IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Quickly, God was faced with a class action suit for failure to file an environmental impact statement. God was granted a temporary permit for the project, but was stymied with the cease and desist order for the earthly part. Then God said, "Let there be light!" Immediately, the officials demanded to know how the light would be made. Would there be strip mining? What about thermal pollution? God explained that the light would come from a large ball of fire. God was granted provisional permission to make light, assuming that no smoke would result from the ball of fire, and that he would obtain a building permit and to conserve energy, He would have the light out half the time. God agreed and offered to call the light "Day" and the darkness "Night." The officials replied that they were not interested in semantics. God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plant yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit." The EPA agreed, so long as only native seed was used. Then God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth." The officials pointed out that this would require approval from the Department of Game co-ordinated with the Heavenly Wildlife Federation and the Audobon Society. Everything was okay until God said the project would be completed in six days. The officials said it would take at least two hundred days to review the applications and the impact statement. After that there would be a public hearing. Then there would be ten to twelve months before... At this point God wrote the blueprint for the ark.

Today’s gospel reading begins with a puzzle. John the Baptist is in prison, has been hearing about what the Messiah is doing but then asks ‘Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?’ It’s a strange question to ask of the one that he’d recognised at the Jordan River as the Messiah. As you can imagine, scholars, preachers and theologians have not been slow in putting forward explanations for John’s apparent uncertainty. The fact that he is alone in prison, facing death, cooped up in a small cell far away from his beloved desert, those wide-open spaces, has been given as an explanation for his doubts. Others have suggested that it’s not so much John who doubts, but his disciples and that he’s asking this question on their behalf.

But neither of these explanations really convinces. John had displayed supreme courage throughout his ministry. He wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, to berate the powers that be. John the Baptist is often referred to as the last of the prophets. He is a pivotal figure, standing at the transition between the old covenant and the new. His preaching reflected the concerns of earlier prophets, in particular that God is interested in how we live our lives rather than in how we keep the rules and regulations of the religious cult. That’s why he had such harsh words for Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious establishment, those men who regarded themselves as good and holy, If you recall last week’s gospel, he rounded on them. Even though they too had come to hear him preach in the desert, he called them a ‘brood of vipers’ and warned of placing too much reliance on the fact that they were children of Abraham.

John’s imprisonment was the direct result of his denouncing Herod Antipas for taking his brother Philip’s wife as his own. Herod was a tyrant. John could have been in no doubt but that like all tyrants he would want vengeance. John had borne hardship in the desert, he would have been prepared for the hardship of prison, for the almost certain sentence of death.

So why does he ask this question? What makes him doubt. Well, Jesus’ own answer perhaps provides the clue. Jesus could easily have replied ‘I am’, echoing God’s words to Moses. The great ‘I am’ sayings in the Gospel according to St John, show that Jesus found this language useful. But here he speaks not of who he is, but of what he is doing. He outlines his mission and he uses words from Isaiah 35 to describe it. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor receive good news. It is these actions which point to the breaking into our world of the Kingdom of God.
There could be no clearer message to John that Jesus is the one to whom Isaiah’s prophesy referred. Isaiah spoke to many generations of Israel the prophetic message that though Israel had turned away from God, God still cared, God still saved, God would bring them out of exile. Isaiah was speaking to the bruised and battered peoples of the exile, but he also seems to be speaking to the watching and waiting peoples of Advent and particularly to John the Baptist, who took the message of repentance to heart and preached baptism and turning away from sin.

The shape of Jesus’ ministry looks rather different to the vehement call to repentance preached by John. Last week’s Gospel passage related how John preached about the wrath of God, about the axe being taken to the dead trees, of the unquenchable fire coming to the husks on the threshing floor. This is a stark message of judgement, of the need for clear repentance, a total change in life-style, of the horrific consequences for those who will not repent or for those whose repentance is less than whole-hearted. John was a zealous man preaching a zealous message.

Many of his contemporaries, like John, had clear expectations as to how the Messiah would act. Some expected a leader who would inaugurate a great kingdom, others expected a Messiah who would uphold the Law, John seems to have expected a stern Messiah, calling for repentance, warning of the wrath to come. All these visions contained some aspects of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus did inaugurate a kingdom, he did call people to holiness of life, he did warn of judgement. But each of these pictures by itself was far too narrow. He also preached of love and compassion, of good news for the poor, of healing and wholeness. Most of all he preached of a God who loved humanity so deeply that he was prepared to sent his only son into the world, not to condemn the world but to give everlasting life.

The reference to Isaiah reminds us that Jesus’ earthly ministry was the pinnacle of salvation history which had its origins firmly in the old covenant. Advent has reminded us about our ancestors in the faith and about the prophets. We, too are part of that story, the prophesies of Isaiah speak to us as well as to Israel, the covenant with Noah and Abraham and Moses was for our benefit as well as for the benefit of Israel. As John’s father, Zachariah, prophesised, Jesus is ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’ as well as being ‘the glory of Israel’.

The latter part of the gospel reading shows how highly Jesus regards John ‘among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist’. Jesus could not have been clearer about John’s stature. John had done his job faithfully and well, but the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven inaugurated a whole new set of priorities. So ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ Isn’t that amazing, each one us here, as citizens of that kingdom is greater even than John the Baptist.

John’s failure to recognise the ways in which God was at work are a stark warning to us not to narrow our vision of God’s saving action. It is all too easy to cast God in our own image, to believe that we know exactly how he goes about doing things, to think we’ve got it all sown up.
But the breaking into human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth inaugurates a whole new way of doing things. The kingdom of heaven takes a form that even the greatest of the prophets could not foresee. The love and compassion demonstrated in Jesus’ ministry shows the love and compassion of the father for humanity, the love and compassion of God for each and everyone of us.

Now that doesn’t mean that John the Baptist has nothing to say to us. His message of preparing our hearts for the arrival of the messiah remains important, and that’s what we try to do each Advent. His message that sin needs to be repented is important which is why we make confession of our sins at the start of every Mass. His message that baptism is a sign and a symbol of new life in the kingdom of heaven is important, so baptism continues to be the route for membership in Christ’s church.

But Jesus’ Good News, was much larger, more loving more compassionate than John’s message. You’ll recall from the parable of the sheep and the goats which comes later in Matthew’s gospel, that Jesus is very concerned with how we show love and compassion in action. As Christians we are called to grow into the likeness and image of Christ, and part of how we grow is by imitating him. We may be unable to work the miracles that he did, but we can follow him in the spirit of love and compassion, in acts of kindness and thoughtfulness, in bringing in a very practical way good news to the poor. Rowan Williams describes mission as ‘finding out where God is at work and joining in’. Jesus described to John how God was at work. Like John, we need our vision expanded, our spiritual antennae more finely tuned to be able to see God at work still in this world, often in unexpected places, in unexpected ways and through unexpected people. The Kingdom of God isn’t confined to church, it’s flooding the whole of creation. We need to learn how to see it and marvel at it and join in with it.

Rev. Penny Sayer

Curate, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea