I like to think of this Sunday in Advent
as portraying the kinder/gentler side of John.
Last week we had a rather intimidating John who was shouting at the
Pharisees and Sadducees who had come to see him. He called them a brood of
vipers. Sometimes insults get lost in
translation and things that might seem insulting to us, were not so much in the
time of Jesus. That is not the case in
this situation. Calling the leaders of a
religious movement a brood of vipers is always a pretty significant
insult. Then he went on to talk about
baptism and the way that Jesus would baptize people. “I baptize you with water for repentance…He
will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear the threshing floor
and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with
unquenchable fire.”
If I was one of the people being
baptized by John, I would have thought, “Thank goodness I am being baptized by
John and not this other guy he is referring to.” Fire, while a lovely image, sounds like a
rather painful way to be baptized. The
winnowing fork does not sound very comforting either. I have seen picture of those things. Picture a really huge fork. A winnowing fork
is what was used to separate the wheat from the chaff. The farmer would lift
the harvested grain with his winnowing fork. Then the wind would blow the chaff
away and the wheat would fall to the ground. People who were listening to John
the Baptist were no doubt familiar with this image. It seems to me that even if
you manage to escape the unquenchable fire, you are still being thrown around
by a long and pointy fork. Neither
option is very appealing to me.
Soon after
John’s pronouncement, Jesus appeared on the scene and chose to be baptized by
John. It is clear that John immediately
recognized Jesus for who he was, the Messiah.
We know this because he said, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you
come to me?” And if that was not enough,
the heavens splitting open and the voice of God should have convinced him that
the man that he was baptizing was no mere man, he was the Messiah, the
savior.
What happened between that
moment and the story we have from the Gospel today? All of a sudden, the once convicted and
doubtless John is now having second thoughts.
Some hypothesize that it was the emotional and physical torment of being
in jail that made him question. Yet
being in jail should not have come as a shock to John. He had criticized Herod, the ruler at that
time. He knew there would be ramifications. He was prepared to suffer. The man ate locusts and lived in the
wilderness. It’s not like he was
accustomed to the Ritz.
The text indicates that
there might be something deeper at play here.
Matthew wrote, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he
sent word by his disciples and said, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we
to wait for another?’” When John heard what the Messiah was doing…It would
appear that John was not satisfied with the way Jesus was spending his
time. It’s not that he was carousing,
turning water into wine every night. He
wasn’t doing anything immoral. He was
healing, preaching, teaching, and ministering to the poor and the needy. Yet for some reason, this was not enough for
John.
You might note that Jesus did not even answer
John’s question. He did not tell John
what his title was or whether he was the Messiah who they had been waiting
for. He told John’s disciples what he
had been doing: giving sight to the blind, enabling the lame to walk, cleansing
the lepers, restoring hearing to those who were deaf, raising the dead and
bringing good news to the poor. These
probably sound like pretty Messiah-like actions to most of us. But this is not what John wanted to
hear. We can be pretty confident in that
because John already knew about Jesus’ public ministry. That was the reason he sent out his disciples
in the first place.
Voltaire once wrote that,
“If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.” We have a tendency to want to visualize Jesus
and God as the kind of God we want, perhaps even a God a little like us. For instance, when God talks to me, he
usually has a slightly sarcastic sense of humor. He is also an Episcopalian,
obviously. While it is important that we try to connect with God (and sometimes
we do so by identifying with him), it is also extremely important that we do
not limit God by our expectations of God.
Do you remember how John first
described Jesus? He was supposed to
baptize people with fire, separate the wheat from the chaff….essentially making
judgments on those who were lacking. By
the time John landed in prison, he had probably spent some time observing the
ministry of Jesus and Jesus had not behaved as John wanted and expected. Jesus had not rained fire on anyone. He had not condemned the corrupt leaders or
tried to overthrow the Romans. He was not
spending his time with the powerful people.
He was healing the people who could not help themselves, and probably
could not do much to help Jesus. He had spent his time with those who everyone
else had forgotten. He had brought them
good news. Some people think that John
was having doubts about Jesus. Perhaps. More likely, he was having doubts about his
own conviction of who this Messiah was supposed to look like, act like, be like. I wonder if John was reassured when he got
Jesus’ answer. I wonder if he remembered
the Jesus who knelt before him and insisted that John baptize him.
I suspect that Matthew did
not write about John’s reaction because that was not the important part of the
story. The important part was Jesus
response to John and Jesus response to all of us who try to pigeon hole him or
define him by our own standards and expectations. It is we who should be defined by Jesus, not
vice versa. Yet in this day and age, we
are so accustomed to having things our way.
You have the iphone, the ipad, me-tv, my-space. Everything is custom tailore to what we
want. Why listen to the whole album when
you can create a playlist on itunes of just the music you like?
People often refer to
their God…who their God loves or does not love. There is the liberal God…the conservative
God, the people’s God. But here’s the
thing, there is only one God and that God has his own plan and his own identity
and unlike every other aspect of our world, God will not be defined by what our
culture needs or wants at the time.
While that might feel a little rigid to some of us, it’s also incredibly
liberating to know that there is something steady out there, someone who is
timeless and does not depend on us. There is a line in the communion hymn
today, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met with thee tonight…” Jesus
is our great hope, but also a fear because we cannot define him and sometimes
we cannot understand him. That’s
ok. God is big enough to handle our
insecurities, our fears and our disappointments. Jesus was not the God who John
expected, maybe not even the God John wanted, but he was the God who John
needed, the God who we all need.
