BIBLE READING: Isaiah
61:1-4,8-11 Matthew
11:2-11
SERMON
Most of us have had experiences from time to time where we have
got excited about some new thing and thrown ourselves into it with great
enthusiasm and high expectations and then after a little while found ourselves
rather disappointed. Perhaps it was the seven habits of highly effective
people, or pilates, or conversational prayer, or a
standing work-station, or the Pritikin diet, or an
innovative daily planner, or speaking in tongues. Those things that were going
to totally change our lives and which we spruiked with such passion to those
around us, sometimes seem a bit embarrassing in hindsight. Whatever it was, it
didn’t live up to expectations and left little behind but sadness and
disappointment.
There are plenty of people who feel that way about Jesus. They
gave the whole faith-in-Jesus thing a go, but it didn’t live up to
expectations, and they gave up on it after a while. There have been people
reacting that way to Jesus all along, even in his own lifetime. Judas was
certainly one of them. And judging by the gospel story we heard tonight, John the
Baptiser might have been one too, or at least one who began to ask the
question: “Has this Jesus lived up to expectations, or has he let us down?”
The major themes of this Advent season focus around expectations,
anticipation and hope. And the question of just what it is we are expecting is pretty important. We all had some sort of expectations of
what it would mean when we chose to follow Jesus. We believed it would make a
difference somehow, and just what we were expecting probably depended most on
the beliefs and expectations of the Christians who most influenced us to make
that decision. For some, it will have been significant personal outcomes:
wellbeing, healing, inner peace, a sense of purpose and meaning, guaranteed
entry to heaven, perhaps even prosperity and success here and now.
For others, especially those of you who were more influenced by
the Christian left, it may have been more about being part of something that
brought about substantial and lasting change for the better in the world. We
expected to see poverty and preventable diseases eradicated, reconciliation
between previously divided peoples, and an end to oppression and war. And for
most, right across the theological spectrum, there will have been some sort of
mix of a number of those things. And for most too, there was an expectation
that there would come a day when the world would be put right, when God would
take charge and justice would be dealt out and everyone would get their just
desserts.
That last big one seems to have been central to the growing doubts
that prompted John the Baptiser to send his question to Jesus, “Are you the one
who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” “I know I told everyone that
you were the one, but now I’m starting to have my doubts.”
We heard an example of John’s preaching last Sunday. It was full
of warnings of a coming day of judgement, with images of God taking an axe to
the root of the tree, and sorting wheat from chaff with a threshing fork, and
purging evil from among the people with a flamethrower. As scary as it can
sound, the hope for such a day is an almost universal human dream.
At its most naked, you can see it on the steps of the law courts
whenever there is a trial over a crime that has shocked the community. Everyone
is chanting for a day when the evildoers are made to pay for their crimes, for
the day when the victims are vindicated and can stand proud and free as they
watch their assailants dragged off in chains to be punished. Most of the time
it is less overt, but most people hold some sort of hope that a day will come
when those who have made the world an unfair, unsafe and miserable place will
reap what they have sown, and ordinary folks like us who have mostly done the
right thing by those around us will come out on top and be rewarded. The scales
have been unjustly tipped against so many for so long that there is a
widespread hunger to see them finally tipped the other way.
You can see these hopes and desires expressed in the eternally
popular song of Mary, known as the Magnificat:
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
You can hear in that that the hoped for
day of justice is not so much a day when everyone is put back on a level
playing field, but when fortunes are reversed. There will still be a top and a
bottom, a blessed and a cursed, but the occupants will be swapped. Those who
climbed up over the top of everyone else before will be torn down and be
themselves trampled upon. Mary’ song accurately discerns that God does not
favour the rich and powerful over the little people, and it certainly
accurately conveys our typical human hunger to see the scales tipped, but is it
right in thinking that God endorses that hunger and stands poised to bring it
to fulfilment? Or has the song fallen into its own trap and projected our
desires onto God?
