In our Gospel reading today John the Baptist found himself
in prison because he criticized Herod for divorcing his wife and taking his
brother’s wife instead. Herod and the
rest of the royal party did not appreciate being taken to task and so they had
John arrested. Not long from the time of
our reading there would be that riotous banquet where Herod promised up to half
his kingdom to Salome who titillated him with her dancing. When she asked for such a small thing as the
head of John, the unpopular preacher, Herod couldn’t refuse her. If he would have resisted this request it
would have made him look like one of those serious, religious types, and that
would have raised some eyebrows in his circles.
Even today, particularly among the bold and the beautiful, there is
hardly anything that is more of a turn-off as having religious scruples.
And so in our reading today John is being imprisoned by
frivolous, foolish people who have more power than they have brains. John finally stepped on some toes whose
owners refused to be corrected, even though it is obviously wrong to send away
a faithful spouse and take a spouse who belongs to someone else.
As we heard, while John is sitting in prison, he sends word
to Jesus by his disciples as to whether Jesus is the one who is supposed to
come or whether they should be looking for someone else. I’ve wondered about what is really going on
here for many years. There are two
conflicting interpretations—neither of which I’ve been totally persuaded of—and
that is why I’ve wondered.
One interpretation is that now that John has been arrested
and senses that his time has come, he sends his disciples to Jesus so that they
can start to be Jesus’s disciples instead of his own. With this interpretation his question, “Are you
the Christ,” is kind of a soft-ball pitch to Jesus, so that he can preach the
Gospel to these disciples and they can then follow him. With this interpretation John the Baptist is
full of faith, and is handing off these disciples to Jesus, because he must
decrease and Jesus must increase.
The other interpretation is almost the opposite of
this. John the Baptist is being wracked
by doubt. Previously, he had no doubts
as his words at Jesus’s baptism testify.
There he confessed that he was not worthy to untie the shoe laces on
Jesus’s feet, and that Jesus who comes after him is greater than him because he
is the eternal Son of God. But now,
according to this interpretation, he isn’t so sure. Being put in prison, perhaps, has had an
unsettling effect on him, and he is in need of being strengthened.
This second interpretation seems to match the circumstances
better than the first interpretation, but then there’s a problem with what
Jesus says of John the Baptist to the crowd.
Jesus’s words sound almost like fake flattery if John is so miserable. He says that John is tough. He doesn’t wear soft, decadent clothing. He doesn’t move whichever the way the wind
blows. He is the finest man who has ever
been born of woman—that means that no one is greater than him except Jesus and
perhaps Adam, who was born from the dust instead of from a mother’s womb. If John is wracked by doubt in prison, these
praises sound almost like lies, or else they are about a John who once was, but
is no more.
And so I’ve never been totally on board with either of these
explanations of what is going on here.
But this past week as I was studying this text with a friend, he had an
understanding that seems totally right to me, and I’d like to share it also
with you.
The key insight that my friend pointed out to me that
differed from the various ways that I had understood things in the past was
thinking about John’s probable state of mind while he was sitting in
prison. With the first interpretation
John is imagined to be resigned and pious, handing his disciples over to
Jesus. With the second interpretation
John is imagined to be miserable—a broken man.
But neither of these characterizations of him really fit with what we
know about him from elsewhere in the Gospels.
John was no pious, gentle church lady, nor was he a withered
pansy. He’s the one who called the
impeccably orthodox Pharisees a brood of vipers, and wondered aloud who had
told them to flee the wrath of God that was about to be revealed. John the Baptist, as nearly as possible for a
fallen human being, loved the Lord his God with his whole heart, soul,
strength, and mind, and it made him angry when his fellow creatures would not
give God the glory that is due him, but went after worthless idols instead. This is what made John the Baptist so
great—he loved God totally and so he also utterly hated God’s enemies. He was courageous and fiery. He preached repentance and pointed to Jesus
as the one who was going to make everything good and right. Sin, death, and the devil were in the process
of being crushed under foot.
And so what my friend pointed out, and it seems right to me,
is that John was probably not stoically accepting his fate, and handing his
disciples off to Jesus, nor was he whimpering and blubbering. He was probably angry. The wicked and petty royal house, decked out
in their skinny jeans, had somehow brought to nothing his powerful preaching
that was turning the hearts of the children to their Father and preparing the
way for the blessed Messiah. How is this
possible? And why wasn’t Jesus calling
down fire upon these wicked fools who were bringing to nothing the work of the
Lord?
Further support for the idea that John was righteously angry
is found in John’s preaching of what Jesus, the Messiah, will be like. They are both cut from the same cloth, Jesus
is so very much greater than he. John
baptizes with water; Jesus baptizes with fire and the Holy Spirit. Jesus preaches repentance just like
John. He has the ax in his hand and he
will chop down every tree that does not bear fruit and throw it into the
fire. The winnowing fork is in his hand,
the grain is being threshed out, and the chaff will be burned in the
unquenchable fire. This is what John
says Jesus will be like, and he is not wrong in saying that. Jesus is like that. And so as John sits in prison he is wondering
why Jesus isn’t summoning his angels and taking out vengeance upon the evil
doers.
