Are You The One Who is to Come, or Should We Expect Someone Else?

What do we do when life doesn't make sense—even when we've done everything right? In this sermon, Megan reflects on the powerful question John the Baptist asked from prison: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Through Jesus’ response, we explore what it means to find hope, not just in answers, but in the character and work of Christ.

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Read the transcript

Today's reading is from Luke chapter seven, verse 18 to 35. Jesus and John the Baptist.

Scripture Reading: Luke 7:18–35

John's disciples told him about all these things, calling two of them. He sent them to the Lord to ask, “are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” When the men came to Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘are you the one who is to come? Or should we expect someone else?’” At that very time, Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses, and evil spirits and gave sight to many who were blind. So he replied to the messengers, “go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk. Those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.” After John's messengers left, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John. “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No. Those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’ I tell you, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words, acknowledged that God's way was right because they had been baptized by John. But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves because they had not been baptized by John. Jesus went on to say, “to what then can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other: ‘We played the pipe for you and you did not dance. We sang a dirge and you did not cry.’ For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say he has a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by all her children.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Introduction

Well, my name is Megan. If I haven't met you before. I'm the senior minister here at Deep Creek. If you were here last week, I wasn't, and so thank you to Lily and Pedram, for holding down the fortress, but particularly to Pedram for an excellent sermon that I had the opportunity to read during the week, starting our series on questions of hope.

It's very powerful to have Jesus as someone who doesn't simply, download content to us, but who asks us questions who, as he interacted with people throughout his ministry, asked such powerful questions that people's hearts had to open to answer them.

During the season of lent, the practice of asking questions of ourselves and hearing the questions that Jesus asks is really important.

As we discern our way forward and as we reflect on whether we are in fact living the way that God wants us to live, asking questions about our life, about our soul, about what we love, about what we value is essential.

And of course, if you find yourself in a hard place, feeling confused, feeling under pressure, or perhaps in the midst of suffering or injustice, questions can be powerful there too. But some of the questions that often come to mind in these hard times might not be the most powerful question we could ask.

John the Baptist’s Question from Prison

Sometimes we ask:

• why me?

• Is God punishing me?

• what am I supposed to be learning from this hard thing?

• who's to blame?

• Why is this happening?

Well, today we meet a man who is in a very hard place. He's in jail, John the Baptist. And we read in Luke chapter three that he is in prison because he has been ministering for God.

He's been speaking God's truth, encouraging people to ask very, very hard questions of their lives, of their spirit. And he did that to a leader. He spoke truth to power, as the saying goes. And that leader Herod threw him in prison. So Luke chapter three, when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother's wife, and all the other evil things he had done, Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison. This was a great injustice. There was no reason for John to be in prison. And yet Herod added this to his list of many injustices.

And so John the Baptist, in prison in this hard place, has a choice of the sort of question that he might ask. Will he ask, why me? Will he ask who's to blame? Will he ask, was it worth it? Will he ask who will get him out?

Well, instead of any of those, he asks this question. Are you the one who is to come? Or should we expect someone else?

Now, I know that the youth on Friday – those ones on their devices, up on the couch – were looking at Mark chapter two, and, they... (Yeah, I see everything!) they were looking at Mark chapter two, where friends helped a friend come to Jesus. So, someone is lowered through the roof, and the conclusion is friends can help friends find faith in Christ. Well here, the friends of John are doing the same. They can't get him out of prison to go and see Jesus, but they can help him with the question that might get him out of his dark place. So they take the question to Jesus. Are you Jesus, the one who is to come? Or should we expect someone else?

Seems like a funny question for someone who'd been so set on Jesus being the Messiah to ask. John had been the one who had identified Jesus as the Lamb of God. In John's gospel, we see John the Baptist say, there he is, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It could not be clearer. John says, this is the Messiah.

John's Expectations of the Messiah

Luke's Gospel, he describes the sort of work that he expects that Messiah to do. The people were waiting expectantly around John getting baptized, and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. John answered them all, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn. But he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” And with many other words, John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.

John the Baptist was sure that he was the forerunner of the Messiah, preparing the people, because if they had not been given the opportunity to repent, the clear and swift immediate judgment being brought by the Messiah would take them unawares. And when the Messiah came, he would bring fire. He would be the one that was dividing the evil and the good. He would be the one who was making sure that those who were following the Lord were gathered together into the Lord's barn, and those who were not were destroyed.

And so you can imagine, as John is a victim of injustice in prison, suffering greatly for this message, and hearing the reports of Jesus healing, eating and drinking and partying, including others, showing great mercy and compassion, he might have had a moment of dissonance. I'm in his suffering. The injustice that I am suffering is exactly the sort that the Messiah should be overturning. And yet Jesus is out there partying. Are you the one who is to come? Or should we expect someone else?

