Address given in Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 11th December 2016, the 3rd of Advent.
In
today’s Gospel (Matthew 11:2-11) we have heard a question and an answer.
John the Baptist sent some followers to ask
Jesus this question: ‘Are you the one who is to
come’ – meaning the promised Messiah – ‘or are we to await another?’
And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the
dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is
anyone who takes no offence at me.’
This exchange raises three questions for
me, which I want to explore with you:
1.
Why did John ask his question?
2. What
did Jesus mean by his answer?
3. And
what does this mean to us as Jesus’s disciples 2000 years on?
As a
starting point let’s put ourselves in John the Baptist’s shoes – let’s imagine
what it was like to be him.
John is under house arrest in the great
fortress of Machaerus, on a barren hilltop looking out over the Dead Sea and
the Jordan Valley to the Judean hills and Jerusalem in the distance. King Herod
Antipas has imprisoned him for publicly denouncing Herod’s illegal marriage to
his brother’s wife.
It must have been hard for John to be so
confined in prison – he was an outdoors kind of man, used to living in the open
air of the desert, sleeping under the stars. I imagine a wiry, weather-beaten,
driven man pacing up and down in his quarters. He is frustrated and longs to
return to his old ministry, to continue preaching repentance and baptism for the
forgiveness of sins, and hell fire for those who do not listen, like a prophet
of old.
John is convinced that God has called him to
announce the imminent arrival of the promised Messiah, who will usher in the
Kingdom of God, in which God’s people will flourish in justice and peace. And
John believes his cousin Jesus is that Messiah. Remember, when Jesus
came to him for baptism John saw the dove descend on him with his own eyes, and
heard with his own ears the voice from heaven say, ‘This
is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’.
John’s disciples, when they come to visit
him in his prison, tell him that Jesus is gathering his own disciples and travelling
around preaching to crowds, just like John. But, they tell him, there is no
sign of Jesus behaving as a Messiah should behave. Their expectation - and
John’s - is that the Messiah will act like a king and lead an army of the
people to overthrow the unrighteous and bring in God’s Kingdom of justice.
So why did John send his disciples to ask
Jesus his question? We shall never know for sure. Some people suggest John
wanted his disciples to see Jesus for themselves, so that they too would come
to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Others suggest that John had begun to
question his own belief that Jesus is the Messiah and is looking for
reassurance. But most likely, I think, is this - John is impatient to see the
Kingdom of God. He expects to see it, and by his question he seeks to encourage
Jesus to fulfil his own expectations of the Messiah – essentially saying ‘Come on Jesus, time to start acting like a
Messiah!’
Now
let’s look at Jesus’s answer
From earliest times the children of Israel
looked forward to a time when God would come to put right all injustice.
Despite their trials and tribulations, they did their best to follow God’s law
and they were sure that God had chosen them and loved them specially. So they
fully expected that God, the God of righteousness, would act to restore their
fortunes as God’s chosen people. And they came to believe that God would do so
by raising up a Messiah, an anointed one, who would usher in God’s kingdom of
justice.
But how would they know when the Messiah
was arriving? And what would God’s Kingdom be like? Prophets tried to imagine
it - the OT is filled with their attempts to put it into words, in catalogues
of amazing things that would occur when God sent his Messiah to establish his
kingdom. We have heard 2 of them today, in Psalm 146 and in the 1st
reading from Isaiah (35:1-10). Here are some of Isaiah’s words again:
‘Here is your God. He will come
with vengeance,
with terrible recompense. He will
come and save you.
Then the eyes of the blind shall
be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a
deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.’
Every religious Jew of Jesus’s time would
be able to quote some of these wonders and signs. So Jesus answers John’s question
by quoting from Isaiah - not just from the passage we heard, but others too:
‘The blind
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the
dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’
‘Look
and see’, he is saying, ‘I am doing what the prophet says the promised Messiah will do’.
John and his disciples would have understood very clearly that Jesus is claiming
that he is indeed the Messiah, ‘the one to come’.
And Jesus prays a blessing on those who are
not offended by his claim. Jesus does not live up to the popular idea of the
Messiah leading an army to overthrow the unrighteous and impose the Kingdom of
God on the world, because that is not what Jesus has come to do. He is an
entirely different kind of Messiah. And there were many who took offence at
him.
So,
what does this mean to us as Jesus’s disciples, 2000 years on?
John and his disciples could see with their
own eyes the first signs of God’s Kingdom breaking out around them, in Jesus’s
ministry. They could also see how few had yet experienced it. But they lived in
expectation and hope that God’s Kingdom would spread to the whole world.
From apostolic times, through the insight
of St Paul, the Church has seen itself as the body of Christ on earth. The
Church has continued Jesus’s ministry to spread God’s Kingdom, following his
great commission to the Twelve, ‘Proclaim the
Good News: the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead,
cleanse the lepers, cast out demons’. The Church has never
ceased to look forward in expectation and hope to growth of God’s Kingdom, and
its final completion, to be marked by the return of Christ in glory. And for
all its many faults, over the centuries the Church has by God’s grace done so much
good work to build the Kingdom – healing the sick, freeing the slaves,
relieving the poor, educating the young, acting as a yeast in society to make
things better – as well as proclaiming the good news. But we all see how much
more there is still to do.
The fact is God’s Kingdom is not like an
earthly kingdom. It cannot be brought into being in an instant by winning a
battle or voting in an election. It is a continuing process, a growing
organism. Jesus is the kind of Messiah who forms God’s Kingdom through the
action of many willing, loving, human beings – his disciples - by showing them
what it looks like, and what they must do to make it grow. And this will take
time. We cannot know when the Kingdom will be complete, but we can hope that it
is soon and pray ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’
So it is right that in this Advent season
Christians should not just look back at the baby in the crib, but also look
forward in expectation and hope to the continuing growth and final completion
of God’s Kingdom. Let us resolve to do our bit to further it, and pray for
God’s help doing so:
O Saviour of the world,
lifted up on the cross to draw
people of all races and nations to yourself:
bless the witness of your Church
in this and every place,
and help us to finish the work
you have given us to do in the world for which you died.
We ask it in your name, our
living and victorious Lord. Amen
