It was a typical Friday in a downtown street. A non-descript man in jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt and baseball cap emerged from a Washington DC train station. He found himself a spot against a wall, just beside a rubbish bin. He opened a small case, removed a violin, shrewdly placed a few dollars into the case, spun it round to face pedestrians, stood up and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m.—peak hour. The man played his instrument for 43 minutes, and was passed by a total of 1,097 pedestrians rushing off to work. Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to many who walk through the city: Do you stop and listen, look straight ahead and hurry past, or throw in a coin just to be polite?

What makes this story really interesting is that no one knew the fiddler in question was in fact Joshua Bell—one of the finest classical musicians in the world. And he was playing some of the finest music in history, on an 18th century violin worth millions of dollars. It was all part of an experiment set up by the Washington Post newspaper.

Bell began with a piece from Johann Sebastian Bach, a piece he described as “spiritually powerful”. It’s also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master.

Bell played the 14 minute piece with acrobatic enthusiasm, but for the first few minutes nobody noticed. One man slowed to look for a second, then kept walking; a woman threw a dollar into the open violin case. It was not until six minutes into that world-class performance that someone actually stopped to listen.

Things didn’t get much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Bell played, seven people stopped to take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run, leaving 1,070 people who hurried by—most not even giving Bell a glance. Bell can command $1000 a minute in the theatre. On this morning he earned a total of $32 and a bit of change. He later said the most awkward part of the experience was the moment he finished a piece and received, not his customary applause and standing ovation, but silence. He wasn’t used to being ignored.

One woman who ignored Bell was stopped by the Washington Post and asked about her actions. “Yes, I saw the violinist,” she said, "but nothing about him struck me as much of anything.” That’s when this story reminded me of another famous figure. “There was nothing attractive about him…” it was said of Jesus Christ. “One look at him and people turned away.”

In fact, the similarities between these two figures are many. Joshua Bell left the applause of the theatre to play in a dusty street. Jesus Christ left his throne in heaven to visit war-torn earth. Bell was the world-class musician whom everyone ignored. Jesus came into the world, “yet the world did not accept him” (John 1:10). One magazine said that Bell’s rapturous playing did “nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." The Bible says Jesus Christ came to give us “life to the full” (Acts 3:15). Even their names are the same—‘Joshua’ is the Hebrew name for Jesus. Without knowing it, the Washington Post experiment gave us a glimpse of the God Story.

Interestingly enough, the first person to actually stop and listen to Joshua Bell’s performance that day was a man in his thirties, who arrived during a musical moment Bell described as having “a religious, exalted feeling to it.” When the man was asked why he stopped to listen he said he was a fan of classic rock, not classical music, and so normally wouldn’t have. But in this case the music made him feel “at peace”.

And maybe the tip for us today is that those who take the time to listen to that first-century Jew called Christ may find something unexpected—life, peace, from the once ignored voice who turned out to be the Maestro in disguise.