It is a matter of rare spiritual maturity to know that one is
not the Messiah. No one throughout my seminary training
ever warned me against a messianic complex. On the
contrary, I was encouraged to take Jesus as my model, to
be a servant of God to the people. In subsequent decades of
working with clergy, many of them exhausted from trying to
meet the expectations of others and themselves or crushed
under the sheer need of their parishioners, I have observed
that having a messianic complex is, for many people, indistinguishable
from commitment to Christ.
John the Baptist knew better. Though he was more
famous than Jesus ever was in his lifetime, John was never
tempted by popular accolades or by his indisputable sense
of calling to think of himself as the messiah. He had a magnificent
role to play for God, but he never edged over into
identifying his role with that of the Messiah.
Martin Buber once commented that there is something
incommensurate between thinking oneself a messiah and
being a messiah. It may be that many of us fall into messianic
roles because we haven’t died to our egocentric need to “be”
somebody. It is just possible that Jesus himself refused the
messianic role later generations laid on him. His temptations
in the wilderness seem explicitly to have been rejections of
the current messianic hopes. Rather than identify with God,
he related to God. He found his calling and followed precisely
that, whatever later generations would call him.
Can we relate to the same divine powers within us that
Jesus related to? Can we be vessels of divine healing without
identifying ourselves with the Healer?
By Walter Wink from The Upper Room:60 Days of Prayer for General Conference 2016