Could you tell me what the difference is, if any, between a messiah and a prophet? Well, yes, every prophet is not a messiah, but every messiah, and we know only of two so far, is a prophet. The fact is, I have, you know, on all these subjects I have spoken so much at such length that sometimes I hesitate to repeat all that, you know, but anyway, because you couldn’t have access to all these things, so I would try to be brief. I’ll answer this question again.
Messiahhood is a special phenomena found within prophethood, not outside it. Messiahhood defines a certain prophet, I mean, among prophets, if a messiah is found, that means that messiah will have certain special conditions to face, and certain responses to those conditions, which will make him distinctive from other prophets. And those two aspects are found both in the lives of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, and the life of Hazrat Masih Maud, peace be upon him, as well. Those aspects, there’s so many, which I have been speaking about, but I’ll mention one important one here. You know, the Jews, they had become very hard-hearted after a long practice on the teaching of truth for truth and eye for eye.
They had forgotten what softness was, they had forgotten what forgiveness meant. Everything about them was harshness and hardness and revenge and retribution and so on. So what was messiahhood? Messiahhood was a total transformation of that state, from hardness to softness, from revenge to forgiveness, from causing suffering to offering suffering. And that transformation is so pronounced, as if a revolution has taken place. So this revolution is witnessed in the time of Jesus Christ, and not in the earlier prophets. There were so many prophets who came between Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them, yet this particular transformation of which I’m speaking is not witnessed in earlier periods of history. In the time of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, as if two different nations were being separated from one from the other.
One was harsh and revengeful, the other was soft and forgiving. Instead of eye for eye and truth for truth, they were taught if one slaps you on one side of the face, you offer the other cheek, and so on. So this particular aspect of softness and offering of sacrifices is messiahhood. You revive a people from death, by apparently throwing them to death. You ask them to accept death in the name of God, and then you receive life. This is the phenomena of messiahhood, although this phenomena to a certain degree, to a lower degree, is found in the life of every prophet, but here it is found with a very special emphasis. You find the difference so marked that nobody can miss that.
So this is what you observe in the time of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, and this is what you observe in the time of the Messiah, peace be upon him. The maulvis before him, in the age when he appeared, had become so hard-hearted, and still they are, very hard-hearted. And Khomeiniism has risen, and so many other isms, revengeful, they talk of sword and suppression and oppression, and taking revenge, bloody revenge from others, spreading Islam through force. This is what they tell you, here in the United States, in the United Kingdom, they held a conference recently, and they openly told Muslims to kill any Ahmadi they come across. So this is Yahudiyat, as we witness in the time of, just prior to the Messiah, peace be upon him, and following him. What was his message to his people?
For the sake of Allah, don’t kill, don’t take your revenge, leave it to Allah, and still you will spread, still you will become victorious. Despite being the victim of these cruelties, you are going to be victorious ultimately. This is Messiahhood, and this is, you are going through exactly witnessing that state of Messiahhood yourself, and you still don’t understand what Messiahhood is.