Jesus’ Response to John

Well, Jesus is not at all concerned to have John ask a question like that. It's not offensive to Jesus. He doesn't shut John down his friends. He doesn't send back, "He knows who I am. He should toughen up." No, there is commendation for questioning in this way. And Jesus provides evidence that yes, John, you were right. And the mission for which you have been jailed is worth it. You will find evidence in me for hope.

And so he replies to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard.”

• The blind receive sight.

• The lame walk.

• Those who have leprosy are cleansed.

• The deaf hear.

• The dead are raised.

• And the good news is proclaimed to the poor.

Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.

Jesus doesn't say a yes or no to the question, are you the one who is to come? Or should we expect someone else? But he points to the evidence of his character and his action.

I might have shared this story before, but when I was asking many questions of the Lord about where I should do my first ministry placement, my first curacy, I sat with him in a church and was praying and asking for guidance. And – and as I've said before, if you've heard it – I did not receive clear guidance. I did not receive an answer to my question. But what I did receive was an assurance of the character and works of Jesus. So as I was praying in the church, I had a strong sense of Jesus himself coming from behind the communion table or altar and sitting next to me, that the answer to my question was actually in the character and work of Jesus, the companion, the one who would bring me to the table, the one who was the Savior through his own death and resurrection, and who would never leave me.

When Jesus answers John the Baptist with this, he is encouraging John that the works that he is doing are the works of the Messiah, and the character that he is displaying is the character of the Messiah. And so he's actually quoting from these Old Testament passages that look forward to or describe the promised servant of the Lord – Isaiah 35, Isaiah 29, Isaiah 61 – and is showing that he is fulfilling exactly the mission statement that he gave when he went to the synagogue and said, see, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. This partying, this inclusion, these acts of mercy, actually are exactly the sorts of acts that John should have been expecting from the Messiah, as well as the works of justice. Jesus wants him to know that his works of mercy are indeed the Messiah's work, and that as he suffers injustice, the work that is happening outside that prison is the work of the one who he was preparing the people to receive.

The Great Reversal in Jesus’ Ministry

But interestingly, I also think he wants John to know that these works in some way are a work of justice. So I've been thinking about healings, and I was reading some articles about whether there's evidence of resuscitation from the dead in our world today – someone who was investigating the claims in this passage, see, the dead are raised. And a lot of the evidence is from parts of the world that we would consider still developing – the two thirds world, the global South, parts of the world that are far more marginalized and under the impact of poverty and war than our own.

So, Craig Keener, who is a Bible scholar – some of you might know he's married to an African woman, and her family are all involved in church life in Africa – and she kind of got him in touch with a whole bunch of people who could testify to miracles of resuscitation from the dead. And he, thinking about the incredible kind of percentage of experience that happens there (maybe in the Philippines, in Indonesia, other places), but not always in his homeland of America, not always in our experience in Australia. Well, part of the reason for that is not simply that they are more open to spiritual things or they don't live in such a scientific worldview. Sometimes we can bring quite an inappropriate lens to looking at miracle accounts in the non-Western. But is it perhaps because Jesus' acts of healing, of mercy, of raising up, are in fact symbols of the great reversal that he is bringing and has brought into the world, that those who cannot heal themselves, that those who suffer great injustice actually, when they see miracles, it is because the Lord is showing that his task is to turn this broken, unjust world upside down.

We have so many resources at our disposal now. That's not the only reason God does miracles, and we know that he does miracles amongst us. And that's not the only reason God does not do miracles. But I think that the teaching of Luke's gospel would be that Jesus, in everything that he does, turns the world upside down. That the great reversal, the lifting up of the lowly that Mary worshipped about in the Magnificat, is seen here in Jesus' works of mercy, healing, and restoration. Jesus' works of mercy ... are also works of justice, because they reverse the marginalization and the poverty of those who are under the big system of broken, unjust world.

But he would say to John, absolutely question your way out of your hard place, but be prepared for surprises.

Jesus Affirms John the Baptist

And so Jesus now moves into two questions of his own. The first is, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” He's talking to the people around him. And then he asks, “To what shall I compare this generation?”

After John's messengers left, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John. “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No. Those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes. I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written: 'I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.' I tell you, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.”

The crowd hearing John bring this question to Jesus may have started to wonder whether he himself had been the forerunner that he had understood himself to be. Well, if John's asking the question now, we're all feeling confused. Is John gone soft? Did we make a mistake? And Jesus says, no.

You know John, you know how tough he is. You went out not to see someone swayed by the wind. You went to see a rock solid tree trunk in the ground – quite austere and possibly quite unusual fellow – this is a prophet of the Old Testament school. You went out to see him and he asks this question. Well, I can confirm to you that he is exactly who he said he was. He was the messenger sent by God ahead of me. He asks, are you the one who is to come, or should we await someone else? No. He was the messenger of the one who is to come. Be sure of it.

