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…Or Shall We Look for Another?
Sermon by Leah Grace Goodwin
for Sunday, December 12, 2004
The Third Sunday of Advent/ Gaudete Sunday
Scripture: (New Testament) Matthew 11:2-11
Would you pray with me?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer.
John the Baptist took his job pretty seriously. For you see, he makes quite an early appearance in the gospel story as Christ’s forerunner - we first meet him while he is still in the womb.
“In those days,” Luke tells us - in the days just after the angel’s visit to Mary, in the earliest days of her pregnancy when the marital mess between her and Joseph (for she was not, you may recall, quite married to him when she became pregnant) still hovered awkwardly in the background - “In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted [her relative] Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped for joy in her womb.”
John, you see, knows exactly who Jesus is, knows the very sound of Mary’s voice, even from the darkness of his own mother’s belly. John knows, even before he or Jesus has a name, that this other fetus is the anointed one, the Messiah. And knowing that, despite the cramped quarters, he quite clearly expresses his joy with what must have been, for Elizabeth, a startling lurch.
But times change, and the vicissitudes of life complicate what once seemed so clear. In this morning’s Gospel reading we find John the Baptist, the great messenger of God’s coming reign, the prophet of the wilderness, in a dark enclosure vastly different from the safety of his mother’s womb. We find him in prison - though, ironically, still in the wilderness, for he is imprisoned, according to other sources, in the dungeon of Herod’s wilderness palace at Machaerus. And this time, news of Jesus’ work in the world does not have John leaping for joy. Jesus’ lordship, at least as far as John sees it, is not quite so self-evident as it used to be.
Matthew writes, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing…” What Matthew might as well have written is “ when John heard what the Messiah was NOT doing,” because as far as he was concerned Jesus was not sticking to the script. Healing, liberation, good news, all right, but let’s get down to some apocalyptic business. Where was the smiting? Where was the ax lying at the root of the trees about which John had warned his disciples? Where was the unquenchable fire?
And so John, from prison, sends his own disciples to inquire about the matter. “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” they are told to ask.
The question is a bit shocking, if you think about it. How can John, of all people, John who baptized Jesus all unwilling because he thought Jesus should baptize HIM - how can John question whether Jesus is “the one who is to come?”
Actually, it’s a legitimate question. Jesus was not the only person claiming to be the Messiah, the “Anointed One,” running around in first-century Palestine. He was also not the only folk healer, not the only social justice speaker, not the only imparter of secret knowledge in the region, either. And John, remember, is in prison, which does not immediately seem an appropriate place for the Messiah’s forerunner and relative.
So, the question presents itself: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Thus confronted, Jesus uses the words of Isaiah, as well as a matter-of-fact call upon empirical evidence, to answer. “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” he says to the Baptizer’s messengers. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the poor have good news brought to them.”
Actually, yes, Jesus seems to say, look for another. Or rather, look at me another way. Shift your perspective. No, my ways are not precisely as John prophesied - but look around you. Quit kvetching about the missing winnowing fork and the disappointingly absent unquenchable fire and the ax which is so conspicuously NOT laid at the root of the tree. Wake up! What do you hear? What do you see?
What John's disciples had heard was the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of forgiveness, generosity, gentleness of spirit, heavenly reward, and God’s care. What they had seen consisted of ten miracles, which Matthew depicts as having been accomplished with an endearing mixture of tenderness and authority. What they had not heard was a good dose of purificatory smiting, or separating wheat from chaff. Meanwhile, Jesus has the wherewithal to hold the work of his own ministry alongside Isaiah’s promises of restoration and healing. He specifically claims compassion as the sign of Messiahship. Jesus’ deeds reveal that the kingdom of God is already at work - already present and spread out among the people whose lives are changed by his deeds. Jesus, clearly, is not precisely the Messiah that John expected. “One who is more powerful than John” has indeed arrived -- but his power is different, and unexpected, and not altogether satisfying to John, John who is in prison, John who will die an awful death, John who is not convinced that healing infirmities alone is going to redeem Israel.