There is no doubt that Mary’s song would have got the big tick
from her cousin’s son, John the Baptiser. His preaching was full of the same
expectations of the scales tipped, the little people vindicated, and the
powerful and exploitative cast into the fire with a threshing fork. And having
confidently announced to all who would listen that Jesus was the one who had
arrived to bring all this to fulfilment, you can hear the disappointment in his
question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” What
happened to the fire? Where’s the revolution, the glorious victory? How come
wickedness and oppression haven’t been purged and punished yet?
And Jesus sends him back an answer that is partial and probably
unsatisfying. It is perhaps fair to say that Jesus answers the letter of the
question, but not the spirit of the question, the underlying question. He says,
“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.”
All of that is, in effect, a positive answer to the question,
because Jesus is quoting summaries of things that were expected to happen when
the messiah came, but he is also doing one of those things that often infuriated people. He is quoting partially. He is
editing stuff out. So he is claiming part of the
messianic expectations, and saying, “Yes, I’m the one who was to come to do
these things,” but he is simultaneously editing other things out of the
expectations, and refusing to be drawn into them. And he is editing out
precisely the things that John was so much wanting to hear: the great
judgement, the axe at the root of the tree, the cosmic tipping of the scales
and the fiery punishment.
And then Jesus says something very intriguing and probably extremely
important. “And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Or perhaps more
literally, “Blessed is anyone who is not scandalised by me.”
So what he is saying is “I’m
not going to be everything you thought I was going to be. There are things you
had wrong about what the coming of God’s messiah would mean. There are things
you were projecting onto God that were just your own lusts, and I’m not buying
into them. But stick with me. If you don’t get all offended and scandalised
when I challenge your hopes, and you trust me and hang in there with me, you
will find that far from losing out, your abandoned hopes will be converted and
transcended, and the new world, though not what you were expecting, will be far
greater than anything you ever dreamed of.”
The world witnessed a very similar thing happening in the public
life of Nelson Mandela. After decades of oppression in South Africa, you had
exactly the sort of social conditions that create the strongest hunger for a
day of justice when the scales are tipped and the oppressors are torn down and
humiliated and made to pay for the evil they have perpetrated. Mary’s
Magnificat was no doubt a popular part of the repertoire of freedom songs:
God will bring down the powerful from their thrones,
and lift up the lowly;
God will fill the hungry with good things,
and send the rich oppressors away empty.
And Mandela himself was the victim of a huge personal injustice,
locked away for twenty seven years, so he too would
have been expected to be angry and ready to turn the tables on his release and
rise to power. He was, on his release, very much a messiah figure: one in whom
great hopes were invested, one whose coming was expected to bring the tipping
of the scales and the day of judgement. And if Mandela had chosen to seek
vengeance on a national scale, he would have had no trouble bringing the people
with him in a great wave of righteous violent anger that would have seen the
nation consumed in the fires of judgement. He could have easily done it,
because it was what most were expecting and perhaps most were wanting. It was
what Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe.
But Mandela rose above that easy and easily defensible temptation.
Like Jesus, his messianic quest brought compassion instead of vengeance, and
reconciliation instead of judgement. He sought to convert oppressors rather
than humiliate them, and he sought to destroy his enemies only by turing them into friends. And have no doubt that there were
plenty of discontented voices within the African National Congress who were
asking the John question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait
for another?” What happened to the fire? When do we get to dance on the graves
of our oppressors? Mugabe took the easy way. Understandable, but ultimately far
less courageous. And history is going to remember the two of them very
differently.
If you’re depending on Jesus fulfilling all your expectations,
whatever they might be, then I’ve got bad news for you. He probably won’t. And
if you cling to those expectations and insist on their rightness and their being the appropriate measure of Jesus’s worth, then
you will probably be offended and scandalised by his apparent disregard for
your cherished dreams and delusions. And you will be disappointed in him, and
probably give up on him and abandon his path at some point. But if you are
willing to trust him completely, and allow him to rewrite your hopes and dreams
in the shape of his scandalous love and compassion and mercy, and his often
unwelcome commitment to reconciliation instead of revenge, then I can assure
you that, though your former yearnings and hopes will probably be disappointed,
you will instead find yourself converted and transformed and lifted to a
nobility of spirit that you could barely have imagined, and ushered into the
exhilarating new world that is being born even now.
Acknowledgment: Nathan Nettleton