They had rejected the Messiah. They despised the way of salvation. The Jews had blinded themselves. And we know that the natural man cannot perceive the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him.
Unbelief leaves a person in utter darkness.
He was despised and rejected by His own. Now we move on to vs. 43 of our text. Jesus is foretelling what the historian Josephus recorded forty years later. That was a judgment of God. The Jews and the Romans hated each other intensely.