Main news for 26 November 2022

Jesus' solemn entry into Jerusalem is perhaps His only explicit and public testimony to His messiahship. Now, when very little remained before the completion of His earthly path, there was no longer any danger that He would be placed at the head of some messianic uprising, although His own disciples were precisely hoping for such an uprising, and they did so to the very end. Meanwhile the evangelist emphasizes: the people greet Jesus as the Messiah above all because rumors about Lazarus' miraculous resurrection have spread widely through the city. This was understandable: after all, if even one person had really risen from the dead, then the very day of Judgment and universal resurrection about which the prophets spoke had indeed come.

And the one who raised him was obviously the Messiah. This logic was simple and clear; it fit entirely within the framework of popular messianic ideas. In reality everything was not so simple. Popular ideas about the Messiah went no further than the image of the Messiah as a great earthly King. Of course, this King was not imagined as an ordinary person. He could, for example, work miracles and even raise the dead. But His Kingdom was imagined as a fully earthly kingdom. And the life of this earthly kingdom was, in general, fully earthly too.

Of course, it would fully correspond to the Torah. Of course, it would have that measure of the nearness of God's presence without which the coming of the Messiah was unthinkable. And, of course, it would lack the triumph of death characteristic of the present age. But people remained the same. Only they became righteous and pious. In the best sense of these words, but still in an earthly way. Jesus' raising of Lazarus fit entirely within these ideas about the Kingdom. No one thought that such a resurrection was only a prelude. A preparation for the main thing. Lazarus did not rise into the new life that Jesus brought with Him.

He rose thanks to this new life. But he did not contain it within himself. His nature remained the same. He returned to the life lived by people of the untransfigured world. And the Savior came to give a person more. To join him to the fullness of life, not to a small part of it. This is exactly what those who greeted Him in the streets of Jerusalem could not understand. They thought that the main thing had already happened, but it was still ahead. For now even Jesus' closest disciples did not know this. He alone knew.