Sermons
16th December 2007 - Advent 3
‘Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?’
It is as if John the Baptist has lost the plot. John, the man sent from God to bear witness to the light, John who saw Jesus coming toward him and said ‘Behold, the Lamb of God’, John, who saw the spirit descend upon Jesus and testified ‘I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God’, now, in prison he asks ‘are you the one?’.
I would like to say something about recognition and about recognising Jesus within the community of the redeemed.
Disguises...people at parties...what is it that makes you sure of an identity...identity theft.
There are images of Jesus all around this church, we recognise him in his actions, climbing up the cross or reigning in glory. But recounting the actions of Jesus, listening to his story as we do again and again, isn’t really how we recognise him. Recognition is about confirmation of something we already know, recognition reinforces what we have remembered; so the first few times you meet somebody you start to build up a picture not just of what they look like and what they characteristically do or say, but you start to have a knowledge of who that person is, you begin to know them. But we use the shorthand of appearance and actions to describe people, so we might say ‘you know Mr Smith he’s tall, always in a rush’ or ‘You know Dr Brown, the lady who lives over there, the one with the red hair’. But these are just convenient shorthand they don’t really say who the person is because the answer to that question is at once very simple and yet impossible to pin down and it involves relationship. But identification is also unmistakable, we can say ‘yes it was definitely him, I would know him anywhere’.
So with Jesus, we don’t recognise who he is through information, Jesus is the Son of God, or Jesus is fully human and fully divine, or Jesus is the redeemer of the world. All these things are true but they are not the way we recognise Jesus. In the same way we do not become Christians because of the truth of Christological doctrines, or because the Bible tells us all we need to know, otherwise everyone who heard the story of Jesus would be a Christian. We recognise Jesus because he is working in us and in our community. We recognise him because we know him and are known by him, we recognise him in relationship. We recognise his guiding voice in our lives, sometimes a voice of warning, sometimes of encouragement, always of forgiveness.
John the Baptist is not alone in the Bible record of those who knew Jesus yet failed to recognise him or rather failed for a moment to recognise their own places within the community of the redeemed. Mary Magdalene mistook the risen Lord for the gardener, the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognise their companion, and Thomas of course would not believe, even though Jesus stood before him. But when recognition comes it is with adoration, the disciples do not say, ‘Look it’s Jesus, we thought he was dead’, they say ‘My Lord and My God’, ‘Rabbouni’.
So why John’s question, ‘are you the one to come?’ It is possible that John was impatient. He had preached a message of imminent doom, the axe was at the root of the tree, why didn’t Jesus get on with the action?, blast his enemies to destruction by unleashing the savage wrath of God, the savage judgement of God, what was it with all this healing and teaching, cut to the chase!
Jesus’ answer to John, through his disciples, is not a doctrinal answer or even a prophetic answer. Jesus in effect says that John needs again to become part of the story of the inaugurated kingdom or he will become the last prophet of the closing age and the least in the kingdom will be greater than him. Jesus’ answer to John seems to point to his own deeds, ‘tell John what you hear and see, the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk’. But Jesus doesn’t bring forward his miracles as proof of his identity or of his divinity, rather he points John to the activity of the kingdom, the kingdom in which we too participate when our eyes are open to God’s graceful action. The miracles show the necessity of recognising the presence of the kingdom in order to transform the way life is lived. The miracles are signs that the decisive and beneficent work of the kingdom has begun and if John the Baptist recognises this then he will take his place in the transfigured community.
So it is with us. When people ask us who Jesus is we should show them what he is doing in our lives and encourage them to take part in the story. When people ask ‘where is this Jesus?’ we need to be able to point to our life lived together in the unfolding kingdom, we need to be able to say ‘Jesus is here, look at how he heals us, and leads us, and teaches us, and restores us when we are broken’. For if we cannot point to that graceful action of the redeemer in the midst of our community, then our eyes have become closed and our ears have been stopped up again, and then something has gone very wrong.
If we can recognise that the kingdom of Jesus is all around us, unfolding in the lives of the redeemed community, then we will be reminded of our own true identities, of the true identities of those whom we love, and the identity of the one who loves us more than we can possibly ever imagine.