The Jordan River is deep and wide,
Hallelujah! Milk and honey on the other
side, Hallelujah! and Moses and his people wandered in the wilderness forty years
– a good long time – forty years before they got to that milk and honey,
before they crossed over from their old life into the one promised them by
their God . . . the Jordan’s a minor river that plays a major part in the
hearts and souls and minds of the Hebrew people . . . it’s source of food and
drink, of life and of hope . . . it’s that way today, too . . . the
Golan Heights overlook its valley, and the West Bank is the Western bank of the
Jordan River . . .
In Jesus’ day, the rich and famous lived
in the wilderness along its banks. I’m
not sure why – it was wilderness, after all – but maybe it was a scenic
thing . . . after all, if you have enough money around here one thing
you can do is build a great big old house overlooking the Little Miami. Or the Great Miami. Or Glendale.
Maybe it was something practical, like for commerce, so you could get
all those fatted calves and frankincense and I-phones into the house without
breaking your back on the roads. Could
be it was for whatever cool breezes were to be had on those hot desert nights .
. . whatever the case, Herod – governor, raconteur, and all-round king of the
Jews – had not one, not two, but three palace-cum-fortresses along the
river . . .
And John the Baptist was imprisoned in
one of them, in the very wilderness he had wandered, along the same river where
he had baptized all who came with a baptism of repentance . . . where he had
baptized one Jesus Christ, son of God, as a matter of fact . . . John would be beheaded beside
that river not too many days hence . . . Jordan River is chilly and cold,
Hallelujah. . . chills the body, but not the soul, Hallelujah . . .
And as he sat there in his cell, John
remembered one particular day on the river, when he’d baptized Jesus and the
dove had floated down from the heavens, and the voice had said “This is my Son,
the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”
And it had seemed to him on that day that a new era had begun, a new
time when they were gonna kick rear and take names, when they weren’t going to
have to take it any more from those purple-robed rich Romans along the
river-side . . . it had seemed to him that the Jordan River – the dividing line
between want and plenty, between wandering and milk and honey, between life and
death – had become a borderline once again, separating new realms, the
old earthly one and the glorious kingdom of God.
But then, cooped up in his prison cell
he’d heard stories about Jesus and his ministry, and he began to doubt
everything . . . he heard about the preaching, about how the meek are blessed,
the merciful exalted, how evildoers are not to be resisted and cheeks
are to be turned . . . and he heard about Jesus’ deeds as well, how he’d fed
five thousand people, cleansed a leper, healed two blind guys and
that was all well and good and everything, but where was the winnowing? Where was the chaff? And where was the unquenchable fire? The Messiah was supposed to bring judgement
and doom on the oppressors, not cure their ills and heal their kids.
And so he sends his disciple to Jesus to
ask him: Are you the one to come or not?
And he uses the technical term – the one to come – the promised one, the
guy who’s gonna make it all better. And
I’m sure he’s hoping that Jesus will just answer once and for all, yes or no,
but he doesn’t: he quotes scripture at him, Isaiah to be exact: “Go and 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.” What do you think, he says. All those works of the messianic age are
coming to pass, blind healed, lame walking, lepers cleansed, deaf hearing, dead
rising . . . all these signs, piled up one on top of another, sign upon sign,
what do you think they mean?
And then he says something that puts it
all into perspective, that shows that he knows exactly where John is
coming from . . . “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” but here our
translation does us wrong, because in the Greek, the word is literally
“scandalized,” as in “Blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by
me.” And in our passage, it has the
additional connotation of “losing one’s faith.”
John is laboring under the misapprehension that Jesus is coming to be a
conquering Messiah, a front-of-the-army king who’s going to restore
Israel to it’s rightful place among the nations, and he’s in danger of being scandalized,
of losing his faith over it. And notice
Jesus uses the same wording here as in the Sermon on the Mount – Blessed are
the meek and blessed are the peacemakers, and blessed are those who aren’t
scandalized because of it all.
Paul uses a form of this word to great
effect in his first letter to the Corinthians.
He says “we proclaim Christ crucified, a scandal to the Jews and
foolishness to Gentiles.” To good Jews like John and the Pharisees and
Sadducees, the fact that Jesus died on a cross was a scandal, a stumbling
block, an obstacle to their faith in him. And well before the crucifixion, John is
beginning to feel that way already.
He’s beginning to have doubts, to question his faith in the identity of
Jesus Christ.
Many times, we measure faith by a lack
of questioning, a scarcity of doubt . . . we’re afraid to admit we have
them, we think it makes us somehow less Christian . . . but Jesus doesn’t say
blessed is the one who doesn’t have doubts, or blessed is the one who doesn’t
ask questions, but blessed is the one who doesn’t lose her faith over it
. . . and looked at it from that angle, it certainly makes a lot of sense . . .
those who don’t lose their faith over the foolishness of the gospel are indeed
blessed, they’re indeed happy, to use another translation of the word
blessed. But he doesn’t forbid anyone
to ask questions . . .
