God Squad: Why Jews don't accept Jesus as the Messiah

Dear Rabbi Gellman: I am a practicing Roman Catholic and I have many wonderful Jewish friends. My DNA shows that I am 2% Ashkenazi (European) Jewish. I honor and empathize with the Jewish culture and history. We all pray to the same God.

My question is: Why haven’t the Jews accepted Jesus Christ as their Messiah? It’s been more than 2,000 years since Christians accepted Jesus as the Messiah. If your Messiah still has not appeared, have you not missed out, all those years? If Jesus, a practicing Jew himself, performed miracles, died on the cross for our sins and was resurrected, what else could he have done to prove that he is the same Messiah for all of us? I hope you will respond to my query. Warmest regards. — From A  

MG: Well, dear A, it is time to finally respond to the biggest question I have often been asked and never answered. I know the answer. Jews do not accept Jesus as the Christ (which means messiah) because Jesus did not do everything that the Messiah was supposed to do. Jesus did not gather all the Jews to Israel. Jesus did not fight the forces of evil in the world and overcome them at the head of an army led by a descendant of King David. And, finally, Jesus did not resurrect all the dead people who died before him. That is a long list and though there is a dispute about how many tasks remain to be performed, every Christian believes that the ultimate proof of Jesus’ messiahship is not yet completed. This is why Christians believe in a second coming of Jesus where he will finally complete his messianic tasks.

So both Jews and Christians believe in the messiah and both Jews and Christians are waiting for the messiah. Some of us are waiting for the messiah to come and some of us are waiting for the messiah to return.

In the meantime, while we wait, we are commanded to live lives worthy of the messiah’s arrival. We must fill our days with kindness and compassion, with justice and love. This is exactly why Father Tom and I could be best friends. We were both good waiters. We were both happy to teach people to get on with living lives of human flourishing while we waited for the end of time. We were happy to concentrate on the way we should live now.

Whatever the messianic timeline might be, it is most certainly above our pay grade.

We used to joke about it. I said, “Tommy, if Jesus returns and he is just a carpenter — a really good carpenter but not the messiah, are you going to regret giving up the physical and spiritual pleasures of being married?” Then Tommy would say, “Well, let me ask you, Marc, if Jesus returns and he actually is the Messiah, are you going to regret giving up pork?” We would both laugh and then I would say, “Let me just tell you, Tommy — it’s better than pork!”