John 1: 15-36 and Matthew 11:
1-19
It is hard to know quite what to make of John the Baptist. In the
four Gospels there are many tens of references to him and a further handful in
the Acts of the Apostles. But what do we end up understanding about this man?
One thing you can’t miss is that everything about John shows him to be
doing something symbolic. For example, Luke tells us that he ‘was in the
wilderness until the day he was revealed to Israel.' That is a great image of
someone who fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy of ‘one crying in the wilderness,
prepare the way of the Lord.’ His base is the river Jordan where,
symbolically, the children of Israel had become a new people. Just look at the
way he dresses in a camel hair shirt! And then there’s the food: even to those
of us on a pre-Christmas diet, John’s food of locusts and wild honey is pretty
weird.
What is he doing in the river? Washing people. Dunking them. A
once-in-a-lifetime washing away of the trash that builds up in everyone’s life.
In a society where women were often the possessions of men, John's baptism was
open to both women and men. Those who came to John were normally shunned by
respectable, religious people: sex workers, collaborators and people on the
edges of society. The religious people of his day came to gawk at what
John was doing. Too proud to get washed by
him, they came to point their fingers in criticism as religious people so
often do. After baptism, the followers of John returned home, to live their
baptized lives as housewives or carpenters or bakers or driven by necessity
back into the sex trade, I guess, but this time with a hope of change.
For a warm-up man to the gospel stories, John had a large following
from a wide area. The claims of large numbers were supported by Josephus, the
Jewish historian (no friend of Christianity). Years later, Paul was surprised
when as far away as Ephesus in modern-day Turkey, he met people who only knew
of John's baptism (Acts 19:3).
All the Gospels
tell that Jesus went with the crowds to the Jordan to be baptised by John.
It was John who saw the spirit of God descend like a dove and fall upon Jesus.
Someone once said that that is when the Old Testament finished and the New
Testament began. The last Old Testament prophet makes way for the long-promised
messiah and a new ‘deal’ offered by God to all people. Then, when Jesus
got started, some of John’s disciples left him to follow Jesus. John’s
followers resented this but John was clear on the topic: ‘He must increase and
I must decrease’.
Jesus considered John to be the greatest of the prophets and a man of
integrity who had taken to the limits what was possible under the Law of the
Old Testament. And the best was never going to be good enough. So Jesus then
shares his good news based on grace, where those who trust him cross a pass-mark
of acceptance in God’s eyes that no mere religious living could ever do.
John died the death of an Old Testament prophet, having made himself
enemies. John died a brutal and political death, which also symbolized
how Jesus Himself was to be treated.
One incident stands out for me, in part because we so rarely read
it. Matthew 11 records that John was in prison, well into Jesus’s active
teaching, and he sent two of his students to Jesus to ask who he was: ‘Are you
the One we were expecting or is there another?’
A moment’s thought reveals how
strange that question is. Now that he is in prison, John begins to doubt. Can
it all really be true? It is not turning out as John may have imagined it
would. Perhaps Jesus has not lived up to his expectations of a
hero. Here I sit, he may have thought, with no way out and facing a
sticky end. The Roman oppressors control our land still. Perhaps I
have misunderstood. Perhaps I got it all wrong. This isn’t the God I was
expecting.
As ordinary men and women, our tendency is always to make a god for
ourselves, especially when we have lost hope in the image of God we had
before.
For us too, the simple fact of living in this world means that so often
we find that God does not wear a red cape and fly through the air faster than a
speeding bullet. He doesn’t leap tall buildings at one bound or stop runaway
trains. He never said he would. When our hopes lie broken at our feet, we may
build up a limescale of unbelief. We love the stories and we go through
the actions but having first moulded Jesus into a model we can cope with. We
may ask: whatever happened to the God we were expecting? But he never promised
to make himself in our chosen image.
He won’t fit into the moulds we make for him. We need to take the
time to fit into his pattern, not the other way around. Our call
is to seek Jesus for who He is. Not to settle for what is comfortable,
nor to tie Him down as something we can manage and control. He is bigger than
we can understand. We are not called to follow the Jesus that we have made or
the Jesus of the church down the road. We must seek him ourselves,
first-hand. The Advent message is that, as we do so – with honesty and trust –
we will find that he is Emmanuel: God with us. That he is with us even as we
seek him. He just may not be what we have made him to be or what we
expected.
