Jesus. Our hope is in the day when our spirits are reunited with our glorified bodies like our Lord’s glorified body never to see corruption again. And it will be heaven on earth because we shall see God and Christ with our own eyes, in our own flesh in the new earth that he has promised.

 

Heavenly Father, help us to realize what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, that we may give him the glory due him for the cross and grant us faith in his innocent, suffering and death for our sakes that we may obtain the resurrection to glory even as he was raised from the dead on the third day. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.