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           At that point some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill?  Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Messiah? But we know where this man is from; when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.”
              Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”           
            At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.  Still, many in the crowd believed in him. They said, “When the Messiah comes, will he perform more signs than this man?”
         The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering such things about him. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees sent temple guards to arrest him. (John 7:25-32)

          In yesterday’s passage, They claimed Jesus was demon-possessed because He claimed someone (or someones) wanted to kill Him. In today’s passage, it seems the plot was common knowledge, traveling at the speed of rumor. And when He offended them, they acted on their desire, and He slipped away. Effectively, they claimed He was paranoid, but they were out to get Him.
         One of the reasons they claimed He could not be the Messiah is because they thought they knew where He came from. The Messiah was supposed to appear from nowhere, so to speak, to step onto the world stage with no backstory, a man of mystery and power. Of course, the Messiah was also supposed to be born in Bethlehem. Putting the two together is a bit of a challenge. But not knowing where someone is from can also mean that He rises from obscurity, and as Nathanael said, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” People seemed to think that a place of obscurity.  Jesus was a nobody from nowhere, without a teacher, but they thought they knew Him, so how could He be the Messiah who would be a man of mystery?
         The more I read Scripture, the more I find God refusing to be what people expect Him to be, and who they believe Scripture tells them He should be. He is both known and unknown. He is both immanent and transcendent. He is both just and merciful. He is both wrathful and loving, unified and diverse, and in the case of Jesus, both mortal and immortal, God and man. This is a level of complexity that most of us find impossible to understand completely, and many of us find it impossible to understand even in part.

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