He was mocked by his own friends and family as a failure.
But, for me, right now, I feel like it’s most important to just sit with this realization a bit longer: Jesus failed.
All of those things are worth exploring in one form or another. We could point out that miracles require the active participation of both the healer and the sick person, or that the placebo effect only works if the patient has total confidence in the physician, or that sometimes the inner narratives we believe can override the possibility of experiencing something new and different, or that Jesus never forced anyone to accept the gifts he wanted to offer them. There are a lot of directions we could go from here. He had to walk away in disgrace and endure the mocking crowd who laughed at his inability to prove he was the Messiah they were looking for. That, to me, is a very significant point to consider: Even Jesus wasn’t one hundred percent successful. We will never see any scenes like that in movies about Jesus, but those scenes took place, nonetheless, and we know they did because of what Matthew and Mark freely admit: There were times when Jesus couldn’t work the miracle couldn’t cast out the demon, couldn’t perform the wonder, and absolutely nothing happened when he tried to heal the sick. Hidden within those two short sentences are scenes we will never find in any films about the life of Jesus scenes where Jesus lays hands on a blind person and nothing happens, or when he commands a demon to leave someone and the demon remains, or when he tries to heal someone born lame, or deaf, and the miracle doesn’t happen. Because of this overwhelming attitude of skepticism from members of his own community, Jesus wasn’t successful when trying to heal people.
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