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Sermon for Advent 3 – Gaudete
1 Corinthians 4:1-5 + Matthew 11:2-10
Today’s Epistle spoke of the stewards of the mysteries of God—the ministers whom God has sent to preach, and teach, and administer His Sacraments, to prepare people for the coming of the King. Paul was such a steward, as were the other apostles, as were the other ministers who were called by the Church, as am I for that same reason. The New Testament ministers are preparing people for Christ’s second coming, while the Old Testament ministers were preparing people for His first coming. Such was John the Baptist, whom we encountered in today’s Gospel, who was not just a prophet, but more than a prophet, as Jesus said. 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, the prophet sent to prepare the world for Jesus the first time.
But we New Testament ministers have some big advantages over the Old Testament ministers like John. We who live on the other side of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection, who have seen how God has upheld His Church and prospered His Word these past 2,000 years, are able, by God’s grace, to see Jesus and His purpose a lot more clearly than the Old Testament prophets could, and that certainly includes John the Baptist. Because, for a moment, toward the end of his ministry, he had trouble seeing Jesus clearly, as you heard in today’s Gospel. He began to wonder, Is Jesus the One who is to come or not? And the struggle of this prophet, or at very least the question of this prophet, is as relevant to our situation as anything else in Scripture. Because after everything John had preached, after all the faithful service he had rendered to God, he was still faced with two problems, which we also face in the world today: The problem of suffering, combined with the problem of not understanding Jesus and His purpose. In this Advent season, when we focus on the coming of the King, let’s consider this account from Matthew’s Gospel and receive the Holy Spirit’s encouragement to wait for the King! You won’t be disappointed!
John had carried out his ministry faithfully. He had done everything God had given him to do. He preached against the sins of which everyone was guilty, from the king down to the peasant, whether it was big outward sins like violence, adultery, and theft, or whether it was the secret, inward sins of lustful thoughts, greed, discontentment, apathy toward one’s neighbor, or indifference to God’s Word. He called them all to repentance, and those who listened, he baptized for the forgiveness of sins, as God had sent him to do, and taught them to amend their sinful lives, and to expect the Christ’s coming at any time. And then, when Jesus was ready to begin His ministry, John faithfully pointed the people away from himself to Jesus, the Lamb of God.
What was his reward for such a faithful ministry? He was thrown into prison, not for any crime he had committed, but for simply doing what God had sent him to do. He was suffering, unjustly, and that was a problem.
But it wasn’t just his own suffering that was a problem. The nation of Israel was still suffering under Roman oppression, a year or so into Jesus’ ministry. The people were still suffering under the spiritual oppression of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and priesthood in Israel. The poor were still suffering in their poverty. The sick were still suffering in their illnesses. And people, including believers in the God of Israel, were still dying.
But the reality of suffering wasn’t the worst of it. For John, the biggest problem was that he thought the Christ was coming to change things, to fix things. He thought that Jesus would put an end to all this suffering. The Old Testament prophecies foretold it, after all. And John himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, had told the people of Israel, 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. That’s not what John saw, though. He didn’t see any of this baptizing with the Holy Spirit, and fire. He didn’t see Jesus cleaning house in Israel, or bringing the poor out of their poverty, or bringing justice to the earth, or releasing anyone who was unjustly imprisoned (like himself), or putting an end to the suffering of His suffering believers. The problem was, John didn’t fully understand Jesus, or His purpose, and so he found himself disappointed, or at least, very confused. Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another?
The answer was given, but not with a simple yes or no. In the midst of John’s suffering, the King didn’t pay him a visit in person, but He did come to John with a message, with His word. Jesus answered and said to John’s disciples, “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.” No, not all the world’s problems were being fixed yet. No, John’s own suffering wasn’t over. Jesus hadn’t come, the first time, to bring justice to the world. But what was He doing? He was doing great miracles, here and there, alleviating the suffering of some, even raising the dead in a few cases—a foretaste of the great healing that will take place eventually, on the Last Day. As for the poor, Jesus wasn’t ending their poverty, but He was preaching the Gospel to them, the good news that God hadn’t forgotten them, that they were precious to Him, that the Savior had come to fix a much bigger problem than material poverty: the problem of the sins that separated them from God, the problem of their slavery to sin and death. The Christ had come to bear the sins of the world, to enter into mankind’s suffering completely, and to die so that we might live forever. He had come, the first time, to set the prisoners free, not from their earthly jail cells, but from their imprisonment in the devil’s kingdom.
This was Jesus’ answer to John’s question, with one final word: Blessed is he who does not stumble over Me. He’s encouraging John here and calling him to faith: “Don’t stumble over Me because you can’t fully see My plan and My purpose. Trust the Holy Spirit, who inspired the prophets before you to prophesy the very miracles I’m performing, and the Gospel I’m preaching. Trust the Holy Spirit, who inspired you to proclaim Me the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Trust the Holy Spirit who inspired you to recognize and proclaim that I am indeed greater than you, John, because if that’s true, that means, you won’t be able to fully understand everything I understand. You won’t be able to grasp all that I can grasp, or all that I came to do. But if all these things are true about Me, then you can most certainly trust Me to do what needs to be done, for you, for the rest of the Church, and for the world. Wait patiently for Me! You won’t be disappointed!”
Just as the King came to John in the midst of his suffering, by means of His word, so the same King, now risen, ascended on high, and already reigning invisibly at the right hand of the Father, comes to you, too, by means of His word. The King comes to us in our doubts, in our struggles, in our suffering, and in our ignorance, and gives us the answers we need. Not all the answers to all the questions, but the answers that we need right now, and the insight and understanding that we need right now.
The answers that we find in God’s Word come down to four basic things: First, God has a plan in which you play a part, and His plan is good and gracious. Looking back, as we now can, on the life of Jesus, including His suffering, death, and resurrection, it’s obvious how Jesus fulfilled the first part of all those Old Testament prophecies about the Christ during His first advent, how He came to pay for our sins and to rescue mankind in a spiritual way, from spiritual enemies, to bring us into His kingdom, which is hidden from view but altogether real. You can see how God has prospered His Word and even included you in the hearing of it, how He saw to it that you were baptized, and that you have the opportunity to keep receiving the ministry of His Word and Sacraments. You may not see everything clearly about God’s plan, but that much you can see.
Second, you have God’s promise to accompany you and preserve you throughout whatever valley of the shadow of death you may be walking through. You aren’t alone or on your own. God will help you to bear up under whatever He sends, and will even help you to behave as a child of God in the face of adversity.
Third, God has promised to turn all things to work out for your good, teaching you and disciplining you as a loving father teaches and disciples his child. He has something to teach you in the midst of your suffering.
And finally, you have God’s assurance that, for believers in Christ, nothing that you suffer will last forever. It has an end, whether it’s deliverance still in this life or when the King returns. Because while Jesus didn’t come the first time to fix all the problems of earth, that’s exactly what He’s coming to do when He comes again in glory, when He will finally fulfill all those Old Testament prophecies about the Christ coming to deliver His people from all their enemies, judge all the wicked, and establish a perfect home of righteousness and healing for all His battle-scarred believers.
To summarize, remind yourself of these four things when you’re suffering and unable to see God’s purpose clearly: God has put me here, according to His good and gracious plan. God will preserve me and help me to bear up and to behave as His child. God will teach me the lessons He wants me to learn. And God will release me in His time. In the midst of your suffering, your King still comes to you, to comfort you until He comes again. Rejoice! Trust! And wait patiently for the King! Hold on a while longer! And you will not be disappointed! Amen.
