John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin and a prophet who pointed the way to the Messiah. He baptized Jesus and told two of his own disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. John spoke loudly and often against the corruption of the ruling classes of Judea, especially King Herod Antipas. John denounced Herod vigorously when Herod married a woman who had divorced his brother. So, Herod had John arrested and thrown into the dungeon of his fortress.
The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11, records,
2 When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3 and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
John must have known he would not leave Herod’s fortress alive. With that fate before him, John began to doubt whether Jesus really was the one whom he had prophesied. John had expected the Messiah come in awesome power, but he also expected to live to see it. So John sent a couple of his own followers to ask Jesus whether he really was the one whom John expected. Was Jesus really the Messiah?
John the Baptist had prophesied the Messiah, saying he was near at hand. He described the Messiah in fearful terms. The Messiah, said John, would have a winnowing fork in his hands and would burn the wicked with fire. It's not clear from the Gospel whether John thought he was talking specifically about Jesus at the time, but by the time Jesus came to John to be baptized, John had concluded that Jesus was the one.
But Jesus didn't do what John thought the Messiah should do. Like almost everyone else in Judea, John thought that the Messiah would be a political activist who would restore the throne of the Jewish kingdom to its rightful occupant, a descendant of David, and who would finally lead the land to be free of its Roman occupiers. Jesus didn’t do that, did not even try to do that. And so John came to wonder whether Jesus was the Messiah after all.
For a moment we shall leave the story suspended there, suspended just as John’s certainty was suspended, awaiting resolution, awaiting an answer from Jesus. Was Jesus the one who was to come, or was the Savior someone else? That’s not only John’s question. It is also ours, too, and in this postmodern, post-Christian world it is more urgent than ever.
I confess some sympathy for John. I have had more than a few occasions in my life when I not so much believed as merely hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate. And from simply hoping Jesus is Lord to suspecting he is not, is a short trip. Like you, perhaps, I am sometimes filled with religious tendencies rather than Christian convictions.
"In the semantics of the church," wrote Methodist Bishop Joe Pennel, "doubt has been a negative word. It is rarely used in a favorable way. Faith, not doubt, is the great word of the church."
Bishop Pennel continued,
Beneath the skins of many of you there is planted the seed of honest doubt. Perhaps you do not share these feelings with anyone; but your doubts are there, and they are real. Your worship does not express your doubts, uncertainties, and skepticism. In facing this situation, all of us at times cry out with the man in the Gospel, "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief."
Doubts can come quite reasonably. After all, if Jesus came to redeem the world, why does the world still seem so far from redemption? If Jesus was victorious over sin, why are we still so filled with sin? If Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, why does the path ahead seem unclear, why does the world still thrive on lies and deceptions, and why do daily headlines report events that would have made even the ancients quake in horror?
Like John the Baptist, we can easily, and not unreasonably, experience a dark night of the soul when our hopes, dreams, or expectations of God's work in the world or our lives are unmet.
There is a scene in the movie Field of Dreams in which Kevin Costner, playing Ray Kinsella, speaks to an elderly, former pro baseball player nicknamed Archie Graham, played by Burt Lancaster. Graham's only playing time had been fifty years earlier. With his team leading, Graham was sent to left field in the top of the ninth inning of the last game of the season. The other team hit three outs to the infield and the season was over. The next day Graham was sent to the minors. He left baseball and became a doctor, spending the rest of his life in medical practice in his hometown of Chisholm, Minnesota.
Perhaps one reason John doubted Jesus was that it had seemed to him the promise of the Messiah's advent had been this close. And then, perhaps, the promise seemed to brush past him like a stranger in a crowd. But John was not quite willing to let go of his hope that Jesus was the promised one, so he sent messengers to ask Jesus point blank whether he was the one.
4 Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 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. 6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
John must have wanted a direct answer to a direct question: Are you the Messiah, Jesus? Yes or no! But Jesus didn't comply, even for one he esteemed so highly as John. Instead, he simply answered, here is what I am doing. Now make up your own mind.
Isaiah had prophesied of the Messiah, "Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy." All the signs Jesus mentioned had long been understood by the Jews as signs of the Messiah. Jesus' answer must have made John confront his own expectations of the Messiah and perhaps realize that there was more to the way God would work for the world's salvation than the narrow way John had expected.
The Gospels do not record whether John came fully to believe in Jesus again. But Jesus believed in John and defended John's work to the crowds nearby. Jesus affirmed that John had prophesied the Messiah even if he wasn’t sure it was Jesus. Like John, though, the people would have to make up their minds about Jesus. John was executed at Herod's command not long afterward, which caused Jesus much distress.
Challenges to faith sometimes arise from unmet expectations or shattered circumstances. The pressures of events and the ways of the world bear down on us and others and can force honest minds to ask, "Is there really a God who knows and cares? Is this God active in the life of the world? In my own life? Is Jesus the definitive revelation of that God, or should I look elsewhere for answers to ultimate questions?"
Before we let our doubts become unbelief, we would do well to remember that one lesson from John's story is that the advent of the Messiah among us was not to fulfill our expectations. Jesus carried out the will of God in ways we can grasp only incompletely.
Nonetheless, Jesus is indeed the Messiah. As the promised one, he transforms our expectations as he fulfills them. To say that Jesus is the Messiah not only says something about Jesus, it transforms the meaning of Messiah as well. Faith does not grow from testing Jesus against our criteria to see if he measures up. It grows from testing ourselves against the Messiah so that by his grace we may become more fully the body of Christ in the world.
"Life," goes an old saying, "is what happens while you're making other plans and dreaming other dreams." Most of could recount a litany of broken dreams, of plans never carried out, expectations never met, and goals not reached. Some of us came this close to attaining them and then watched them brush past us like strangers in a crowd. Maybe we thought there would be other days, not knowing there would be no other days. A tragedy? I don't know.
But what if you had never become a disciple of Jesus Christ? That would have been a tragedy.
But we are disciples, and the world asks us what John asked Jesus, “Are you, the church, that which God promised was to come, or should we expect something else?”
We are called as a church to point a greater reality, to provide a way to the ultimate meaning of things. The pressure of events and the ways of the world bear down on us all and sometimes force honest minds to ask, “Is there really a God who knows and cares? Is this God active in the life of the world? In my own life? Is Christ the definitive revelation of that God, and can I find Christ in this church?”
It is by us, the Church, that the work of Christ is done. It is for us to give the spiritually blinded their sight, the morally crippled their wholeness, the sick of soul their wellness. It is by us that those deaf to God shall praise him and those dead to life shall be reborn. Let us bring to the poverty of life the Good News that shall be to all people: unto us and all the world was born in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord!
For to ask whether Jesus is the one in whom God is definitively revealed and in whom God acted for the world’s salvation is to ask what human existence is all about. The Gospel message included a cross for Jesus and an executioner's sword for John. But we who affirm that God is present with his people in the person and work of Jesus called the Messiah, know that neither we nor the world need look for another.
Let us pray:
Gracious and redeeming God, we confess our moments of doubt, yet in our confessing know that you accept them as part of the walk of faith. For it is not doubt you judge but dismissal. We pray therefore that we will bear the name of our Lord in service to your kingdom, even though we often perceive your purposes dimly. Fill us anew, O God, with the conviction that in you alone is the salvation of the world. Shape us anew, O Christ, into your body in this time and place that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by the blood you shed for our redemption. Lead us strongly, O Holy Spirit, to paths of righteousness for your sake, that through us our community may be assured that in Christ is found salvation, and that we, your Church, live and witness so truly so that there is no need to look for another. In the name of that Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we let our cry come unto you. Amen.
