This month marks ten years since the death of Steve Jobs. If you’re not familiar with the name, you’ll definitely be familiar with his company’s most famous invention – the iPhone. Although Apple had already seen success through the iMac and iPod, when the iPhone was released in 2007 it quickly became one of the most successful consumer products of all time.
Apple as a company has continued to do well since Jobs’ death. The Apple Watch, released in 2015, quickly overtook Rolex as the bestselling watch in the world. In fact, Apple is currently the world’s most valuable company.
But while predictions of Apple’s demise following Job’s death have proven unfounded, many Apple afficionados are haunted by a sense of what might have been. One leading iPhone product developer, Marco Arment, wrote recently: ‘As an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on. He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime. He had so much more to offer the world’.
Indeed, Jobs has long been regarded as a Messianic-type figure. Following his death in 2011, the New Statesman reported that if you did an internet search for the phrase "Steve Jobs, Messiah", you would get nearly 600,000 results. This is partly due to what could be called his ‘Second Coming’. Having left the company that he founded in 1985, he returned in 1997 when Apple was on its knees, the iMac was launched the following year, and the rest is history.
This type of Messianic language for public figures is not uncommon. In 2013, Newsweek had a cover story about Barak Obama's re-election, with the headline 'The Second Coming’. In sport, we’ve recently had the ‘Second Coming’ of Manchester United legend Christiano Ronaldo.
Statements like these are made with varying levels of seriousness. Yet this tendency we all have to pin our hopes on one particular human being surely points to a deep longing within us. Whether we look to celebrities, politicians or romantic relationships, we want someone we can follow, someone we can look up to, someone who will solve our problems. Someone who will make life worth living.
You can hear that longing in what Arment says of Jobs: ‘He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did. We all wanted his attention and approval. Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can.’
The problem with human messiah figures however is that if we meet them, they’ll probably disappoint us. And if they live long enough, they’ll let us down.
Undoubtedly part of the reason Jobs is remembered so fondly is that he didn’t live long enough to disappoint his followers. Likewise, when it comes to politicians, Enoch Powell’s words have proven true time and time again: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream, end in failure’.
Although Ronaldo will be talked about for generations to come, we’re already beginning to see the nadir of his career. He received a rating of 5 out of 10 for a recent Premier League performance by the editor of one United fanzine – not quite the Second Coming that had been hoped for. And in our personal lives, we’ve surely found that no human being is able to bear the weight of all our hopes and dreams.
But what if there was a Messiah who would never let us down? The word ‘Messiah’ comes from the Hebrew word for anointed – its Greek equivalent is ‘Christ’. From beginning to end, the Bible tells us about this Messiah. One who had been promised from the very beginning of history. One who was both God and man. One who is both like us and unlike us – and will never disappoint us. One who was cut off in the prime of life – but rather than his death being a tragedy, it was part of God’s great plan to rescue his people. One whose qualities don’t wax and wane over time, but ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever’. On earth, no-one who put their hope in him was ever disappointed. A woman left empty after seeking satisfaction in a string of relationships told her friends ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?’
When all our other messiahs have failed us, maybe it’s time to start asking the same question.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 28 October 2021