Well, insofar as (IMHO of course) the world is not as it should be — I would not describe the global situation as largely characterized by open sharing, forgiveness, mutual caring, and not passing judgment on others — I’d say the endeavor has not yet been met with success. This ain’t a saved world.
re: at least one potential Messiah in each generation — I believe each of us is a potential Messiah; I believe God takes volunteers rather than “sending someone down” or “calling someone”; I believe the combo of human conditions/circumstances and the voice of God within us leads some people to make a more profound communication with God and to reach an understanding of what we’re doing wrong and what ough to change. Each such person is more of a potential Messiah than those who don’t.
But only some such people will have the combo of people-skills and emotional resourcefulness to also communicate effectively with the rest of the species. In fact, it seems to me that many of the individual characteristics that make it more likely for a given person to focus and commune with God make that individual an unlikely leader of people, and vice versa, especially if we forego formal systems of rank-and-authority leadership and confine ourselves to people who can charismatically appeal to folks and sway crowds as a speaker and etc. (I, for one, certainly do not shine in that area).
And not all of those will be successful. There are questions of strategy, the extent to which the would-be Messiah has a gut-level understanding of how the history of collective human thought and interpretation of events is likely to play out, and the skills to set up and precipitate outcomes in human social and ethical philosophy as a consequence of the Messianic deeds and teachings and the (deliberately chosen) conflicts and events and how things transpire.
It is in the latter area that I tend in particular to look upon Jesus of Nazareth with a lot of awe. (Disclaimer: I may be wrong about how things went down 2000+ years ago and may be guilty of selecting historical interpretations that I find appealing. OTOH, who doesn’t?) But I’m under the impression that J of N rather deliberately set up situation after situation so as to juxtapose and contrast the pedantic letter-of-the-law rule-following definition of right-versus-wrong with the felt-and-realized spirit-of-the-law sense of what was genuinely the right thing to do, and positioned himself as a violator of the former as a direct consequence of embodying the latter, and did it in such a way as to precipitate strong criticism of his (mis)deeds so he could explicate them in terms of the latter and make his point.
(Certainly as many non-Christians like to point out, his teachings are wonderful and admirable but not unique and he was not the first to say such things)
And as you know from prior threads, I split company with Christians in general in my belief that the crucifixion was yet another such educational juxtaposition, one gone awry; that it was his intention to put himself in a position where by the letter of the law he should be punished (it may even have been his intent to get himself charged with a capital crime for which he would be sentenced to death if found guilty), but by the spirit of that which is good, and apparent to all involved that it was good, it would be a horrid thing to put a man to death for what he had done. I think he expected them to get this and back down and turn him loose and it would be another case, perhaps the culminating capstone event, in fact, in which he got people to see that even the best of laws are frail attempts to put into words what is moral and right and that always the living spirit of what is good reigns superior to the letter of the law and overrules it.
(The centrality of this is underlined by reminding ourselves that they had no separation of church and state: the spiritual rulebook of right-v-wrong was also the civil rulebook of legal-v-illegal)
It may have been his deliberate intention to pull in the Romans and get them to examine their own beliefs about right-v-wrong and the role of law, or the involvement of the Romans may have been a factor he wasn’t counting on (& up until then, at any rate, although he often spoke in ways that indicated that what he said was applicable to everyone, his attention was on his fellow Jews and the relationship between Jews, God, and the Torah). The involvement of the Romans may have been what caused things to go awry. To speak to the Roman officials and make his points he would have to appeal to concepts of what is good and what a person’s duty w/regards to the good and to God in terms foreign to Judaic theology and ethical politics.