But he says, even though John was the greatest, the greatest prophet, the preparer of the Messiah, yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. Question your way out question, but don't stop too soon. John's message of preparation, of asking people to reflect on their lives, to question whether they were living for God, whether they needed to repent was absolutely right. But it was not the end of the story. John was in the period of expectation of promise, but Jesus was now in the kingdom of fulfillment. John's answers – John's questions and answers – could only bring a person so far: to repent before God, to weep and bemoan your sins and your wickedness, as we sometimes say in our Anglican liturgy, was absolutely what needed to happen. But to stop there would not be enough. The one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than John. Not because John's not now in the kingdom of God, but because the fulfillment of what John was pointing to was here in Jesus. And so the questions that John asked and then the questions that Jesus asked must be heard together. The ministry that John had, and then the ministry that the Messiah has must be embraced together.

So Jesus asks his next question: “to what then can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like?”

An Unresponsive Generation

He's speaking now not to those who have heard John's message – he's told them, don't stop too soon, come into the kingdom. Now he's speaking to the Pharisees and the experts in the law, those who should have both heard John's message and then seen him as the forerunner to the Messiah. But what happened?

“To what then can I compare the people of this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other: 'We played the pipe for you and you did not dance. We sang a dirge and you did not cry.' For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine. And you say he has a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking. And you say, 'here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' But wisdom is proved right by all her children."

Jesus looks around at a people who have not heard either the call of John nor the call of Jesus, and he says nothing. Nothing is going to please you if you cannot hear a person who's calling you to Old Testament repentance, and yet you cannot also see someone inviting you into the love of God. The dirge and you did not cry – well, that's John out in the wilderness, eating his locusts and honey and being very smelly and very serious and calling people – well, calling them a brood of vipers. Calling them to repentance. Because so clearly have they broken the law of God for justice and care. But they didn't cry to that dirge. They didn't repent. They didn't want to hear.

And then Jesus comes eating and drinking, partying on, embracing those on the margins, healing people who needed it. And they didn't dance. They didn't rejoice. John, they said, oh, all that fasting and smelling piss and yelling at us. He's got a demon. Jesus coming, eating and drinking. Oh, he's just a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. And that's not actually just a charge of saying, oh, he's a total party boy. That's actually from Deuteronomy – a quote from Deuteronomy that a parent would say about his or her rebellious son, taking them to the elders of the village and asking for punishment: “Here my child, is a glutton and a drunkard.” And Jesus is saying, actually, God can't win with you. You want someone to be serious and call you to repentance. You have it. You want someone to show you the love and justice and inclusion of God. You have it. God can't. I just think of Jesus having to rejoice and celebrate being amongst people who he is restoring to the kingdom of God. But God can't win. Wisdom is proved right by all her children, John's way and Jesus' way sit together to bring people into the wise kingdom of God and all those who follow them.

But it's very possible to avoid the answers if you really want to. We live in a world where there are many, many arguments against faith, and it's really important to grapple with those at various times, probably not all at once. But it's important for us to know that even for ourselves, you can avoid the answer if you really want to. You can find the next objection. You can change what you're looking for. You can change the standards, the goalposts. Can God win?

So I just want us to close today by asking you. If you got answers to some of your questions, if you're in a hard place, would the answers to the questions you're asking really be enough?

What Are You Really Looking For?

If you got answers to some of your questions, if you're in a hard place, would the answers to the questions you're asking really be enough?

Maybe you're asking who's to blame.
Maybe you're asking, why me?
Maybe you're asking, what should I do next?
Maybe you're asking, what's the system that's underneath all of this injustice?

If you got answers to that, would it really be enough? And I want you to ask yourself – and I ask myself this, too – what are you really looking for? If you had God, if you had Jesus right here, what is the question that you really want to ask him?

• Is it really who's to blame?

• Is it really why me?

• Could it be do you really love me?

• Could it be are you the one that we're looking for? Or should we expect someone else?

Just take a moment in quiet. If you feel comfortable to close your eyes in a group, then please do that if that helps you. Jesus does not turn away your questions. So I'm encouraging you now – and as we spend some time in worship as well – what are the questions, right down at the bottom of your heart, that you really want to ask. And then I'm going to pray that Jesus' works and Jesus' character will show you what you're looking for.

Closing Prayer

Loving and most merciful Lord, we know that you are the Holy One, and we know that you never overlook injustice. We know that you will set things right. We know that one day we will see you face to face. And as we sit here now, Lord, we have our questions:

• Do you love us?

• Did you love our loved one who died?

• Are you the one?

• Is it worth it?

• What do you want to say to me?

Lord Jesus, as we bring our real questions to you, we ask that you would show us who you are. Point us to the evidence in our own lives, in the world, and most clearly in the scriptures, illuminated by Your Holy Spirit. Speak to our hearts of the ways in which you can be trusted, of your great love for us, each one, and your joy over us as we come into your kingdom. As we journey through lent, we ask Lord, that you would help us to ask the right questions, that we might know you truly as the one we've been waiting for. Amen.