Saturday, January 5, 2008

A Voice Calling

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

 

There is no doubt that in the early church there was considerable tension between the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus.   All four gospels show a real concern to spell out that relationship: they are not to be understood as rivals, but as two characters in God's great drama playing different roles.   John is the one who was sent on ahead – to prepare the way – to proclaim, to warn, to get ready.  In some ways he is like the supporting act in a modern pop show – he comes on in the first half to warm up the crowd for the Big Act to follow.

 

So we first hear from him as he emerges from the wilderness.  He draws the crowd, he preaches repentance, he tells them of the coming Messiah, while being careful to make it clear that he is not himself the Messiah.   At least, that's where we first hear from him in three of the four gospels.  But St Luke takes the question of John's relationship with Jesus back even further.   He tells us that John's mother, Elizabeth, and Jesus' mother, Mary, were cousins, so Jesus and John were second cousins, members of the same extended family.   And according to St Luke, they first knew each other pre-birth – which may be something about eternity, pre-history etc.

 

That's as maybe.  What is certain is that John was a prophet, whose specific calling was to help to establish Jesus' identity.   And that's what he does when he first emerges as an adult from the wilderness.  Crowds flock to him as he warns them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, and the time for repentance is NOW.   And St John's gospel has John pointing Jesus out as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and directing his disciples to follow Jesus.

 

At this stage in the drama there is no hint of uncertainty: he speaks with the conviction we associate with the other Biblical prophets.   But by the time we get to today's passage, things have taken a turn for the worst.  John has upset King Herod, and is languishing in the royal dungeons.   His fate is not yet certain, but his future is under severe threat, to put it mildly.  Not uncommon among the prophets of old, most of him suffered terribly for the privilege of speaking for God.

 

And in some respect his reaction is rather like theirs.  Elijah comes to mind, sulking in a cave, wallowing in self-pity, and muttering his complaints against God.   Jeremiah also complained about the hand he had been dealt.  Now we find John in the dungeon beset by doubts: if Jesus really is the Messiah, how come the Romans are still in charge – how come John himself is facing the death penalty – how come the glory of God is not filling the earth as the waters cover the sea?

 

In other words, John is no longer convinced that he heard what God had told him, he is no longer convinced that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the one promised hundreds of years ago by Isaiah and many of the other prophets.   The trouble is, there was no precedent for this – he had nothing to compare it with.  God was doing a new thing, and John was not sure that he had called it right.   God was moving from the aural to the visual, and that was something God had not done before.  In the past God had been heard, but not seen.   Now, in Jesus, God was to be seen as well as heard.

 

We can easily overlook how different the God of the Jewish Scriptures is from the divinities of other cultures and holy books.   The Greeks believed that divinity was seen in beauty – in shapes and forms.  If God created all things then he must have acted like an artist, a sculptor, taking primordial goo and shaping it into various forms.   The Hebrew Scriptures take an entirely different starting-point.  God created all things, not as an artist, but as a Caller.   God created by calling things into existence.  Let there be…and there was.  In our faith history everything occurs through call and response.

 

When the human drama with God really began, God did not show himself to Abraham, he called him.  Leave the land of your fathers…   The Hebrew God is a Voice calling out to us.  When we are asked how we know there is a God, it is because we have heard him, not because we have seen him.   We experience ourselves being addressed, being called, being spoken to – and that Voice we call God.

 

Moses is one of the pivotal figures in this disclosure, because in him we see most clearly the next stage of the self-revelation of this God who calls.   In Moses we see the concept of "call forwarding", so to speak.  God calls to him, as God called to Abraham, but now the call is not only for the recipient, it is for others to whom the recipient must forward it.   Go to Pharaoh and say to him…

 

There, perhaps, is the birth of the prophetic ministry.  God has a message for Pharaoh, but the message is not sent directly to him.   It is given to Moses to forward to Pharaoh.  At that time Moses is both leader and prophet, but as time goes on we see a split take place in those two ministries.   Samuel and some of the other judges seem to combine both, but by the time we come to the heyday of the monarchy we find the political power in the hands of King David and the prophetic ministry in the mouth of Nathan the prophet.   You are that man…

 

In many ways that great story of Nathan's prophetic challenge to the King is the biblical equivalent of the Magna Carta, establishing for all time that even the King is under God's law.   And from that time on, the role of the great succession of prophets was to call the nation and its rulers back to faithfulness to God.  They were not powerful people in the ordinary sense.   They could not force people to do anything – they were in fact, very often, the powerless victims of the powerful elite.  They were mere voices…calling in the political wilderness.

 

Instruments to sing the song of God, to proclaim words they themselves first had to hear.  And it is in that tradition that John the Baptist stands as he emerges from the wilderness.   He has heard the words of God, he has been called to forward the message to the people of his day, and he has obeyed.  He has spoken out the message that the waiting is over, the Messiah is coming, and he has correctly identified Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

 

His task is done; but the results he had anticipated had not occurred.  Or had they?   He sends emissaries to Jesus to ask him a simple question: are you the Messiah or aren't you?  No doubt he had hoped for a simple answer, yes or no.   But Jesus told him to look around him, to see the effects of Jesus' ministry.   The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.   That's what the prophets of old said would happen when the Messiah came.  Now you do the maths!

 

But here was something completely different.  Jesus appeared to be, not another messenger, but the message itself.   Jesus spoke, said the crowds, with his own authority.  Jesus did not point out the error of their ways, he simply called them to follow his way.   He called people to himself.  He called attention to himself.  He didn't ask God to do something, he did it himself, things that only God could do.

 

We will never know if John understood Jesus' reply when he received it from his emissaries.  Did he understand that his distant relative was not ,like himself, a mouthpiece, an instrument for the God who calls.   Did he understand that Jesus was himself the God who calls to us?  Come to me…Come, follow me…

 

Did he understand that for the first time in history God had become incarnate, ("incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary", as we say in our Creed)?   Can we understand it, even two thousand years later?  Or do we take the easy modern way out and dismiss it as pre-scientific twaddle?

 

This Advent and Christmas Season we have the same questions addressed to us by the Voice crying in our wildernesses.   Will we, can we, give the same answer that Mary gave?  It's to her that we turn next week


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