3. Advent, 12/12/2010

Sermon on Matthew 11:2-15, by Hubert Beck

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples, and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" And Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me."

As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.' Truly, I say to you, among those born of women, there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. English Standard Version

THE QUESTION

We have heard it said many times, in many different ways, under many different circumstances, have we not? Perhaps, in fact, we have said it ourselves on occasion: "God will surely put a stop to all this nonsense, will he not? How can he stand by and see all the evil in the world and not do something about it? Corruption in politics; a society rapidly deteriorating in its moral sensitivity on every level; relationships falling apart within families and among families; alcohol and drugs tearing at the very seams of the social order; pornography and violence on practically every TV program or movie that appears ... how can God let it all go on? If he is good and righteous, just and holy, he must step in and put a stop to it - and that very soon! Either we are approaching the last days of the world or, at the very least, the last days of the nation in which we have taken such pride in the past before all this corrosion set in."

This is all said from the limitations of our own personal human existence, of course - from the private cells within which we all live and from which we view the world around us ... like the cell in which John the Baptizer lived in. On occasion we even say that about ourselves: "Can God put up with me much longer? The harder I try to be what I want to be, the more I realize what a failure I am at being what I want to be. If I sense that failure on a conscious level and within the solitude of my own inner life, what must God, who knows me even better than I know myself, think of me? I have a hard time putting up with myself - so it must be far harder for God to put up with me! What kind of future do I have with God if he exercises divine judgment on me?" That may not be an everyday kind of "confessional exercise," but it falls on us at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways - especially those times when we do precisely the things we were sure that we could and would never do - and still we did them, contrary to anything we ever thought possible. Do you resonate with what I am talking about? If those thoughts occur to me, I suspect I am something of a bellwhether for the kinds of inner lives that most others have also!

Whether, then, we look out and away from the small little cubicles of our own tiny segment of the world or whether our thoughts search the deep, inner space of our personal lives, we begin to associate with John the Baptizer in today's Gospel reading. "Surely," he is saying, "if you are truly representing the God whom I was sure you were going to represent, you would put the feet of the world to the fire of God's judgment." What else can we deduce that John expected of Jesus when he had said only months earlier, "He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." (Matthew 3:11, 12)

John, himself, had already taken the "winnowing fork" of God's judgment into his own hand, calling out Herod for his adulterous action. "It was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because he had married her." John had openly challenged this marriage, saying, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife." (Mark 6:17-20) It was Herodias who had goaded her husband into putting John into the cell from which he sent his disciples on the day recorded in our text. Was this not something of a "model" for the one who was "mightier than he" who would clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn while burning the chaff left from the winnowing fork of God's righteous judgments? Why wasn't Jesus doing the same, whether it was challenging crooked merchants or a morally lax society or some other such thing?

What was Jesus waiting for? The reports that John could garner in the isolation of his imprisonment did not resonate with John's expectations in the least. "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" Our concerns about God's apparent inaction in the face of the worldly evil in our own day are all echoes of John's question. Much as we love God and his Son Jesus, we are quite sure that he should more actively address the wickedness of this world. That is what we say - dare we say it this way? - out of the smugness of our own righteous indignation that the world is not shaping up according to the standards we would expect if it were truly ruled by God as we would expect him to rule it. (Of course, as was noted earlier, in more quiet and introspective moments we also recognize that such a righteously indignant God would sweep us up in our own sinfulness no less than he would clean up the world around us!) But, still ... why does God stand so idly by?

JESUS' RESPONSE

"Idly by?" Jesus says! "The problem is that you do not see that the winnowing fork is, indeed, in my hand! You look, but do not see. You listen, but do not hear. My separation of the wheat from the chaff is as clear as day for all who have eyes to see. The awful oppression of blindness is put down in favor of sight wherever I go. Is that not truly a ‘separation of wheat from chaff?'

"Or do you not recognize the miserable imprisonment that lameness imposes on a person? I burn that imprisonment with the fire of eternity, giving mobility to those who have been disabled by this foe.

"How about those who have been forced into social isolation through their leprous condition? I take away the disease that has isolated them and returned them to a normal place in life. Is that not a most worthy way of swinging the "winnowing fork"?

