John the Baptizer: Icon of Advent Tension
Advent 3 Year A
Isaiah 35:1-10 | Psalm 146: 5-10 | James 5:7-10 | Matthew 11:2-11
John the Baptizer is hard to miss, but that doesn’t mean I’ve historically found it easy to hang with him.
Until this year.
Every preacher of the lectionary knows that John shows up three times in rapid succession. He comes in the second and third weeks of Advent to herald the coming of the Messiah and less than a month later at Baptism of the Lord Sunday. Every year. “You, again?” I groan when John shows up.
John is unavoidable.
On top of that, he’s also hard to cozy up to. John is prickly and edgy, and that’s just his outfit and diet (Matthew 3:4). He’s blunt and impolitic with his words. Who wants to sit next to John at the family holiday gathering? He’s always getting into fights at the dinner table by talking about religion and politics. It’s no wonder he ends up in prison (14:1-4). He doesn’t know when to stop making loud remarks about the current administration.
This year, however, I have found myself rooting for John, looking up to him, and desiring more of us, including myself, to be like him.
John has moral clarity and isn’t afraid to name names. He calls the powers to account. He’s entirely nonpartisan when he calls both Pharisees and Sadducees “you brood of vipers!” (3:7). That’s like calling out both progressive and conservative Christians for their feeble gestures at righteousness. John announces a reckoning for all the corruption in the land. A new day of cleansing is fast approaching when the Messiah comes to uproot and incinerate evil. John is unafraid to speak out despite the risk of imprisonment and beheading. Amid the gathering darkness, John’s fire¹ feels like precisely what we need to fight the powers.
This third week in Advent finds John’s flame flickering in prison. Reports of Jesus’ activities provoke John to send his disciples to question Jesus, “Are you truly the Coming One or are we to wait for another?”
Jesus’ ministry has not lined up with John’s messianic expectations. Where’s the fire? Where are the ax and winnowing fork? What happened to irresistible messianic power? For John, the inauguration of the messianic age ought to trigger the immediate collapse of the old age of injustice and corruption. But thus far, there has been nothing cataclysmic about Jesus’ entry onto the scene. To John’s eyes, the world remains the same old putrid mess. And all the more because his number is about to be called for the execution chamber.
When thousands of immigrants are daily deported with ruthless aggression and in defiance of the law, can we not identify with John and ask Jesus, “Are you the Coming One or are we to wait for another?” When the billionaire class vacuums up federal contracts and profits from policy changes that advance its interests over the common good, can we not share John’s anguished longing for the end of the old age? When the lives of the marginalized and the health of the planet are collapsing under repeated, diabolical assault, doesn’t John verbalize our own Advent groaning?
Jesus does not take offense at John’s question, but he exhorts John – and us – to not take offense at him. Jesus lists the signs his coming has unleashed. It’s an unmistakable recitation of Isaiah’s sweeping vision of the arrival of Yahweh’s royal authority:
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…²
In no uncertain terms, Jesus is saying that, in him, the messianic age has begun. John was right to herald his coming. John is the greatest of the prophets, even the greatest of those born ahead of the Messiah’s coming, because he is the prophet that was himself prophesied about (v. 10).
But as great as John is, he is smaller than those who belong to the age of the Kingdom. John saw the coming of the Messiah but not the astonishing way he would come. John expects a separation of good from evil and the immediate end of the old age; Jesus inaugurates the messianic age without first tearing down the old one. John proclaims clarity and judgment; Jesus teaches and embodies mercy. The messianic age bursts forth not at the end of the old age but right in the thick of it.
Jesus does not relieve John’s tension or ours. We join with John and all the faithful who preceded him in longing for the end of exile. We sing the same laments over the brokenness of the world and the vexing impotence and division still characteristic of God’s people. And all of this after Jesus has come and announced the good news of the Kingdom’s arrival.
Yet Jesus frames this Advent tension as holy and righteous. He understands that while he has given sight to the blind and raised the dead, these are but a few cryptic signs in a world full of diseased and dying people. Jesus gets that his ministry is potentially scandalizing: “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” The messianic kingdom is hidden in plain sight, like wheat sown among the weeds (13:24-30). It does not overcome evil through swift retribution. The kingdom restores by taking the long road of growing to fruition in the midst of that evil.
Our prolonged waiting for the consummation tempts us to escape this tension. We collapse waiting into passive resignation to the evils we deplore. Or fighting passivity, we convert this tension into heroic triumphalism, as if we can “build” God’s kingdom – language Scripture never employs for our relationship to the kingdom. Or when our efforts inevitably fall short, our confidence easily turns to despair over the pervasive sadness of it all.
Jesus’ framing of the messianic age as both inaugurated in him (as John expected) but growing in the midst of the present evil age (to John’s surprise) opens up a new way of perceiving our time. Variously described as “already and not yet” or “the overlap of the ages,” this moment is thick with Advent tension.
Increasingly, I am drawn to John Zizioulas’ image of the Church as having “its roots in the future and its branches in the present.”³ The explosion of abundant life and redemption envisioned by Isaiah doesn’t come about as the natural and inevitable development of the past. Neither fate nor human ingenuity is the key to the coming of the messianic age. No, God’s redemption comes from outside of human history and creation’s capacity. As something entirely new and unexpected, it has the power to scandalize just as Jesus’ cautioned. But because it comes to us from God’s future, its coming is sure. Jesus’ coming has cemented the entrance of God’s redemption. Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount illustrates its practicability. The cross embodies its tension with the present evil age and the assurance of God’s presence in the midst of suffering and injustice.
If we are feeling Advent tension with the imprisoned John, we are in the best place to receive the Messiah. Blessed are those who do not attempt to escape it.
Jesus’ ministry of redemption opens up this time as space for the Church to live out her vocation as those who practice patient hope.
Behold your God! He is coming to save you.
Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear!”
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1 “Fire” is John’s favorite word in Matthew 3:1-12, along with “repent(ance).”
2. We can easily trace each sign to a passage in Matthew’s gospel, with the possible significant exception of the last one. Perhaps the good news is brought to the “poor in spirit” via the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount as a whole.
3. Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004.
