A sermon on Matthew 11:2-11 by Nathan Nettleton

What happens for us when we’ve invested a great deal of hope in something, and as time goes on it seems more and more that it is letting us down? Perhaps you really believed that this new job would set you on the road you needed to be on, but it is beginning to look like a dead end. Perhaps you thought this relationship was “the one” and the marriage and family you had always dreamed of were beckoning, but things are beginning to go sour. Perhaps a new spiritual discipline was looking so promising, really making a difference, but now it has gone dry and nothing seems to be happening. Frustrated hopes. What do they do to us? What do we do with them? And what when the frustrated hope is our hope in Jesus? What are we to do when we have put our hope in Jesus and invested all our expectations in him, and now we are filled with doubts because, any way we look at it, he seems to be letting us down? What then?

John the Baptiser seems to have had an episode of such doubts and discouragement in the story we heard from the gospel tonight. In Matthew’s account, John had quite clearly recognised Jesus as the Messiah back at the time when he baptised him. Then he was sure that Jesus was the one. “The one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” And then when Jesus comes to him for baptism, John says, “Whoa! I need to be baptised by you. Why are you coming to me?!”

But now John is not so sure. He’s feeling let down, disillusioned, perhaps even depressed. He had looked to Jesus as the one who would set Israel free, but now Israel is no more free and he himself is sitting in jail. Some liberator this Jesus is turning out to be. What happened to the “winnowing fork in his hand,” and “clearing the threshing floor and gathering the wheat into the barn and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire”? This isn’t a barn I’ve been gathered into; it’s a jail! What’s the story Jesus? Are you the one, or aren’t you? It appears most probable that the very same sort of doubts and disappointment lay behind the later decision of Judas Iscariot to give up on Jesus and turn him in to the authorities. “Your campaign promises were impressive, Jesus, and we put all our eggs in your basket, but we’re not seeing the results. What’s the story?”

If we are to begin to unravel these questions, we probably need to start with some questions about what we are expecting of Jesus. This season of Advent invites us to contemplate Christ as the God who comes to us and who is coming to us. It invites us to reflect on our expectations and hopes. What is it that we anticipate the coming Christ will do?

The way that the season of Advent gets tangled up with the secular festive season can, I think, help shed some light on these questions and perhaps sounds some challenges to us. If ever there is a time when it becomes apparent how thoroughly we can misunderstand the coming Christ, it is this time of year. Jesus is everywhere at this time of year. I know that there are lots of Christians who think he is not everywhere enough, and that we could do with less Santas and more baby Jesus, and I sympathise with their motives to some extent, but I think their method is off course. We do not need more nativity scenes. More nativity scenes may, in fact, be one of the great obstacles that the coming Christ has to overcome if his message is to be heard. Why? Because nativity scenes have become almost inseparable from a quest to get Jesus to serve our interests and reinforce our agendas. Nativity scenes have been coopted to render Jesus safe, undemanding, and sentimental. They turn him into an inoffensive Jesus who makes us feel warm and mushy, who reinforces our sentimentalised concepts of happy families and buying expensive gifts. Jesus is left as the guardian of keeping things cute and nice, and keeping up appearances. He is turned into a welcome distraction from the harsher realities of our lives and our world, and “the spirit of Christmas” becomes a kind of drug that lulls us into a euphoric oblivion for as long as we can sustain it.

The nativity scene expectations are about as different as you could imagine from the “winnowing fork and fire” expectations that John the Baptiser held, but I wonder whether they don’t both equally represent us trying to tell Jesus what we want him to do. Sometimes we want him to be the centrepiece of our festivities, smiling angelically but saying nothing, and other times we want him to carry out our political agendas, wiping out the oppressors and vindicating our side. And both of those extremes might be little different from any number of other agendas we might put on Jesus – to be the guarantor of a successful career, or the provider of the perfect spouse, or the protector of our children, or the soother of our anxious souls. I’m not saying that any of those desires and hopes are wrong, in and of themselves. But when we begin to project them onto Jesus, and make them the expected purpose of his coming to us, then we may be setting ourselves up for serious disappointment.

Jesus picks up on this theme too when talking about John the Baptiser in this story we heard. “What did you go out to the desert looking for?” he asks. “A celebrity with fancy clothes and a big mansion? A motivational speaker who sniffs the wind and tells you what you are itching to hear?” If that’s what you were looking for, you’d have been disappointed, because what you got in John was a true prophet, one who uncompromisingly gives voice to the message of God. It’s not nice, It’s not safe. It’s not comfortable. But it is true and its truth burns like fire.

Of course, the irony is that John has been a faithful voice for the message of God, but he has still managed, himself, to read his own hopes and agendas into that message and eventually become disillusioned with Jesus when they were not realised as he imagined. Being able to rightly understand and express the gospel does not make us immune to projecting our own wish-lists into it.

The God who comes to us is not a cosmic santa who comes to give us the gifts we want if we have been good all year. The God who comes to us comes as the creator and redeemer of the earth and all that is in it, knowing what we need to liberate us to be god-like, and also knowing how many of our wishes and hopes are just marketing-manufactured pale shadows of the fulness we were created for. The new age that Jesus is bringing about looks neither like the scorched earth triumph for which John longed, nor like the schmaltzy delusional niceness of plastic santas and fluffy lamb nativity sets.

This is why, as Jesus sends the messengers back to John saying, “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,” he adds this strange little comment, “and blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” It doesn’t take much to get our noses out of joint when Jesus’ agendas not only don’t match our wish-lists, but go off in directions that seem to conflict with ours. John, who found his spiritual home in the desert, eating bush tucker and preaching a fiery judgement, sees Jesus spending most of his time in the cities and towns, attending dinner parties and speaking of love and mercy. “Blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

We gather here each week, not because we never find Jesus offending us, nor because we have successfully and consistently allowed his agendas to overwrite our own. And we certainly don’t gather here because Jesus has always met our expectations and we have never been disappointed. Rather we gather as a people who have found that the agendas of the coming Christ find both echoes and clanging dissonances within us. We are hear because call of Christ has awoken within us echoes of a song we have never heard and memories of a place we have never seen, and we must follow their call. We gather here to offer ourselves to the coming Christ, that he might enable us to sort out what is real and true and life-giving, and what we need to stop grasping at lest it bind us to trivialities and the petty lifeless dreams that are so slickly marketed to us. We are here because even in our disappointments and frustrated hopes lie the seeds of new life and the whispered call of the Christ. In broken bread and the presence of the broken Christ we are reminded that it is from broken dreams and frustrated hopes that resurrection hope is born. So, come, let us gather together, owning our disappointments and frustrations, and let us meet the risen and coming Christ in prayer and in the sharing of bread and wine. Come, Lord Jesus, set us free from our expectations that we might find life in yours. Amen.