"Do you realize what it means to be unable to hear the sights and sounds that so enrich life? I oppose that. I give deaf ears new life, so to speak, so that they can enter into the full enjoyment of life.

"Do you not see that all these things are death-dealing enemies, each in their own way, to the fullness of life that marks the presence of the kingdom of heaven - and I raise them from the death that haunts them with new possibilities. All are impoverishments of various kinds, and I preach good news to them, restoring to them that of which they have been deprived. Is that ‘standing idly by'? Quite the opposite. Your eyes have been blinded to the kind of separation that is taking place between those things that the forces of evil have imposed on the children of this world and the nearness of the kingdom of heaven that can now be seen in me. You were right in what you preached, but you put on the wrong lenses through which to see that of which you preached! You thought of the overthrow of governments and great social upheavals. But the kingdom of heaven comes much more quietly than that. See in me that which God has in store for all creation in ways that you never thought of."

Can you perhaps hear Jesus saying that?

Or, perhaps, you can hear Jesus saying this: "Don't ask me if I am ‘the one who is to come.' Ask those who were blind but now can see - and those who were lame but who now can walk and leap - and the lepers who are now received back into their home - or those who were deaf but now enjoy the sights and sounds of normal life - or the many who languished in the shadow of death but who have found new life because I have restored it with the same hope that I give to all those whose poverty burdens them but who find new strength and possibilities as recipient of God's promises.

"Go ask them, but do not ask me. They will tell you who I am. They are my witnesses."

That may have been the message Jesus gave to those disciples of John who came with the question, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" We do not know just how those disciples reported it to John, but it is a reasonably good conjecture that John took considerable heart from the report his disciples brought from Jesus even though, he, himself, who might have wished that Jesus would come and rescue him from his cell in the same way that Jesus had raised up hope in so many other recipients of his gracious power, still languished in the darkness just preceding death itself.

THE QUESTION TURNED BACK ON ITSELF

Jesus then directs the crowd's attention to this prison dweller after his disciples have gone back to him, turning the question that came from John inside out: "Who do you think that he is?"

He challenges them with a series of rhetorical questions. They knew very well that they had not gone out into the wilderness to hear a weak, indecisive man reporting the nearness of the kingdom of heaven - no "reed shaken in the wind." He had, in fact, raised their hopes to a high level that the kingdom was near at hand, and he was preparing his hearers for its immediate advent.

Nor had they gone out to see "a man dressed in soft clothing," a self-serving man, so to speak. They knew better than that. "But who is he?" That was the question! And everybody knew the answer to that, also. They had received him as a prophet - and that was a very significant affirmation. Israel had all but given up on any more prophets appearing after four hundred years of prophetic silence. But now, here one appeared whom they could and did honestly affirm as a prophet! If they had all but given up on seeing such a one, there was one piece of evidence that they could not get out of their heads in spite of that long silence. That was a promise delivered by one of the last of those prophets of so long ago: "Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you." And here, they sensed, that long-ago promise was being kept in their very presence!

Jesus then extols John like he would extol none other: "Among those born of women, there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist." That was quite a pronouncement, to say the least! But hardly has he said that when he seemingly contradicts himself: "Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."

In this set of paradoxical statements we find the secret to John's inquiry, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" John's greatness had superceded all others who had come before him, for they had all been bearers of the promise that God would break into the world's sad condition in some unexpected way. They, however, could anticipate this only from a far more distant position. John was privileged to be the bearer of that anticipation at the very dawning of that new day. None had been honored to be so close to that new day as he was.

Yet that new day dawning was now coming into the full light as Jesus' ministry broke the darkness once and for all. He was separating blindness from seeing, lameness from walking, the lepers from their misery, the deaf from hearing. In him life was emerging out of the grave of sin ... "and blessed is the one who is not offended by me." That dawning of the new day presaged by John in such immediate terms was now blossoming into full light - and all who basked in the sunlight of that new day were even more blessed than John who had only stood in the first rays of that light! "What marvelous blessing you have," Jesus was saying, "that you see fully that which John could only, at best, see but dimly. See it, he did, to be sure. But you see, standing among you, the very light of the world - and you will be blessed beyond measure if you are not scandalized by that which I say and do and bring into your midst. People do, indeed, love darkness so much that they do anything possible to avoid the light. But how great will be your blessing if you let the light shine into your lives, breaking that darkness." (John 3:16-21)

"HE WHO HAS EARS TO HEAR, LET HIM HEAR!" (V. 15) / "HE WHO HAS EYES, LET HIM SEE!"

