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John's disciples said: 'Are
you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?'
Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and
see.” Matt.11:3,4 I breathed a sigh of relief when the December Rota came round. For the last 3 years, if not 4, I seemed to have been allocated the 4thSunday in Advent on which to be the preacher. I really was running out of things to say about Mary, great as she was! So the play next week may have something new to tell us – let's wait and see! The BBC is to reinvent itself, we are told. Not before time, I hear you say. So it will be away with the so-called 'reality' TV, makeover programmes and the like, and back with the right stuff, which people of my age remember! Perhaps you won't be needing those 300 channels which are presently available through your satellite aerial and digi-box after all. I jest, of course, but we can all dream…….! Has it ever occurred to you that you are not only what you eat, but also what you hear and see? What you see and hear through the various media every day of your life influences you, your thinking, your actions, your life style, and so on. I don't think anyone seriously believes otherwise these days. What we eat, yes; but also what we wear, what we drive, what perfume, what deodorant we use, what Christmas presents we will buy – the list can go on and on. Manufacturers of these products certainly think it worthwhile to spend millions on advertising, so that they can influence us into buying their products. We are what we see and hear. In a similar way we read the papers - usually, to be fair, the ones which reflect the way we think anyway. If you see someone reading the 'Telegraph' or the 'Guardian' it will tell you something about that person. Yes, they reinforce our prejudices and predilections, but perhaps they do even change the way we think, bit by bit. Our view of the world, of its people, of its events, of its tragedies, of its joys, depends very much on how clear sighted or how blind we are, how deaf or able to hear we are. We can close our eyes and our ears to what is going on around us. We can shut ourselves away and ignore the world, we can stop our ears to the cries of the hungry and the dispossessed. We can close our eyes to the heartbreaks that unfold in front of us. We can pay no attention to the state of our town, to the young lives which tragically go to waste. We can do all this, and withdraw into our own little world, and fail to see what my father used to call 'the signs of the times'. Then we have eyes but we do not see, ears but we do not hear. Two chapters later in Matthew's gospel, Jesus says to the disciples: 'Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears, for they hear.' And to John's disciples, he says: 'Go and tell John what you hear and see. The Jewish people of the time of John the Baptist and Jesus were waiting – waiting for the Messiah. Today, they still wait. A great Jewish theologian in a previous generation, Martin Buber, once put it like this. He said: 'To the Christian, the Jew is the stubborn fellow who is still waiting for the Messiah; to the Jew, the Christian is the heedless fellow who, in an unredeemed world, declares that redemption has somehow or other taken place.' How can Christians claim that redemption has come to the world? Look at it! It is in a mess – it is no better than it was in the days of Amos or Hosea. 'Are you the one who is to come?' Well, we do believe in Jesus as the Messiah, the one who has inaugurated the Rule Of God. We call him 'Christ', (which means the same thing, Messiah coming from a Hebrew root and Christ from the Greek). But way back then, John the Baptist seems, on the face of it, to have had his doubts. I suppose when you are in prison, time hangs very heavy, and one is given to a great deal of introspection. John the Baptist certainly had plenty to think about. He had 'put his foot in it' in a big way, taking on Herod, challenging him about his marriage. I am not sure whether his question, though, is one of doubt or one of faith. Is he gloomily saying: 'I thought you were the Christ, but now I'm not so sure', or is he saying excitedly: 'Is it you? Are you the one? Do we need to look for the Messiah any longer?' I remember a Norfolk man from my boyhood, who saw another coming down the lane towards him one gloomy afternoon. When they met, he said 'I thought that was you, but I didn't think that was'! In other words, he wasn't sure. Whichever it was, the answer Jesus sends back to John via his disciples carries the same message. 'Go and tell John what you see and hear'. What they are to look for are the signs that this Kingdom (which, I repeat, we Christians today still believe in) has indeed been inaugurated – it has started. The New World has begun. These signs recall passages from Isaiah (29:18; 35:1; 61:1) which talk about the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, the lame walking, and so on. The climax of the list in Matthew's account, however, is that the poor have good news brought to them. And what is good news for poor people? Surely that their poverty, in whatever form, is to be ended! All these are Messiah-signs, or, as we Christians would call them, Kingdom signs. Jesus is plainly saying to the disciples of John: 'The Kingdom, God's Rule has begun. Open your eyes, unstop your ears, then you will see and hear what is happening.' Is this a message for the world today? Is the fact of God's Rule still good news for the people of Dumfries? I believe it is, and that we as people of the Kingdom must remain faithful to its message of bringing healing and wholeness, imperfect though the world is; imperfect though we as messengers may be. I keep meeting people who have given up on the institutional Church, but many of them still, I feel, want to believe in the values of this Kingdom, this Rule of God. DH Lawrence, with undue pessimism perhaps, put it like this: 'I know the greatness of Christianity – it is a past greatness. I know that but for those early Christians we should never have emerged from the chaos and hopeless disaster of the Dark Ages. If I had lived in the year four-hundred, pray God, I would have been a true and passionate Christian…..but now I live in 1924, and the Christian adventure is done.' Now we live in 2004 – 80 years on. Is the Christian adventure done? Or have we just grown old and shrivelled up, our joints aching and our bones brittle, so that even God's Spirit cannot move us? 'How can a man be born when he is old?' asked Nicodemus. But it must be so, because the Christ, the Messiah, comes anywhere and everywhere to touch our lives, however old we are. When we least expect it, when we are totally unprepared, Christ comes in: If he's not born in thee, thy heart will be forlorn.” |