Don’t lose hope between Advents!

Sermon for Advent 3 – Gaudete

1 Corinthians 4:1-5  +  Matthew 11:2-10

The King is coming! That’s what all the Old Testament prophets foretold! The King—the Christ—is coming! John the Baptist himself foretold it. In fact, as Jesus tells the crowds in today’s Gospel, John himself was prophesied in the Old Testament by the prophet Malachi. He was the promised messenger who was sent to prepare the way before the Lord. He was the most blessed among all the prophets, because he didn’t point to a Christ who was to come. He alone, among all the prophets, was able to point to the Christ who had come.

But where is John in today’s Gospel? He’s in prison. He’s in prison, waiting to be executed by King Herod. He’s in prison for faithfully carrying out his ministry, for preaching God’s Word to the King—warning him to repent for taking his brother’s wife to be his own wife, contrary to God’s Law. How can God’s prophet remain in prison, when it was foretold that the Christ would “proclaim liberty to the captives, to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness”? Where was all that?

What’s more, John had preached about Jesus that He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Where was the winnowing fan? Where was the fire? God’s prophet sat in prison, while wicked King Herod continued to prosper. Zion (the people of Israel) still sat under Roman oppression. If Jesus was the Christ who was to come, why wasn’t he making everything right? It didn’t make sense. And, often, it still doesn’t make sense to God’s people, even to ministers of the Gospel, like John was. But Jesus’ message to John in today’s Gospel was all he needed, and it’s all we need, too. And that message is, essentially, Don’t lose hope during this time in between!

John wisely, properly, sent his disciples to Jesus to ask Him about this apparent contradiction. If He was the one who was to come, if He was the promised Christ, why wasn’t He doing many of things that were prophesied about Him? Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another? Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

In order to answer John’s question, “Start,” Jesus tells John’s disciples, “with what you can see and hear.” Jesus is healing blindness, deafness, lameness, leprosy, and even death—just as the Old Testament prophecies said about the coming Christ. You can see that He’s doing these things. Furthermore, you can hear that He is preaching the gospel, preaching good news to the poor, just as Isaiah had prophesied about the coming Christ. But what good news is He preaching? And who are the poor? The answer to those questions will help us understand the rest.

While Jesus certainly preached against the rich people who were trusting in their riches or being stingy with their wealth, He never once preached to the poor people in Israel that they would become rich—not financially, at least. He never once told them that anyone was going to raise them out of earthly poverty. Think of the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus, who remained poor and outwardly wretched right up until the day he died. Never did Jesus change the economic status of anyone. So, what good news, what gospel did He preach to the poor?

Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest! Take heart, son, daughter, your sins are forgiven you. Your faith has saved you. God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. That message wasn’t directed exclusively to the financially poor. It was addressed exclusively to the spiritually poor, to the poor sinners who knew they were bankrupt before God, with nothing to offer Him that could ever make up for their sins. So Jesus stepped forward and offered them Himself as the true Lamb of God who would atone for or make up for their sins by giving His life on the cross for them.

Now, if the “good news to the poor” was to be understood in a spiritual way, then maybe so was the “liberty to the captives.” Maybe Jesus hadn’t come to jailbreak everyone who was innocently imprisoned, or to overthrow oppressive regimes. Maybe it was a spiritual freedom He was offering to spiritual captives, to those held captive by sin, death, and the devil. Yes, that’s often how Old Testament prophecies are to be taken, as depicting a spiritual salvation that the Christ would bring, as well as a spiritual winnowing fan and a spiritual fire that will rebuke and condemn the wicked with words, without wiping them off the face of the earth with the sword.

But there is also, clearly, a physical, outward salvation that’s included in those prophecies about the Christ. Jesus was, even then, literally healing some blind eyes and some deaf ears and raising some of the dead, while, at the same time, giving spiritual healing and spiritual life to many. So which things were to be understood literally and which things figuratively? In the end, it’s mainly the timing of the prophecies that was hard for anyone, especially at that time, to understand. As we’ve been saying throughout this Advent season, the prophets looked forward to the coming Christ and threw all the prophecies about Him together in a future heap, without distinguishing between a first coming and a second coming, between literal and figurative fulfillment. That was by God’s design. Certain things about the Christ were intended to be crystal clear, while other things were intended to be studied and contemplated and spiritually discerned.

So if a person, even a prophet like John, didn’t fully comprehend every aspect of every prophecy about the Christ, did that make him worthless or unreliable as a prophet? Hardly! Remember, the prophecies were never invented or thought up by the prophets. They were given to the prophets by God. God was the source of the prophecies, even as He is the source and the teacher of the interpretation. To emphasize that, Jesus reminds the people why they followed John the Baptist in the first place:

Jesus began to say to the crowds concerning John, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? No, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothes are in kings’ palaces. Back when John started preaching, out in the wilderness, in his camel’s hair scratchy clothing, he never pretended to be something he wasn’t. He never pretended to be scholarly or sophisticated or important. They didn’t go out to hear a so-called “scholar.” At the same time, he was never wishy-washy. His message was firm and solid and sure. They didn’t go out to hear what they wanted to hear, but to hear the truth from God. They went out to hear a prophet. And the truth that he spoke was always sure and certain. His entire message pointed people to repent and to receive the coming Christ, and, specifically, to receive Jesus as the promised Christ. There was no misunderstanding in that preaching, no leading anyone astray. And Jesus confirms that John was indeed a prophet sent by God for that purpose: No, what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I am sending my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.’”

In other words, John was sent to prepare the way for Jesus, as true God, as the Christ, as Savior from sin, as a King who is coming again, and as the One who would teach us to understand Him rightly, who would teach us what we need to understand from the prophecies of Scripture, and who would teach us to be content with the understanding He gives.

Today’s Gospel is a beautiful encouragement to trust in Jesus as the Christ, even when you don’t understand everything He says and does. Blessed is he who does not stumble over me, Jesus says. He has done enough, hasn’t He, to demonstrate that He is who He says He is—true God, true Man, the One who came the first time to fulfill some of the prophecies about Him, including the prophecy that He would suffer and die for the sins of the world, and the One who is coming again to fulfill all the rest of the prophecies made about Him, including the prophecies that He will come with complete deliverance for those who are found trusting in Him when He comes. So don’t lose hope during this often-confusing time in between His advents. Let the Scriptures be your guide. Let the pastors whom God sends to you help to guide you, as a shepherd guides the sheep to green pastures. God hasn’t told us how everything will turn out in the immediate future. But He’s told us enough about the Christ to sustain our faith and to give us hope. And, as Paul writes to the Romans, hope will not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Amen.