Advent 3, Year A | Matthew 11:2-12 | Isaiah 35:1-10
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 11, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“…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. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” – Matthew 11:4-6[1]
This year we get to hear about John the Baptist two weeks in a row. Last Sunday we met him calling the people of Judea to repent—to turn around from their self-destructive paths and to change their lives in practical ways. Immediately after that reading, Jesus arrives for baptism and sees “the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”[2]
A lot can happen over the course of a few chapters in the Bible, and this week finds us a good bit further along in John and Jesus’ story. John has been arrested, and after moving his work from the heated religio-political climate of Judea back up to his home region of Galilee, Jesus has been more than busy. He’s preached the Sermon on the Mount and given us both the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule. We’ve seen him on a healing spree, calming a storm, and banishing supernatural entities. Just before today’s reading, he commissioned the Twelve Apostles to heal and serve the people of Israel.
John, unfortunately, has spent all that time—however long it may have been—sitting in prison. Although inhibited in his ability to prepare the way of the Lord from there, he has been keeping tabs on Jesus. But trapped behind walls, what he hears leaves him impatient or confused. Whatever he might have expected out of the Coming One, this wasn’t it. Where’s the judgment and fury? Where’s the world being thrown upside down and reordered with God’s people at the top? In last week’s Hebrew Bible reading, Isaiah declared, “he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.”[3] Surely no one could be more wicked than the Herods holding John prisoner. So why was he still stuck in a dungeon, wasting away in his own filth? Is this how the Savior of the World treats those loyal to him?
Eventually, John manages to sneak a message through the castle walls: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”[4]
When we read the Bible, it’s easy to focus our attention on the more spectacular actions of God. We focus on fire and plagues and crossing the Red Sea. We gleefully await a God who will “come with vengeance, with terrible recompense, [one who] will come and save [us]”[5] from whoever we suspect the enemy-of-the-moment might be. We fantasize over the victory parade, about marching a route made just for us, one where “the unclean shall not travel.”[6] We imagine ourselves waving to cheering crowds as we process among “the ransomed of the Lord [who] shall return, and come to Zion with singing; [with] everlasting joy…upon [our] heads.”[7] We dream of the day everyone will finally “see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God”[8]—and realize just how right we were about everything all along.
But if that’s the type of deliverance and salvation we’re waiting for, we might as well turn around and go home, because we’re going to be standing there forever.
And that, in fact, is what Advent is all about. We pave the road for a Warrior King to enter in glory but find instead an avenue for the weakest among us to travel safely. We prepare the way for the Pure One to pass but discover it covered in a migration of the unclean, the exhausted and unwashed. We establish an Empire in the name of the Ancient of Days to realize the Prince of Peace prefers to sleep in a barn. We ready everything and everyone for the End of the World and stumble upon the drowsy seed of a New Creation.
God has already shown us the signs of their presence, not only through the words of the prophets but in Jesus himself. Yet distracted by visions of what we want, we miss the God and the Savior we have. God doesn’t come with burning clouds and legions of angels. God doesn’t come with guns and swords and iron rods. God doesn’t come to destroy the “sinners” but to tend the sick and bring comfort to the poor. God arrives unobserved in stillness, where “waters…break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.”[9] Where God is moving, “the wilderness and the dry land [are] glad, the desert rejoice[s] and blossom[s].”[10] Where God rests the smallest celebrate and the inconsequential flourish “like the crocus…[they] blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.”[11]
There is no need to wait for God. There is no need to keep searching for some other Savior to deliver us from a wicked world. Once we truly want God for Godself—not just idolatrous imaginings about God based in our own expectations of majesty—we’ll find what we seek. We simply need to repent: to embrace that world we all too frequently abandon or reject and walk among the humble, where
“…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. And blessed is anyone who [won’t][12] take…offense [in him].”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Matthew 3:16b-17
[3] Isaiah 11:4b
[4] Matthew 11:3
[5] Isaiah 35:4b
[6] Isaiah 35:8b
[7] Isaiah 35:10a-b
[8] Isaiah 35:2c
[9] Isaiah 35:6b
[10] Isaiah 35:1a
[11] Isaiah 35:1b-2a
[12] I altered this portion of the verse not just for rhetorical purposes but because the negation in the sentence is volitional.