The 3^rd Sunday in Advent                                                    

Hear the words of the Gospel lesson appointed for the Third Sunday in Advent: 

…”Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”

This morning’s Gospel includes a scene taken from the final days of the life of John the Baptist, and an interesting scene it is. John has been sent to prison, though he probably didn’t realize at this point that he was not going to be released – indeed, that he was about to be put to death, possibly within a few days of the conversation recorded here, and have his head served on a platter as a gift to Salome, the step-daughter of the king.

This is an unsettling story to have laid before us in the weeks leading up to Christmas…it’s not very “Christmassy”, is it? The Baptist is in prison, and he appears to be having doubts about Our Lord, about His ministry, and about whether he’s gotten the whole Messiah-thing right in the first place. It doesn’t appear to be the type of scene to be contemplating this close to Christmas.

Perhaps John was depressed…and it sort of makes sense to me to see him as a man who struggled at times with his understanding of God’s calling upon his life… who often wrestled with what it was that God wanted him to do. We know full well that when he’d started in ministry, he sensed that he was laying the groundwork for some greater work of God…a work that was going to eclipse his own efforts, but that he really had no idea at that stage exactly who or what it was that God had planned for him.

And yet he had come to the realization that it was his own cousin, Jesus bar Joseph, who was the one for whom he had been preparing the way. We don’t know if this realization came to him slowly over time or whether it just struck him one day like a lightning bolt out of the blue, but what we do know is that, well prior to his arrest, he had quite explicitly recognized Our Lord as being the fulfilment of his own ministry. But now he wasn’t so sure.

Was it just that things weren’t progressing as quickly as John had expected? Was it the arrest itself that had thrown him? Had he not expected that? Was it Our Lord not quite living up to the fiery character that he had envisaged: winnowing fork in hand, clearing his threshing floor, baptizing with fire…or was it just the normal effects of imprisonment taking their toll on John’s psyche? After all, prison is not a place to make a man more religious is it?

We don’t know for sure why John was having doubts, but we do know what he did about it. He took his concerns to Our Lord, and he got a response he probably didn’t expect…”Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (Matthew 11:4-5)

This is probably not the response he expected…it might not be the response that we would have given him. Most times, if someone challenges us about our faith in Our Lord, we might quote Scripture to them…offer a biblical text as proof. Perhaps, if John the Baptist had come to us, asking us for our opinion as to whether Jesus was the Messiah, we might have pointed him to a piece of Scripture.

Perhaps the more orthodox among us might have appealed to Our Lord’s strong religious pedigree. If not to any accreditation He received from the High Priest, at least to His good lineage, as Matthew himself did, showing how Jesus was a true member of the people of God, one who stood as a direct descendant of Abraham, the father of faith, and of King David.

These are the ways we determine whether or not somebody speaks the truth for God, aren’t they? First and foremost, we check out their theology – we make sure that they believe in the Trinity, accept the first three creeds of the Church, and of course, the Affirmation of St. Louis. And we look to see that they’re wearing a collar, because we know if they are, that they’ve evidently been screened, tested and certified as orthodox by an ecclesiastical establishment that we know we can trust. So, we can be sure that the Spirit of God is alive and well in them.

When Our Saviour is questioned about His own legitimacy as the Father’s representative, He points to none of these things – not to His orthodoxy, not to His pedigree, not to any certification He had received from any ecclesiastical body. He simply says, “Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see.”

It is the works of Jesus that identify Him as God’s Messiah because it is in the works of Jesus that we see the Spirit of Almighty God undeniably at work. The facts on the ground are all we need in order to identify the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, at work, and these facts are clear and undeniable.

When you’re driving along State Road 207 and you see yellow barrels on the roadway and barricades sectioning off a hole in the asphalt and men in hard hats leaning on shovels, you know a DOT road crew is at work. When you see blind people receiving their sight, dead people being raised, hungry people being fed, the sick being healed and the poor having good news preached to them, you know that the Spirit of God is at work. It is very straightforward – the work of the Spirit of God is unmistakable.

You just take a look at what’s going on around you…the facts on the ground speak for themselves. In John 10:37, Our Lord was accused of blasphemy, but He said “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.”

Again, the idea is that the works speak for themselves. You know that Jesus is in the Father and the Father in Him because of what you see happening. When you see love, joy, health, peace and healing breaking out, you know the Spirit of Almighty God, the Holy Ghost, is at work in your midst. It’s not difficult to work out.

As Our Lord says to Nicodemus in John 3:8, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the spirit.”

The wind blows where it will. You don’t know where it has come from and you don’t know where it’s going to go next, but there’s no mistaking the presence of the wind when it’s blowing. Sometimes it comes as a gentle cooling breeze on a warm summer’s day and other times it rips through like a tornado but either way there’s no mistaking the Spirit of God when He is present.

I look at my own spiritual pilgrimage up to this point and it seems to sometimes be a constant struggle of Our Lord and Saviour dragging me forwards to recognize the presence of the Spirit of God in places where I didn’t expect it. In truth, I don’t know what it means, except that the wind blows where it will and you don’t know where it’s going next but you can’t mistake it when it’s blowing!

Love, joy, health, peace – these are the signs of the presence of the Holy Ghost. The blind are receiving their sight, dead people being raised, hungry people being fed, the sick are being healed and the poor are hearing good news. These are unmistakable indicators that the Holy Ghost is at work. We can’t deny His presence, and we dare not.

Indeed, in Matthew 12:32 where Jesus talks about the ’unforgivable sin’: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”, it’s the failure of Our Lord’s religious contemporaries to acknowledge the facts on the ground that’s the problem.

Our Lord is driving out demons, and these people interpret His actions as something demonic, and He tells them that by denying the presence of the Spirit of God in His own miraculous actions – by denying the clear reality of the facts on the ground – they’ve gone beyond the point of no return.

Now, I began this morning by saying that there’s nothing particularly ’Christmassy’ about this passage. I want to conclude this morning by revising that statement.

For what is Christmas about? Well, ask anybody today…it’s about peace and goodwill to everyone. It’s about family and the joy of children and Tiny Tim saying, “God bless us every one!”

In truth, it’s not about any of those things, is it? It’s not about general feelings of goodwill towards everyone any more than it is about Santa Claus or Tiny Tim or God’s general feeling of goodwill towards us.

It’s about the facts on the ground. It’s about Almighty God coming into our world as flesh and blood. It’s about God the Father becoming tangible in Jesus the Son – being born, living, breathing, bleeding and dying for all of us. This is Christmas…this is our faith…this is the reason for the season.

It’s the facts on the ground that draw us together to celebrate each and every year.  The blind receiving their sight, the dead being raised, and the poor having good news preached to them. It’s about Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, being born humbly into our world in that small, cold stable at Bethlehem – being born to give His Body and His Blood for our salvation.

Amen,

The Rev. Deacon Timothy Fleming