The Hidden Messiah and the Rainbow the World Has Never Seen

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The Palace No One Else May Enter

Deep in a heaven folded away from every road stands a palace that opens for one guest and no other. Its makers called it the Bird's Nest, and inside it a thousand halls run one into the next, each heavier than the last with longing. No angel walks them. No prophet has ever crossed their threshold. Only the Messiah may enter, and he has been inside so long that the doors have learned the weight of his hand.

He is not enthroned there. He waits there. The palace is a prison built of yearning, and he is its only prisoner, held back from the world until the hour he is permitted to come out. In a tree beside the palace a wondrous bird keeps its nest, close enough that the Messiah can hear it stir in the dark.

The Bird That Sings Him Toward the Throne

On every New Moon, on the festivals, and on each Shabbat, the Messiah walks into the halls of longing, lifts his voice, and weeps. The sound does not stay inside the palace. The Garden of Eden shudders at it. The firmament trembles. His grief climbs through the heavens until it reaches the throne of God.

Then God calls the bird. It leaves its place in Eden, flies to the nest in the tree, and sings. No music ever made on earth resembles it. Three times the bird pours out its song, and on the third the bird and the Messiah rise together, up past the shaking firmament, all the way to the Throne of Glory. There God swears an oath in the hearing of the man He keeps hidden. He swears to break the wicked kingdom of Rome, to end the empire that has ground His children into the dust, and to give that battered people every blessing set aside for them since the beginning.

The oath sworn, the bird flies back to its nest. The Messiah walks back into his palace. The doors close. Once more he is hidden, and once more he waits, and the halls fill again with the ache of a promise not yet kept.

When Gog and Magog Scar the Earth

Below him the world tears itself open. The armies of Gog and Magog rise against the nations, and the fields the Messiah has never been allowed to walk are salted with the dead. The earth wears its wounds like a burned face. Every generation of the exile has felt the chains that hold him fast, the long links forged from each single day the redemption did not come.

Then the hour turns at last. The doors that opened for no one swing outward.

He Comes Forth With Only a Staff and a Sack

He steps out of the prison-palace carrying almost nothing. No crown, no army, no herald walking before him. A staff in his hand, a sack across his shoulder, and that is the whole of it. The redeemer the world has ached for comes out looking like a beggar on a country road.

His first act is not conquest. He wraps himself in prayer and girds himself like a warrior, not for a battlefield but for the presence of God, and he cries out from the bottom of everything he has carried. "Master of the Universe," he says, "remember on my behalf the suffering and grief and darkness and obscurity into which I was cast. My eyes have beheld no light, and my ears have heard great reviling, and my heart broke with pain and grief."

He will not let the plea rest on himself alone. "You know that I have not acted for my own glory," he says, "nor for the glory of my father's house, but for Your glory have I acted, and for Your children who dwell in sorrow among the peoples of the world."

Heaven answers him with work, not comfort. Before any throne is won there is one task set before him, and God gives it to him plainly. "Go and assemble all your brethren from all the nations." From every land where they were scattered he is to gather them home, the exiles carried back like an offering laid before God.

The Rainbow Adorned Like a Bride

A sign has been set for that gathering, and it hangs where everyone has always been able to see it and no one has understood it. The rainbow that arches over the world after rain is the old sign, the bow God set in the clouds for Noah so the waters would never again drown the earth. Its colors are muted. It promises only that the worst will not come back.

That faded arc is not the rainbow of the Messiah. Not yet. When the exiles begin their long walk home, the bow in the sky will catch fire with color, blazing so bright that its splendor floods the whole world, adorned the way a bride is adorned for the bridegroom who has waited to marry her. That rainbow will not say only that God will hold back the flood. It will say that God has remembered, that His covenant with Israel stands, and that the footsteps drawing near belong to the man who wept alone in a thousand halls and has finally walked out of them.

The world has seen the pale bow for as long as there has been rain. The bright one it has never seen at all.