Well.
After John’s disciples leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and begins to
teach them about John . . .“What did you go into the wilderness to see?” he
says, “some reed, shaken in the wind?”
Did you go out to see some official like Herod, who is politically
pliable, who blows whichever way the wind blows and – not coincidentally – whose
coins have the image of a reed? “What
did you go out there to see?
Somebody dressed in soft robes?
You can go to those palaces over there to see that . . . no, really
– what did you go out to see?”
And on the third repetition of the question, he gives them the answer,
he tells them what they should already know: Did you go to see a prophet? Of course John’s a prophet . . . a
prophet doesn’t blow every which way like a reed, he doesn’t prance around the
palaces in fine robes and sandals . . . of course he’s a prophet . . .
but he’s way more than that . . . This is the one about whom God said –
through other lesser prophets – “see, I am sending my messenger ahead of
you, who will prepare your way before you.”
John not only preached about what was to
come, he played a part in them himself. So he is an object of prophecy as well
as a purveyor of it. He is player in
salvation history, not just a proclaimer of it.
And of course, as the baptizer of Jesus, the role he played was crucial
– he was a vessel, a conduit, a pipeline, of the grace of God as it settled
dove-like upon Jesus. It is the same
role the church plays today . . . the technical term is means of grace:
and like the church, that’s what John was: means of grace, a channel for
God’s direct action. Like the church,
John preached the message of Christ, about the kingdom of heaven that was
surely at hand. Like the church, John
was a sign of that coming kingdom in and of himself, in his actions – baptizing
all who came to him – as well as in his proclamation. John was a prophet and at the same time
greater than a prophet, more than a prophet. As Jesus himself says, among those born of
women no one has arisen who is greater than John the Baptist.
And yet, Jesus says, and yet, . . . the
least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is. The least in the kingdom of heaven is
greater than John the Baptist, greater than the one crying in the wilderness,
greater than the one who baptized Jesus himself in the cold, cold river. John was a herald of the kingdom, a signpost
to it, he was one who participated in its coming, and yet he is less even than
the least one there.
And this paradoxical statement is at the
heart of who John is, and who Jesus himself is as the once and future
Messiah . . . Do you remember reading about the Israelites in the
wilderness? They wandered for forty
years – biblical code for a long time – homeless and hungry in the
wilderness east of the Jordan. The Lord
had promised their ancestor Abraham the promised land, the land west of
the river, and that promise was always in their minds, like a star that travels
on before, or a willow-the-wisp that winks and jitters just out of reach . . .
and do you remember that when they were finally ready, when it was finally time
for them to cross over into the promised land, the Lord told Moses that he
could not go . . . the Jordan River – the borderline between the wilderness and
the Land of Canaan, between privation and milk and honey – became a line that
he could not cross . . .
In a sense, John the Baptist was the
same way . . . he came to the border country at a transition time, when the
time was ripe or – to use Gospel language – when the time had been fulfilled
to make ready the way, to smooth the road, to prepare for the coming of the
Kingdom of heaven . . . but he was not a part of that kingdom himself . . .
like Moses, he would not cross that border into the new reality . . . John
stood on the borderline, in the border country along the river, at a border time,
looking into that new kingdom, but he could not go there himself. Thus even the least of those in the kingdom –
you and me, for example – are greater than John. This greatness is not in being better than him, but in the sense of
having advantages, of being rich in what matters.
And so now we can see that – in those
border times, along that Jordan River deep and wide – John was a sign of that
border in and of himself . . . he had his doubts about the identity of Christ
precisely because he is of the old school – he preached about the coming of the
new, but could not comprehend its nature . . . as our story tells us, when he
saw that Jesus was the Prince of Peace, and not some violent, conquering hero, he
couldn’t square it with his own experience, with his own notion of what the
Messiah would be. And in that, he was
very much a sign of the world, a sign of the old age, which equates
might with right, which says that the ones with the most money, the ones with
the most success, are the ones who win.
John was a borderline himself, between the old and the new
kingdoms, between the kingdom of the world, and the dawning kingdom of heaven.
And now at this Advent, at this
border-time, the world seems to be at one too . . . violence grows daily, we
feel massively insecure within our own borders . . . the poor of the world are
getting poorer, the rich seem to be getting richer, and society seems to be
falling apart around our ears . . . into this border country comes John,
baptizing a baptism of repentance, pointing the way to the new way, the
new coming . . . and this new way is not like the old, he’s not what the world
expects, in some ways, he’s not what we expect, either . . . the Son of
God is coming to bring peace not war, to bring healing, not killing, to bring
reconciliation, not conflict. Blessed
are we who are not scandalized, who live in that new kingdom, in the time of
that coming, surprising Word of God made flesh.
Amen.
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