The One who is to come (Matthew 11)

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

     All religious searching, it seems to me, one way or another, amounts to asking questions. And the questions are universal, they are very old, and every honest person asks them, sooner or later. What is real? Does God exist? Why is evil so widespread and persistent? What can be done about it? Is love real? Who among all the prophets and teachers and philosophers and mystics perceives the truth? What is truth? Does religion, any religion, offer any credible answers, any insights at all into the human condition, that we can use? And so on and on. We can all think of variations to questions like these, and we can all think of more questions along the same lines. Questioning is at the heart of the effort to understand our experiences and to do something to make them easier to bear.

     And so it is with John the Baptist. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” He is looking for the Messiah, the Anointed One, who will deliver Israel from the foreign oppressor. John takes it for granted that there will be a Messiah. The only question is, who it is, and whether he has come or not.

     Jesus, it seems to me, doesn’t actually answer the question. Matthew lets us know in verse 2 that he (Matthew) thinks that Jesus is the Messiah, when he writes, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples.” But in this reading, Jesus doesn’t confirm that belief himself, or respond to that expectation directly. Instead, he tells John’s followers to report what they hear and see. Nothing more than that. What they 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 the good news brought to them.” In other words, Jesus is not, at least at this moment, claiming the traditional religious title and role of Messiah. He’s doing something else: he is opening the eyes and ears of John’s followers, and ultimately the eyes and ears of everyone else who is ready for it, to the presence, the reality of divine power, attested to here by miracles. Notice how Jesus does this. He inverts, he turns upside down, our usual expectations of how the world works: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead have life. But the most world-inverting thing Jesus says in this reading is, “The poor have good news brought to them.” We live in a world very much like the ancient world, where the poor are slighted, denigrated, abused, deprived, and so on. This sort of thing goes on everywhere, even in our own city, where we do make good efforts to help the poor, to ‘bring good news to them,’ we may say. So even we can sense something of the impact this remark must have had on those who first heard it. The poor were of no importance in that world, so anyone bringing good news to them would be a sensation, and a subversive, dangerous one at that. And the good news they are brought is the news of the kingdom, and of their rightful place in it.

     Jesus is aware that he may be subverting traditional expectations. He says, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” He knows that traditionalists may be disturbed, offended, by his teaching and miracles. But those who see and hear him for what he is, are blessed. That is, they have an opportunity to glimpse spiritual reality in the vision of the upended, inverted world, which Jesus is putting before them.

     John’s followers leave, to take back to John what they hear and see. And Jesus turns to the crowd, and he says, “So, what are YOU looking at? Hm? You came all the way out here into the desert for WHAT? A reed shaken by the wind? Well, you may be right there! There isn’t much in the desert except wind and sand and rock and the occasional plant! You came out here looking for glorious spectacle? You are definitely in the wrong place! No? Oh, you came looking for a prophet? Is that so? Well, then. Let’s talk about this!”

     I hope that my rewrite of verses 7, 8, and 9 conveys something of the impact that Jesus’s words may have had on his hearers, and may have on us, if we put ourselves into that scene and really hear them. Notice what is happening here. Jesus is distancing himself, again, from a traditional expectation, the appearance of a prophet, or rather, he is expanding on the meaning of ‘prophet.’ “What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.” Evidently the crowd thinks that Jesus is a prophet, but he deflects that expectation and talks about John the Baptist instead, as a forerunner to himself. And here Jesus again upends, inverts a traditional expectation. “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.” John, in other words, is the greatest of human beings, but in the Kingdom, that doesn’t count for much. Earthly hierarchies of status, importance, supposed closeness to God, don’t count for anything in the Kingdom. We don’t have to be prophets to reach the Kingdom, and the poor, the least on earth, will be ahead of the prophets in any case.

     Do we ask the same question of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Have we, in other words, let the reality of Jesus’s words and deeds get through to us, or are we waiting for someone else, something else, to come along and answer all our questions and fix everything for us? Are we looking for prophets in the wilderness, in the desert? There are lots of would-be prophets around these days to choose from. Are we looking for spectacle, for something unusual to entertain us? Or are we prepared for the world-upending, world-inverting deeds and words of Jesus, which can answer our searching questions, and show us the way to the Kingdom in which we will have a place with him and the prophets?

     “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.