Third Sunday in Advent
December 16, 2007
The Rev. James Richardson
Isaiah 35: 1-10
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11

My namesake, the brother-of-our Lord, the apostle James, tells us in his letter today: “The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” And that reminds me of a story about rain and a farmer from Stockton who I know. Only this farmer does more than farm – he is also a state senator, Mike Machado.

Well, one rainy day in my duties as chaplain to the state Senate, I gave the opening prayer for the day by giving thanks for the rain “and may it grow our crops. Amen.” When I was done, Senator Machado came up and grumbled “What did you do that for? The rain is ruining my cherry crop!”

So a few days later, I gave thanks in my prayer for an end to the rains. And Sen. Machado ambling up to me again: “Geez, rev, we need that rain for my grape crop.”

Sometimes you can’t win in this “rev” business. Which also just goes to show that the apostle James was not a farmer in Stockton. So struck deal with the good senator – who is still laughing about how he pulled my chain – that I would stay off the weather if he would show up for all the prayers. And he has kept his end of the bargain.

And that brings me to the gospel lesson today, which is about showing up. So let us lay our scene: We meet again John the Baptizer, only this time when we meet him, he is in prison. The placement of this passage in our weekly lectionary is a bit odd, because last week he was standing in the River Jordan and this week he is already in prison. We have skipped past Jesus coming to him to be baptized – we will circle back to that on another Sunday.

But today, John the Baptizer is in jail and he sends a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” He wants to know, who is it who has shown up? The passage comes this week because it helps set the stage for Christmas, the birth of the messiah. Still, John’s question is jarring, because doesn’t John know the answer? I mean, he baptized Jesus and heard the voice say “This is my son…”

One way to read this is to hear John expressing doubt – and I take comfort in that. Maybe even John the Baptizer, this strident prophet of God’s kingdom, had his moments of doubt. From our moments of doubt can come moments of clarity, and if you take nothing else from today’s lesson, take that. Yet John may be asking a more nuanced question, and the nuance can be found in Jesus’ answer.

John is really asking: What kind of messiah are you? Are you the one we have heard about – a messiah who will raise an army and vanquish the Romans? A messiah like King David who will bring us back to the glory years? Are you that kind of messiah?

By one estimate I’ve read, two-thirds of the Jewish population of the Middle-east was annihilated by the Romans in the century of Jesus, and we do well to read the New Testament always with that backdrop in mind. John the Baptist’s question is not unreasonable – there was another “messiah” – Shimon Bar-Kokhba – who led an uprising against the Romans that briefly gained momentum before he and his followers were crushed by the legions. John the Baptist wants to know: Are you this kind of messiah? Or are you something else?

Jesus replies: “Go and tell John what you 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 good news brought to them.” Jesus is saying: I am not the kind of messiah you expect.

Then he lobs a wonderful inside joke. Like all inside-jokes, you have to have been there to get the humor, and this joke is 2,000 years old, so you can be excused if it flew past you. “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?” Jesus asks.

The reed was the symbol of Herod Antipas, the Judean king who is a puppet of the Romans. Herod’s reed was stamped on coins to show his strength. But Jesus takes a dig at Herod by calling him a “reed shaken by the wind.” Jesus is calling Herod weak. Now, that is an outlandish statement on the part of Jesus. After all, Herod is part of this Roman machine that will put Jesus to death. So what to make of this?

Jesus is saying that he is a messiah that stands outside of the human social and political order. We get a messiah who is pointedly not a politician, not someone “in soft robes” – another dig at Herod. Jesus makes his claim only by standing inside of God’s unlimited Grace that has no boundaries in this world or in the next. The values of the world – power, possessions, violence – have nothing to do with God.

The values of Jesus, the One for whom we are waiting, are the values of healing, wholeness, forgiveness and reconciliation. Jesus is not using his messiahship as a place of power, but quite the opposite. He is saying I am the messiah who brings healing and health and life now. Salvation comes not as a reward for standing in lock-step with a political leader, or adhering strictly to a set of doctrines. Rather salvation is gift from God’s unlimited abundance.

Think about the implications of that statement: salvation comes outside of a human economy based on reward-and-punishment. Jesus wants nothing to do with an economy based on death. That position is profoundly threatening to the powers of this world because it suggests our salvation is not dependent on those powers. Jesus is deliberately setting himself up as outside the social order of this world.

And that raises a huge tension for us. We need social order, and you only need look at Iraq to see what happens when the social order breaks down on a mass scale. We still need police officers to patrol our streets and show up at this church when we get burgled. We need schools to educate our children, and yes, we still need the Legislature to pass laws and deal with complex issues like health care, water delivery and global warming. And we still need churches, and God knows, churches could use a little orderliness.

But we should not mistake our social order as being our messiah. Or to put this another way, our limited social constructions, even at their best, are not the best God has for us. And that brings us back to Jesus, the One whom John wonders: What kind of Messiah are you?

Jesus replies with his life-giving actions, demonstrating that God’s gift of eternal life begins now, not in the future, but now. Healing and wholeness are ours, now. That, too, is an outlandish statement.

We all know that people get sick and tragedy happens. So how can Jesus make this claim? I believe Jesus is showing us that there is a continuum from this world into the world just beyond the horizon of our experience.

There really is more to this Creation than what you see now. Healing does come, sometimes here, sometimes there, but healing comes, and God’s creation is all connected in this world and in the next. So be awake, look for the salvation that is already yours.

Life eternal begins in this place and dwells with each and every one of us. The One who comes is already here. The dawn arrives, and the blessing is ours.

Amen.