Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/276

Rh liverer was called the Messiah; this term is not common in the Old Testament, however, but is sometimes applied to Cyrus by the Pseudo-Isaiah.

These hopes and predictions of a deliverer involved several important things: A reunion of the divided tribes; a return of the exiles; the triumph and extension of the kingdom of Israel, its eternal duration and perfect happiness; idolatry was to be rooted out; the nations improved in morals and religion; Truth and Righteousness were to reign; Jehovah to be reconciled with his people; all of them were to be taught of God; other nations were to come up to Jerusalem, and be blessed. But the Mosaic Law was to be eternal; the old ritual to last for ever; Jerusalem to be the capital of the Messianic kingdom, and the Jewish nation to be reëstablished in greater pomp than in the times of David. Are these predictions of Jesus of Nazareth? He was not the Messiah of Jewish expectation and of the prophets' foretelling. The furthest from it possible. The predictions demanded a political and visible kingdom in Palestine, with Jerusalem for its capital, and its ritual the old Law. The kindgom of Jesus is not of this world. The ten tribes—have they come back to the home of their fathers? They have perished and are swallowed up in the tide of the nations, no one knowing the place of their burial. The kingdom of the two tribes soon went to the ground. These are notorious facts. The Jews are right when they say their predicted Messiah has not come. Does the old Testament foretell a suffering Saviour, his kingdom not of this world; crucified; raised from the dead? The idea is foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. Well might a Jew ask, “Wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” To trust the uncertain record of the New Testament, Jesus was slow to accept the name of the Messiah; he knew the “people would take him by force and make him a king.” But what means the triumphal entry into Jerusalem? He forbids his disciples to speak of his Messiahship—“See that thou tell no man of it;” lets John draw his own inference, whether or not he must “look for another;” thinks Simon Peter could only find it out by inspiration. Was it that