Missing the Messiah

John 17:6–26

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• "they are your gift to me"
• "I guarded them"
• "I pray ... for those who will believe in me through their word"
• "the love with which you loved me may be in them"

Applying the Word to My Life:
The Gospels remind us again and again how badly the Pharisees missed Jesus. It’s like they had one job to do: they were waiting for the Messiah, looking for the Messiah, convinced they knew what the Messiah should be like—and still they could not recognize Him when He stood right in front of them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they didn’t just miss Him—they condemned Him to death. Talk about falling short.

The tragedy is not just that they missed Him. It is that they missed Him while being so sure they understood what God was doing. They should have known better. The Scriptures had already prepared them for a Messiah who would not fit ordinary instincts about power, control, and visible triumph. The signs He performed spoke loudly. But they were so attached to “their own picture” of the Messiah that they could not receive the one God had actually provided.

Jesus can see into their hearts and knows what is coming. We get insight into His last moments before the arrest and what He was thinking about. Not surprisingly, Jesus is focused on the people who have been gathered to Him and the ways His Passion will test their faith.

When I put myself in their place, it must have been confusing and comforting. Clearly Jesus knows that something bad is going to happen. They might have even had an inkling that it would involve His arrest. From there, the Romans and Jewish authority had multiple paths to take, none of them good. Wherever this was going, it wasn’t going to be good.

And still, knowing this is coming, Jesus is praying so that they will continue to be gathered, not lost. That the Father will protect them as Jesus did when He walked among them. There is hope in that—if God Himself is their protector, then whatever is coming cannot be the end of the story. And that protection is not just limited to that faithful group, it reaches through the ages even to us who “believe in Him through their word.”

But the truth is, there are days I can’t feel that protection and the hope wears thin. Sometimes out of silly selfish reasons like a little too much pressure at work or nothing quite going my way. Other times it comes from real challenges like health problems for people I love or when I see people who are being pushed to the margins of society. There are plenty of moments where I look at His promise and wonder where the hope and protection went.

That’s when I realize that I’m looking for “my own picture” of hope and protection instead of receiving the hope and protection that God sent. The Apostles, the early martyrs, the host of saints and the Church herself give me all the evidence I need. The hope and protection are there and bear fruit—it just doesn’t look the way I wanted it to be.

It gets a lot harder to look in judgment of the Pharisees when I realize how easily I fall into the same trap today. But the thing that amazes me is that Christ knew I would be here and still reaches out to keep hope alive. I see it in the way He treated the Pharisees who missed the Messiah standing right in front of them. We know Christ doesn’t cry out in condemnation of them, He cries out in forgiveness as they were so blind they didn’t even really understand what they were doing.

That matters for me because the protection Jesus gives is deeper than the protection I usually ask for. I want the kind that keeps me from pain, confusion, weakness, or loss. Jesus keeps His people in something deeper. He keeps them in truth. He keeps them in love. He keeps them in the Father even when the road ahead still passes through darkness. That does not make the suffering small, but it does mean it is not empty.

And maybe that is the hard grace in this reading. I can spend a lot of time asking why God did not protect me the way I wanted, while missing the ways He is still holding me together in the middle of what I would never have chosen. The Pharisees missed the Messiah because they insisted on their own picture of how God should act. I can miss His protection for the same reason.

To truly see Christ, maybe I need to stop looking for the escape I want so I can receive the love I need.

My Response for Today:
Today, when I feel anxious or unprotected, I will stop once and ask not only how I want God to act, but how He may already be keeping me in His love.