In despair of the present men began to forecast the future. A time will surely come, they said, when God will give an anointed one, the Messiah; he will set all Israel free, will make Israel rule the world instead of the Romans; he will gather together the scattered of Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God's people in triumph in Palestine. And then, when the prophet paused, a plain man spoke: "I don't care if he does. My father all his life looked forward to that. What does it matter now, if God redeems his people, or if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, why should your father not come with the redeemed Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does God care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal immortality?--that became the anxious question.[18]
But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in heaven? Are you quite sure that there is any distinction in the other world between good and bad, between Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom would be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, and added that the Jews will look down and see the Gentiles in hell--something worth seeing at last. But, after all, it was still guesswork-- "perhaps" was the last word.
When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" the obvious reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems to have been no standard idea of the Messiah. The Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as, in modern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody knows what they will be till they do come. Jesus is not what they expected. A Jewish girl, at an American Student Conference a year or two ago, said about Jesus: "I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him." Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was a vague one.
The main point was that men were uncertain about God. God was unintelligible. They did not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the individual; God's plans miscarried with such fatality. Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guesswork. It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles--the Romans, and the rest of us--but nothing was very clear. In the meantime, if God was going to damn the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews do it in this? Human nature has only too ready an answer for such a question--as we can read in too many dark pages of history, in the stories of wars and religious persecutions.