Jesus, Revolutionary.

It's a name we use for Jesus all the time. We just call it by its Greek equivalent.

Christ.

You might think it a bit strange to suggest that Christ means revolutionary; that's hardly how it's used today! But Christ is a translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which literally means 'anointed one'. And by the time of Jesus, the Jews were convinced their anointed one would bring a revolution.

There were different groups within the Jews of 1st century Palestine. But all of them were defined by the reality of Roman occupation. Some were committed to violent revolution; some believed that observing ritual purity would enable God himself to instigate it. Some had given up hope of it, while others fled to the desert to wait for it. But pretty much all of Jewish faith was dominated by the idea that living under Roman rule was not God's intention for Israel, and that with the Messiah a serious change was coming.

In this 6-week series - first posted here in Jan 2009 - we'll explore the hopes and fears of the Jewish readers of Matthew's gospel. We'll imagine how it must have felt to be longing for a revolution, and what it looked like when it came.

And we'll be dreaming of a revolution in our own time. One like this...