Secondly, accepting anybody as the messiah means now there is no hope. This man certainly is a kind of magician – he turns water into wine, walks on water, feeds hundreds of people out of two loaves, raises a man from the dead, cures a few sick people. But if this is the messiah, what about their suffering and anguish, thousands of years old? Now even the hope is finished. The messiah has come, and the messiah has failed.

Rather than see the messiah fail, they would like the messiah to be crucified – because that keeps their hope alive.

Nobody bothered about the psychology of the Jews. They were not cruel people, they are not cruel people. They have not tortured anybody.

Why suddenly did they turn upon Jesus? He was destroying their hope, and that was all that they had – no joy in their life, no freedom in their life, simply a hope that one day all this suffering will end. This night cannot remain forever; the dawn is going to come, the messiah will come and redeem God’s chosen people, the Jews.

They could not sacrifice that hope. That hope was such a big solace, consolation; that hope was their only future.

And just a carpenter’s son comes and wants to destroy it.

They could not forgive Jesus.

But they were not against John the Baptist, although he declared the end of the old and the beginning of the new, although he declared that he is preparing the path for the new messiah to come.

He was killed by the Romans, particularly Pontius Pilate’s wife. That is a very strange thing. She was a beautiful woman, and Pontius Pilate was a powerful man in the Roman Empire…and politics works in strange ways. He was so powerful that the king of the Romans was afraid – he was getting old, and when he dies his son has no chances to become the king if Pontius Pilate remains in Rome. He had such influence on people so he had to be sent far away – in such a graceful way that nobody thinks that he has been simply removed from the path of the king’s son. And when the king orders Pontius Pilate to go…. A powerful man, an intelligent man, and he has a powerful wife.

But the more beautiful a woman is the more egoistic she is.

Man becomes egoistic if he is rich, he becomes egoistic if he has political power in his hands, he becomes egoistic if he has great knowledge, scholarship, he becomes egoistic if he is worshipped as a saint, as a prophet. He has not left the woman any area except beauty to fulfill her ego – a very limited scope, one dimensional.

But because the scope is limited, the ego becomes very strong. A beautiful woman has a stronger ego than any man can have.