When you think of John being in this frame of mind, it sheds
new light, I think, on Jesus’s response to him.
He says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive
their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the
dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not
offended by me.”
In his answer to John’s question Jesus quotes the prophet
Isaiah who prophesied that the Messiah would do all these things. John was focused on one facet of the
Messiah—the way that he would bring justice and restore righteousness to the
land. But that is not all the Christ was
coming to do. Jesus is full of mercy as
well as truth. He is compassionate as
well as just. John the Baptist, that
wonderful warrior, was doing the work of the Lord as he preached God’s wrath
against all unrighteousness. But that
work is only brought to completion when the terrified sinner comes to rest in
Jesus the Savior.
Of course, it is not as though John was ignorant of
this. John was a true prophet—the best
born of women. He is the one who points
to Jesus and says, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world,” as we will hear next week.
But he is impatient and has a hard time seeing the way that the Lord
works in his lowly, longsuffering ways, just as all saints of all times always
have been—particularly those who are suffering for the name of Jesus. The martyrs in the book of Revelation call
out from below the altar and say, “O Lord, holy and true, how long before
you judge the people who belong to this world and avenge our blood for what
they have done to us?” Even Jesus himself expresses something of this
impatience when he says, “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I
wish that it were already kindled.”
And so John is not exactly wrong when he essentially says to
Jesus, “Why aren’t you doing anything about this horrible injustice?” He is saying what God’s saints have said ever
since Abel’s blood was crying out from the ground. But the other side of this is that God is
patient and long suffering, desiring that all people should reach
repentance. He despises nothing that he
has made and wishes for all people to come to the knowledge of the truth, be
healed and saved.
A good lesson that we can learn from this is that when it
comes to the Gospel we are not going to be able to pick everything apart and
neatly categorize everything the way our calculating brain would like. Our reason cannot see how mercy and judgment
can come together since they are essentially opposites of one another. We cannot perfectly conceive of a Messiah who
has the winnowing fork in his hand and the ax is laid to the root of the tree
on the one hand, but on the other he also gives sight to the blind, hearing to
the deaf, and preaches forgiveness to even the very worst sinner. Our brains are capable of entertaining only one
of these thoughts at a time, but the Scriptures show that Jesus is both.
The heart that has been enlightened by the Holy Spirit also
can understand something of the truth that the calculating brain is incapable
of. The believer knows that Jesus is
kind and merciful—that he is not some overbearing stickler just waiting for
people to mess up so that he can fall on them like a ton of bricks. Jesus isn’t like that. The devil is like that.
But Jesus also knows what wickedness is, and he hates it
with a white-hot passion. He does not
wink at sin like some indulgent grandma.
Again, it is not Jesus who winks at sin, saying that it is pretty much
harmless, and you can carry on to your heart’s content—it’s the devil who does
that.
The believing heart is able to grasp who Jesus is in a
better way than our reason which is always trying to fit things into a
system. Jesus, our salvation, is not a
system. He is a person, and he is God,
and the Bible is what teaches us about him and not our own thoughts. He is at the same time merciful and
just. He is righteous and
compassionate. He is just and the
justifier of whoever is ungodly but puts his or her trust in him.
John the Baptist, being flesh and blood, was not different
than us. His brain didn’t work
differently. It’s not surprising that
he, like us, was in need of God’s Word and the Holy Spirit to know who the
Messiah is. The Messiah being just was
quite clear and vivid to him at that moment, but he also needed to know of the
Messiah who heals the sick, raises the dead, and preaches the Gospel. This does not make John into something
bad. He was a Christian just like all of
us and in need of the Holy Spirit for true understanding.
I think this is reflected in the way that Jesus speaks about
him. No one greater than John the
Baptist has been born of women, and yet even the least in the Kingdom of God is
greater than him. Those who are of the
Kingdom of God are the ones who hear the Word of God and believe it. Even the baby who is blessed by the Holy
Spirit with faith in Jesus is greater than John the Baptist, because that baby
has the perfect gift of knowing the Messiah.
You who have heard of and know Jesus the Messiah, and are
looking for his coming with eager anticipation have something greater than John
the Baptist had even with all his greatness.
You have the healing, saving gift of Jesus, and are being fully purified
to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind as you
continue in faith. Continuing in faith
means that you are continuing in the Word and you do not graduate from it. Even John did not graduate from the Word, but
was in need of learning yet again the true nature of the Messiah.
This preaching of the Word that he heard and which you also
hear is powerful unto salvation. Not
long after he heard Jesus’s preaching John’s head was chopped off with a brutal
ax and put on a platter. Those wicked
party-goers seemed to have carried the day.
But time will tell that John lost nothing by dying for preaching the
Word of God and staking his life and salvation upon it.
And so we also must take courage and not fear the loss of
property, reputation, or even life and limb.
Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and he
will come with power and great glory to judge the earth. Together with John we are waiting for this
and saying, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”
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