WHAT SORT OF MESSIAH ARE YOU EXPECTING?

(Preached on Sunday, December 16, 2007)

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, AAre you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?@                                                  -Matthew 11:2-3

 

This time of the year the Aexpectation meter@ inside each one of us is turned to Aultra-high@.  In children, it is in danger of red-lining!  Parents must help them dial things down before they blow a gasket!  Children of all ages are expecting the arrival of Santa Claus with his bag of goodies.  Parents are expecting the return home of college students, or military children, or adult children with grandchildren in tow.  All sorts of people are expecting peace on earth.  And in the church we are expecting the birth again of the messiah, Immanuel, God-with-us. 

 

The danger, of course, is that reality rarely lives up to our expectations.  Sometimes, it is that our expectations don=t live up to reality.  This passage from Matthew is a reminder of who it is we await in this season.  During Advent we tend to focus our anticipation on the sweet baby Jesus because, as every parent knows, we can see in an infant almost anything we want to see.  And, besides, everyone loves a baby.  This passage, however, reminds us of the mission of God=s anointed one, the Messiah.  When we read this passage during Advent it is a reminder that the baby grew up!  He taught, he challenged, he provoked, he healed, he liberated.  We are never very good at letting babies grow up to the point where they have their own ideas and confront us with their own lives.  A baby tends to turn things upside down and can be a bit of a challenge to have around.  In the case of the baby Jesus, that is nothing compared to the ways in which the adult Jesus can disrupt and challenge us.

 

It is no wonder then, that poor John, isolated in a prison cell and reliant only on what he hears through the grapevine, has his doubts.  There is no more poignant communication in the New Testament than John=s message from prison: AAre you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?@  Here is a heart stretched toward a fulfillment that is not of his making, and in the face of which he is vulnerable to a sense of shame, loss and futility.  Given what he is undergoing, how can he be sure that he has been pointing in the direction of God=s breaking in?  Will this One vindicate him against the enemy who holds him in a dungeon?  It is an extremely tough time for John.

 

When he had preached, John had preached a harsh message of a God with extremely high standards; a God who was angry those standards were being flaunted and ignored; a God who would willingly use such tools as an axe, a winnowing fork, and fire.  And John had expected that the coming Messiah would use those tools to bring God=s judgment, God=s justice, to reality in the world.  John fully expected a Messiah who would separate the true from the false, the good from the bad, and make the world right. Now in prison, what John was hearing, did not sound like his expected Messiah.  Instead of judgment he was hearing about compassion, mercy and love.  Instead of condemnation he was hearing about forgiveness and acceptance.

 

John is not alone in his doubts about Jesus as Messiah.  Episcopal priest, theologian and author Robert Capon presents a tongue in cheek vision of our typical American view of the Messiah.  AThe true paradigm of the ordinary American view of Jesus is Superman: >Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  It=s Superman!  Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.=  If that isn=t popular Christology, I=ll eat my hat.  Jesus C gentle, meek, and mild, but with secret, souped-up, more-than-human insides C bumbles around for thirty-three years, nearly gets himself done in for good by the Kryptonite Cross, but at the last minute, struggles into the phone booth of the Empty Tomb, changes into his Easter suit and, with a single bound, leaps back up to the planet Heaven.  It=s got it all C including, just so you shouldn=t miss the lesson, kiddies: He never once touches Lois Lane.

 

AYou think that=s funny?  Don=t laugh.  The human race is, was and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah.  We don=t want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it.  We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing that claim.  It=s not that we weren=t looking for the Messiah; it=s just that he wasn=t what we were looking for.  Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross.  He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket.  He wouldn=t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead.  He would do a smart thing like never dying.@

 

We have real problems with a human messiah.  We want a messiah to Afix@ the problems of the world.  We want a messiah to zap the bad people, correct all the inequities that affect Aus@, cure all diseases and wipe out all suffering.  And we want it without changing our bottom line, without any sacrifice on our part, and without upsetting our lives and lifestyles.  We don=t want to have to adjust our views on the world, our ideas about God, our politics, or our social understandings. 

 

Instead, here came Jesus, the one who was mighty, and he is telling people to turn the other cheek, to ADo good to those who hate you.@  We expected so much of Jesus.  And he delivered so little.  When they put him on a cross, we expected him to act like the Son of God, to be able to throw himself down from the cross, to say, ANow it is payback time.@  Instead, he looked down from his cross, hanging there in utter misery, and said simply, AFather, forgive.@  As Woody Allen once said toward the end of one of his movies, AI don=t hate God.  No, I think the worse thing you can say about God is that he is an underachiever.@

 

God and Jesus have just not met our expectations.  That is why we continue to ignore his radical teachings on love, forgiveness, acceptance, mercy, and compassion for all people.  Instead of embracing these actions which he promises will bring true peace to the world, we keep looking for a different kind of messiah to arrive.

 

C. S. Lewis, in his wonderful work of Christian apologetics, God in the Dock, argues though that this human messiah, this idea of God becoming so very human, is exactly the messiah which truly does help us make sense of the world.  He invites us to think about what it really means that God becomes human flesh in Jesus.  AThe coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months that precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do.  One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea-bottom.@

 

Lewis then claims that if we take the trouble to think this through, we discern a great pattern that drives us to the very depths of truth, all the way down.  It is as if we have been given a key to what=s going on in the whole universe, and always has been going on, except that before we got this one insight, we didn=t know what was going on.  It would be as if the whole thing, the whole purpose of why the world is, and why we have been put here, has come to gracious light.  We will look at the world differently.  We will be, in a sense, living in a different world because we have seen what=s going on in the universe.