HE DIDN’T COME TO DO IT ALL

To the minds and hopes and dreams of the Hebrew people as they waited expectantly for centuries – and are still waiting – for the Messiah to come, when the Messiah did come to live among them, he would do it all. He would make all those hope and dreams a reality almost all by himself if not all by himself. No one can do that, of course, even if that someone is God.

The Hebrew people were not simply daydreamers or even alone in having such hopes. Every four years in our country we have an election to vote for the person who will be our Messiah, the one who will make all our hopes and dreams come to fruition. The candidates all proclaim that “I am that one. Vote for me and I will make this country and your life so much better” adding implicitly “all by myself”.

When the person elected fails, and they all fail because the Kingdom has not yet come, that person is roasted over the coals as a failure. But no matter how great the ego of the candidate, no one person can do it all. No one person was ever meant to do it all. That is not the nature of the political system and that is not how God intended it to be from the very beginning.

Jesus did not come to do it all, whatever we deem “all” to be. He came to show us how to do it, how to make those hopes and dreams a reality. More often than not we overlook that truth, conveniently overlook it especially when life is not going the way we want it to go. And when it does not, we tend to look for a scapegoat, someone to blame for the mess we or the country is in.

To find the culprit all we have to do is look into the mirror. No, we are not the total blame but we are part of the blame. Whenever we fail to do what we are expected to do, even if what we are expected to do is very little, the blame for the failure is on our shoulders. That is true in politics as it is in why the world is in the mess that it is in the present day – and it is a mess.

The Jewish people believed that the Messiah would come to change the world just as we Christians believe Jesus, the Messiah, came to change the world. But the world has not changed not because Jesus failed but because we have failed. We have failed to do our part. Jesus did not come to change the world all by himself. Again, he came to show us how to do it and promised that he would give us everything we needed to do just that.

Doing “just that” means that we live out each and every day what we promise to do every time we renew our baptismal promises. In sum those promises mean that we will use whatever gifts we have been given to see and seek and serve Jesus, the Jesus, the God, who lives in everyone, for we are all children of the same God. It is only when we live the way that Jesus taught us to live that the hopes and dreams we have will be realized.