Netflix’s Messiah Doesn’t Know What a Messiah Is Supposed to Be

King David was the prototypical messiah. He was, after all, “messiah’d,” that is, smeared with oil. Messiahs are “anointed” – that’s the root meaning of mashiach. In David’s case, he was messiah’d as king. Priests and prophets are also said to be messiahs, and, oddly enough, so, too was Cyrus, the non-Jewish king of Persia. Josephus in the 1st century CE thought that Vespasian, soon to become Roman emperor, was the messiah. So there’s a leadership dimension to being a messiah, typically that of a king or ruler. But is there more to being a messiah than the political requirement?

King David was both an adulterer and complicit in a murder. Remember the Bathsheba affair. David seduced her and engineered her husband’s death, an act that changed the course of history with the birth of their son, Solomon. So clearly a messiah is not a perfect being, just a flawed, ordinary human being who fails, repents, and is chosen by God for a mission. The Dead Sea Scroll Community around the turn of the Common Era looked forward to two messiahs: one a king, one a priest –the job being too difficult for one individual to handle. So how does a messiah differ from either a king or a priest? What’s the added dimension?

The mysterious figure in Netflix’s Messiah is an enigmatic individual. He’s positioned as Muslim. He seems to perform miracles – restoring a boy who has been shot, creating a dust storm, and, at the end of Season 1, reviving a person from a plane crash. And he seems to engage in long-distance travel with ease, showing up on the doorsteps of the Texan preacher’s wooden church after having escaped from the clutches of an Israeli prison.

Could he be the messiah? Is this his first appearance? Or is he the returning Jesus, as Christians might expect, although he appears to be Muslim and not Jewish?  Is this what either Jews or Christians expect the messiah to be? Or is he a con artist? Perhaps al-Masih is blank canvass that allows his followers to read into him whatever they wish.

The people in the series all expect al-Masih to do something, but what? No one seems to know. Something dramatic is anticipated, but nothing materializes. Al-Masih continues to be a remote individual somehow disconnected from the events swirling around him.

The show challenges our own understanding of a messiah, and gives us a lot to think about.