How do you find the perfect piano? A Romance on Three Legs is the story of Glenn Gould’s obsessive quest for the perfect piano. Gould was Canada’s most famous pianist and the most eccentric pianist of the 20th century. Not even the world’s best Steinway was good enough for Gould. In the mid-1950s, he even considered giving up performing because there were no pianos he could bear to play. He spent almost half his life searching for the perfect piano.
Glenn Gould’s CD 318 Steinway piano
Finally, he found it lying in the basement of a department store. It was an instrument he had played 14 years earlier at the age of 13. Back then, he had rejected it. Now, it lay battered and bruised, worn out by years of playing and fatigued by years of being shipped to concert halls around the world. It was in such a decrepit state that the Steinway company decided to have it retired. It would harm their reputation to have it played in a concert hall. It was in this condition that Gould discovered the piano in June 1960.
It bore the rather prosaic name of “CD 318.” Gould played a few bars and instantly fell in love with it. It did not matter to him that CD 318 was an unwanted stepchild in need of a complete overhaul and had outlived its shelf life. It did not matter that its own creator, Steinway, the world’s greatest piano manufacturer, had doubts about its use as a concert piano. Gould’s obsessive quest for the perfect piano was complete. Gould had found the perfect piano.
Finding the Perfect Messiah
How do you find the perfect answer to your life-long questions about the meaning of human existence? How do you find the perfect solution to the world’s greatest problems? How do you find the perfect resolution to the world’s most intractable conflicts? You do that by finding the perfect Messiah. That’s what the people of Israel will tell you. The job description of God’s Messiah is to set God’s world to rights.
But how do you find the perfect Messiah? How do you know what the perfect Messiah looks like? What if you found Him in the basement of a department store, ready to be retired, declared not fit for purpose, in a state of disrepair, despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? What if you discovered that He had not answered your lifelong questions, solved the world’s greatest problems or resolved the world’s most intractable conflicts? Would you still believe He was God’s Messiah?
What if you found Him posing more questions than answers, more problems than solutions and more conflicts than resolutions? Would you still think he was God’s Messiah? Or would you begin to have doubts? Would you be disappointed, disillusioned and disenchanted with your quest for the perfect Messiah? Would you ask the question John the Baptist asks in the gospel reading from Matthew 11:2–11 and say, “Are You the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Have you ever found yourself asking John’s difficult question? I know I have. Many times.
Towards the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel and at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist is on a high, enthusiastically and excitedly pointing others to the Messiah! He thought he had found the perfect Messiah. Now, in the middle of Matthew’s Gospel, at the midpoint of Jesus’ ministry, believing John has turned into something akin to doubting Thomas. Mister Firebrand has turned into Mr. Doubtfire. The cocksure crowd-puller is not sure anymore if Jesus is indeed the Messiah, like young Glenn Gould having doubts when he first played CD 318 and like Steinway having doubts about CD 318 and deciding to retire it!
Doubting the Messiah
Doubting John is sending his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are You the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” We are told that John still retains disciples of his own. Why has he not asked them to transfer their allegiance to Jesus? In fact, in the synoptic gospels, we are never told that John’s disciples became Jesus’ disciples.
John had been the Messiah’s media manager. Now he is a skeptic. What has gone wrong? John has been hit by a personal tragedy. He’s now in jail and faces the guillotine. Isaiah’s messianic prophecy promised “liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.” So far, there hasn’t been a single jailbreak. John is disappointed with Jesus. Perhaps Jesus is not really the Messiah.
John’s credibility is at stake. His fire and brimstone sermons have warned of God’s wrath. But now in prison, John hears of sinners being embraced by the love of God. Like Jonah, he feels he has lost face. Jesus has not taken an axe to any tree; he has not burned any “chaff” with unquenchable fire. No cosmic judgment has taken place. The apocalyptic conflagration has not been ignited. Jesus has not overthrown the Romans. Jesus has not sparked off a political revolution. John is disappointed with Jesus.
All that Jesus is doing is having a ministry of mercy to the marginalized. Hence, John’s question remains, “Are You the one to come, or should we wait for another?” John uses the Greek word heteros rather than the word allos for “another.” Allos refers to another of the same kind, while heteros refers to another of a different kind. John is asking Jesus, “Are You the Messiah, or are we to look for a different kind of Messiah?” Jesus is not the kind of Messiah John had been expecting. He is a different kind of Messiah.
The Messiah’s Reply
Jesus replies to John’s question. He sums up all He and His disciples have done so far: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them.” Jesus is quoting verses from Isaiah 35:5, a text made popular by the recitative in Handel’s “Messiah.” This passage from Isaiah 35 also talks of the Messiah coming with “vengeance” and with “terrible recompense” in verse 4, but the purpose of the recompense is to “save” and not to destroy.
John is disappointed with Jesus. But John has not read his Bible properly. His reading of Scripture is skewed and selective. His expectations of God’s Messiah are unrealistic. You and I are so much like John. When God does not meet our expectations, our faith falters. When God does not answer our prayers the way we expect Him to, we are disillusioned and disappointed. We doubt. We turn our backs to God. We become disappointed with God. We stop going to church. We look for a different kind of solution to our problems. We forget that God’s ways are not our ways and that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. We forget that the Bible is much bigger than our skewed and selective readings of it.
John is scandalized because Jesus has not lived up to his expectations. Matthew uses the Greek word skandalizo fourteen times in his gospel. Here, skandalizo refers to some kind of stumbling in faith. In Matthew’s Gospel, a number of people are scandalized by Jesus. The Pharisees are scandalized by Jesus. The people of Jesus’ hometown are scandalized by Him. Just before Jesus’ arrest, His own disciples are scandalized by Jesus and fall away from their faith. John has lived a scandal-free life. Now, he is scandalized by the scandalous words and works of Jesus.
Jesus responds graciously with a beatitude to John, “Blessed are those who are not scandalized by Me.” Jesus gently appeals to John not to fall from faith and not to be scandalized because Jesus is a different kind of Messiah from the one John has been expecting. “Blessed is he who does not ‘look for another’ because, if he does, he is looking for the fulfillment of his own fantasies rather than of God’s prophecies,” remarks biblical scholar John Meier.
Shall We Look for Another?
Soon after Christmas in 2007, the Washington Post conducted an experiment on how people saw things. They asked a young man in jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap to stand at a metro entrance in Washington, D.C., in the middle of the morning rush hour and play the violin. In 43 minutes, the violinist played six pieces of classical music. Nearly 1,100 people passed by. Most of them were white-collar workers employed as policy analysts, project managers, budget officers, specialists, facilitators and consultants.
Joshua Bell busking in the New York subway
In the three-quarters of an hour that the violinist played, only seven people stopped to listen — but only for a minute. Twenty-seven people gave money, a total of $32 and change. The rest hurried by, few even turning to look.
Three days before he played at the Metro station, the same violinist had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall. There, the same kind of people had paid $100 each for the middle-range seats. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, the same violinist would play to a standing-room-only audience.
But that morning, no one recognized Joshua Bell. No one recognized that the violin he was performing on was an original Stradivarius valued at $3.5 million. Standing in the subway on a Friday morning, one of the world’s most famous violinists was just another bum, just another busker.
God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten son. The only stumbling block is that He sent Him to be born as an obscure baby in a basement in a one-horse town called Bethlehem. The only stumbling block is that He sent Him to party with a sleazy bunch of sinners. The only stumbling block is that He ended up in a state of total disrepair, battered and bruised, scarred and scorned on the Cross of Calvary. Are you scandalized? Or do you think you’ve found the perfect Messiah? Is Jesus the one who is to come, or are we to look for another?