Does the darkness give way easily, though? Not at all! "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force." The darkness is a particularly ominous setting for violence - and the violent have put John into prison. It was never different with the prophets. Elijah was relentlessly pursued by Jezebel. Amos was persecuted. Jeremiah was thrown into a well. On and on the stories go of God's prophets seized by violent hands and put to shame, scorn, even death itself. The powers of darkness oppose the coming of light with a vengeance. Jesus is surely not unaware of the scenario that will take place only a short time following this when he, himself, will be taken with violent hands and shamefully put to a wretched death. At that time, we are told, "from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour" when Jesus breathed his last. If ever one sees that of which Jesus speaks here, it is there on Golgotha, where "the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force."

Ah, but the darkness was not the last word. John, the prisoner, remains Elijah for those "who are willing to accept it," the one who was preparing the way of salvation, a salvation so powerful that even the pinions of darkness could not gain the final word. In Jesus' resurrection death itself suffered violence, for it was overcome by the force of life - the life that originated with God "in the beginning" and which will prevail until the end of time. John put it so well, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:4, 5) The final violence was enacted against those who tried to hold the curtain of darkness over the earth. In Jesus, the crucified one, life became available in a form and way that even John in his prison cell could not have imagined. Jesus was on his way to that cross when John sent asking him, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?"

The response of Jesus was not a simple verbal self-affirmation given to those who had ears to hear. It was a response that required one to see everything that he was and did through lenses focused by the prophets of ages past. The miracles to which he pointed were not merely isolated events, but they were framed by words like these from Isaiah of old: "Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God he will come and save you.' Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy." (Isaiah 35:4-6) Or again, "The Spirit of the LORD GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound." (Isaiah 61:1) The coming of God's great liberating servant had long been looked for, hoped for, anticipated with great longing. Jesus sends that word to John as a visible word that he was, indeed, the one who was to come in accord with the expectations of all those who had come before John.

The great Advent themes of waiting, longing for, hoping, yearning, hungering and thirsting for God's great liberating entrance into visible form in the world are all wrapped up in this one to whom John sends his disciples. The waiting is over, the longing satisfied, the hoping fulfilled, the yearning at an end. The hungering and thirsting of the soul is fed and watered. We, on this side of Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection are assured of that - and we are those who trust him with our eternal welfare. John could only peek into that moment of fulfillment but, great as he was, he couldn't hold a candle to those of us who are immersed in the power of that fulfillment.

Now we are to be signs to all who ask about where to look for hope that Jesus is, indeed, the one in whom all hope is swaddled, to use the Christmas word describing the infant. If only we could, with a word, give sight to the blind, make the lame walk, cleanse the diseased, give hearing to ears silenced - but, alas, we cannot do it as Jesus did.

Yet we can - as those whose lives have been washed in the waters of baptism, thereby joining our lives to his suffering, death and resurrection, and as those whose lives are regularly fed on his body and blood through the forms of bread and wine - be lesser arms doing similar acts of mercy and kindness that are the hallmarks of him whose name we bear. To preach the good news to the poor of the world is our great privilege, for it is the good news of him who has broken the boundaries of space and time in order to enter the world as a newborn child.

That is what the waiting of Advent is all about. Like John the Baptizer, we stand "looking in" at Advent on what is about to happen. But we, unlike John the Baptizer, know already what it will mean in only another week or so to become caught up into that which he could only look into. John's greatness was immense. Yet the truth remains, "The one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."

We are among those who "are least in the kingdom of heaven," heirs of those heart-stopping words of our Lord! And they give life to all that we do in his name!

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Retired Lutheran Pastor Hubert Beck
Austin, Texas
E-Mail: hbeck@austin.rr.com

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