As it happens, Swedenborg isn’t convinced that healing physical disease is going to do the salvific job, either. Swedenborg tells us that, in the Word, very physical disorders -- blindness, lameness, deafness, muteness, disfiguring disease - correspond to what he calls (in a very weighty phrase) “the iniquities and evils of spiritual life.” Likewise, the very concrete misery of poverty corresponds to the suffering of a person who lacks knowledges of good and truth, and yet desires them. Now, I have to say that my first instinct upon reading these correspondences was to lay them aside. Swedenborg’s correspondences for the physical ills are, at first glance, thoroughly interior and intellectual interpretations of very physical suffering. As such, they did not initially strike me as either relevant or particularly compassionate. His interpretations of very real sources of suffering - blindness, lameness, deafness, disfiguring illness, death, seemed neatly to substitute the abstract for the concrete, the neatly incorporeal for messy and upsetting bodily trauma.
Meanwhile, the world cries out in need. Hunger, poverty, distress - all these things hover at the door of existence, even here in the U.S., even here at the chapel in the Bread and Jams homeless shelter downstairs. The fragility of human existence makes itself known to us in the most demanding ways. Like the exiles of Israel to whom Isaiah spoke, like John the Baptist languishing in prison, we yearn for salvation. We see the real need for the healing of which Jesus speaks. How can we responsibly interpret the works of Jesus through a solely spiritual lens?
The answer emerges in the following passage from Swedenborg:
The union of eternal and temporal matters in us is the Lord’s divine providence… The physical and time-bound things [of our bodies and understandings] are the outermost and final substances that we first enter when we are born, in order eventually to be brought into deeper and higher things. The outermost and final things are what hold us together, and they are found in this physical world…[A]ll the deeper and higher parts of us are present at once in these outermost or final elements. As a result, everything the Lord does he does from beginnings and endings at once, and therefore completely.
The implications of this passage upon both John’s question to Jesus and Swedenborg’s interpretation of Jesus’ healing are immense. Our physical selves, “the outermost and final elements” that make up our earthly bodies, contain the parts of us that are most truly us - our spiritual beings. And yet, our earthly form is more than a temporary repository for our souls, more than an inconsequential pile of bones and flesh. Our bodies are linked inextricably to our souls for this earthly part of our spiritual journey, and they are crucial in our experience of God, who desires, when he comes to us, to heal our spirits as much as our bodies. Our bodies are precious, and our well-being - both physical and spiritual -- is precious in God’s sight. This is not to say that suffering and sorrow are vanquished, or that the tragedy of the human condition will ever grow less bitter. I cannot say that they will. But I can borrow the eloquent -and far more authoritative - words of Helen Keller, a woman who was herself blind, deaf, and for a significant chunk of her life also mute. She continually expressed profound confidence in the Lord’s constant presence in the world, even amid infirmity of soul and body. “Although the world is very full of suffering,” she said, “it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
John the Baptist struggled to square his vision of the Messiah with the reality of Jesus -- and he had every reason to. We struggle, too. This struggle, in fact, is what the season of Advent calls us toward. Advent is a reminder to us to let God out of the box, to let go of our preconceptions about who this Messiah should be, to release our grasp on just what we think our salvation should look like and where the Lord is going to lead us in our soul’s journey. Advent is a time in which we are called, individually and communally, to open our eyes to the kingdom which we claim to believe is already spread out among us. It is a time, I suggest, in which it is worth asking this question: Shall I follow the living Lord, or shall I simply follow my notion of who the Lord should be? For Jesus is saying to us what he says to John: “I did not come for titles, or to collect my kingly dues. I came to bring life to the dead. Do not ask me who I am - look, instead, at the life I am stirring inside of you.” The Lord abides within us, is present in every level of our existence from inmost soul to the tips of our fingers. And he wants to heal us. He desires that we be whole. The Lord awaits his chance at advent within us, and he will never leave us. There is, after all, no need to look for another.
I would like to close with a poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and a priest who knew a thing or two about where to look for God.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The Sun of righteousness has risen with healing in his wings, bringing light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. Alleluia - Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
Copyright 2004 by Leah Grace Goodwin
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