Rev’d Peter Balabanski
Advent 3 A – Isaiah 35 1-10, Matthew 11 2-11
Sustain us with your love on our journey to meet the One who is coming
Today’s collect prayer says we’re on the way to a rendezvous where we may be called to change utterly. Are we up to it, or should we just turn and go back; keep our heads down; stick to what we know? No, we just prayed for God to keep us coming; strengthen our weak hands, make firm our feeble knees, and open blind eyes to the dawning of your kingdom, so that our hearts may rejoice as we behold the majesty of our God. We prayed that God would help us keep that rendezvous.
Rendezvous? Yes. Because we’re on a journey to meet someone who’s also on our road. The One who’s coming from the other direction to meet us. We don’t have to cover the whole distance in our own strength. In fact, if we fell and couldn’t go on, the One who’s coming would meet us anyway – meet us where we fell. In Advent, we take time to think about what that journey is like. On this 3rd Sunday in Advent, we think about it with the example of John the Baptist’s journey before us.
John’s whole life was framed by the way he saw his journey to his rendezvous with Jesus. His understanding was shaped by the way he read the OT prophets. For him, they spoke first of wrath and judgment that would do away with evildoers, and then of blessings which would come to those who’d kept the faith. He understood the prophets to say that judgement preceded blessing. John preached this without fear or favour. Remember his greeting last week to the religious leaders – You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? No fear or favour there!
Today, we meet John after he’s taken this to another level. We meet him in prison today because he’s rebuked Herod Antipas for running off with his brother’s wife. In his cell, John has time to think about his life-long understanding of the coming Reign of God. Sure the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; … the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. Isa 35.5-6 We all heard that this morning too in Isaiah. But wouldn’t that come after the judgement? Doesn’t the Messiah come and sweep out the old order first?
From his prison cell, John hears of the ministry of ‘Jesus the Messiah’, He’d baptised Jesus; proclaimed him to be the One the prophets said would come. But apparently there’s been no final judgement. This makes no sense! Is he the One? John sends some of his own disciples to ask Jesus: 3.Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? 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.’
John believed God had sent him to proclaim a fiery judgement; to call people to repent, because this fiery judgement was to cleanse the way for the Reign of God. But the message Jesus sent him effectively said that the Reign of God had already arrived, but without the judgement. This left John confused – how can blessings be poured out before it’s even been established who deserves them? How can John’s belief in the sequence of justice before paradise suddenly get subverted like that?!
John the Baptist travelled the road we are on in Advent: the road to his rendezvous with Jesus. But today’s episode tells us that after their meeting, nothing much really changed for John. He just went on proclaiming the fiery judgement that he’d been preaching all along. He didn’t follow Jesus – he didn’t change his preaching to accommodate the fact that Jesus was doing something totally different. And we read today that John kept disciples of his own; the ones he sent to Jesus with his question. That didn’t change as time went on either. You can read in Acts 19 that Paul ran into people in Ephesus years later who were still John’s followers. And in fact, there are still many followers of John the Baptist today, called Mandaeans.
John’s rendezvous with Jesus left him unchanged. But the whole point of meeting Jesus is that it confronts us with the question, are we his disciple or not? Matthew tells us today that John the Baptist met Jesus, but didn’t decide to become his disciple. He simply went on preaching fire and brimstone. He missed the fact that while we were not yet good enough, Jesus brought the blessings of God’s Realm to the world. John couldn’t accept that those blessings be offered without judgement; couldn’t grasp Grace.
How could he have missed this – John the Baptist of all people? He’s like Moses, who saw the Promised Land, but never entered it. In prison, he sounds like someone who’s thinking about joining a community, but waiting ‘till he finds out if it’s good enough. We mustn’t get into that prison with him.
The Gospel is this: God did not wait until we were good enough before blessing us; before sending Jesus to meet us. We must return the compliment: we mustn’t get ourselves so tied up in our preconceptions that we can’t move to where Jesus calls us. Ours is a gospel of Grace, not perfectionism. Love is our rule, not safety. We are not called to an obsessive fixation on other people’s worthiness or our own. We are called to tell them that Jesus loves us all just as we are. It’s his love that does the transforming.
In Advent, we’re on the way to meet a special person – a wonderful person. It’s natural to feel nervous. Those nerves are a good thing in a way. Maybe if we don’t feel too confident about the way we see things, we might just let Jesus show us how to see things the way he does. Then that transforming prayer we offered today might do its work in us: God… open blind eyes to the dawning of your kingdom, so that our hearts may rejoice as we behold the majesty of our God. Amen