The
doorbell rang and when the homeowner went to answer it he encountered a tearful
man with a bucket who said, “I am trying to raise money for a family in
desperate need. The father has been out
of work for year and the mother suffers from a chronic illness. They have five children and almost no food to
eat. If that isn’t bad enough, their
landlord is about to kick them out of their house. The entire family could be out on the street
in a matter of days.” Well, the person
who answered the door was quite moved by this story and asked how much money was
needed to pay the rent. “Exactly $4,000,”
said the man with the bucket. Pulling
out his checkbook and a pen, the homeowner said, “I have been very blessed all
my life and I’d like to pay off their debt myself.” “That is so wonderful of you,” the tearful
man replied. Handing over the check the
owner asked, “How have you come to know so much about this family and their
situation?” The now-relieved man with
the bucket responded, “Oh, they are my tenants.”
Think
about a time when you were down and out; a time when life really laid you low. Someone once quipped that just when I thought
I had hit rock bottom a person standing above me tossed me a shovel and ordered
me to start digging. Very few of us
manage to get through life without having an episode or two like that.
This
is the exact place we find John the Baptist in today’s gospel reading. He is in prison, having been arrested for
criticizing publically King Herod’s adulterous marriage to his brother’s
wife. Last week we heard about John’s
wilderness ministry of calling people to repent and to prepare. He believed that God’s Messiah was coming and
coming soon. This person, as John
conceived it, would lead the people with a baptism of fire. This person would take a winnowing fork to
everything in society that needed to be cut down. In short, John believed that the Messiah was
going to lead a revolution that would overthrow Roman rule and restore the
kingship of David’s royal line.
John
proclaimed that Jesus was the person God had raised up for this messianic
role. He baptized Jesus and then he
waited for Jesus to act. And he
waited. And he waited. And he waited. And then he was arrested and imprisoned. And then he waited some more.
But
eventually he could wait no longer. He
sends a few of his followers to ask Jesus if he is going to fulfill his duty of
Messiah (as John understood it), or should John start looking around for
someone else to do the job. You can
imagine John sitting in a prison cell with his life hanging in the balance
thinking to himself that now might be a good time to get the revolution going. He must have looked out the cell’s window
each morning wondering if this would be the day that Jesus was going to lead an
overthrowing mob to rise up and free him.
But all he hears about Jesus is that he blesses little children, parties
with sinners, and has a penchant for telling perplexing stories about something
called the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ John is
at rock bottom and he is being told to pick up a shovel and dig even deeper.
Again,
think about what it was like when your life was at point like this. Looking back on it now can you see how
discouragement and disillusionment worked hand in hand? Discouragement: nothing that you tried seemed
to work. Disillusionment: everything you
had come to believe about life and how it is supposed to unfold turned out to
be wrong. Think about the future that John
envisioned and how he dedicated his life for it. How discouraged and disillusioned must he have
been as he sat in that cell?
John
had good reason to be disillusioned because, frankly, he was wrong. He was operating out of an old and outdated
theological worldview. He held that God
cared only about the people of Israel.
He held that the role of the Messiah was to start a rebellion in order
to rule from an earthly throne. And he
held that the only work required of the people of Israel was to purify
themselves in preparation for the restoration of something from the glorious
past.
John
came to this view through a narrow reading of Scripture and a heavy dose of
cultural influence. You can pick and
choose your way through the bible and paste together a series of verses that
point exactly to what John expected. But
this is something akin to looking at a rich, colorful mosaic and focusing only
on the green tiles. If you do that you
see something very different and very distorted. And messianic distortion was rampant in
John’s day. Individuals and groups
popped up everywhere predicting this and that.
John himself seems to have joined a commune known as the Essenes who
retreated to the wilderness to prepare for the arrival of God’s chosen one and
the establishment of a new Israel.
But
God’s plan was not to have the Messiah perpetuate a centuries-old cycle of
violence in order recreate a geographical kingdom. What God desired was to renew a loving relationship
with the entire human family, to do away with death, and to vanquish the
horrible affects of sin. The author Rob
Bell gets it right when he says, “God is not behind us dragging us
backwards into some primitive, regressive state. God has always been ahead of us pulling us
forward, into greater and greater peace, integration, wholeness and love.” Perhaps the single greatest difference
between Jesus and John was that John found his vision of the future by looking
to the past whereas Jesus’ vision of the future was something entirely new and
never before seen. John’s hope was to
recover something lost whereas Jesus’ hope was in something to come that no one
had yet imagined.
So John’s
followers come to Jesus with John’s question: “Are you the Messiah or are we to
wait for another.” Jesus answers them by
saying this: “Go and tell John what you see and hear: 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.” His words have the effect of encouraging John
to relook at Scripture in order to take note of the blues and the yellows and
the reds and the golds. God’s plan and
deep desire is right there. It has
always been there. We just haven’t noticed
it yet.
Matthew’s Gospel
does not tell us how John received this answer.
It is also little unclear as to how much or how little time passed
between this episode and when Herod had him beheaded. We will never know if John had time to do the
revisioning work Jesus encouraged him to do, or if he was still discouraged and
disillusioned when he was executed.
But I like that
today’s reading ends with Jesus proclaiming first that there is no person born
of a woman greater than John. By this
Jesus highlights the important role John played in the coming of God’s Kingdom
and that he played his role well. Jesus
then adds paradoxically that even the least person in the Kingdom of Heaven is
greater than John; indicating how blessed you and I are by our understanding of
God’s work in Christ (when we get it right).
What a blessing
it is to see the world as it truly is and to have some accurate sense of where
God is calling it to go. The actor
Michael J. Fox, when asked what it is like to live with Parkinson’s, said, “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my
acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.” If he was given the time, I think John the
Baptist might have said just the same thing:
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance of what Jesus
is doing, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”
John managed to do great things but did not have life
figured out and it tore him up. He was
discouraged and disillusioned. He needed
to learn that finding the Kingdom of God has much to do with laying aside your
expectations and accepting what you hear and see God doing. Where are you in all of this? When have you been like John? In what ways are you still like him? When and how have you been able to let go of your
expectations and accept the Kingdom of God for what it is?
