Third Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 35:1–6a, 10

James 5:7–10

Matthew 11:2–11

Today’s gospel reading asks us to compare John the Baptist with Jesus, as we began to do last week. Doing so will help us prepare for Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, because it will deepen our love and appreciation for the gifts Jesus, and he alone, continues to give us. John was the very best the ancient Hebrew tradition of Law and Prophets had to offer. To see how Jesus transcends even this powerful legacy is to understand why he is, truly, the Savior of the world. And our savior started out life just as we all do: as a drooling, mewling, pooping, helpless baby.

I love how our reading begins, with John sending his disciples to ask Jesus if he is “the one to come.” I love it because I believe this is almost certainly historically accurate, and it helps us to correct for the hindsight fallacy, a constant problem whenever we are doing history. And anytime we read the gospel, whether we like it or not, we are “doing history” because we are reading about events that happened long ago.

The hindsight fallacy we must always be aware of is this: when we read about people in history, we have to remember a huge difference between them and us, viz. we know how things turned out, while they did not. We believe Jesus is “the one to come,” but John did not. By comparing how Matthew tells the story with the parallel in Luke 7:18ff, we can see that Matthew may have already fallen into the hindsight trap because Matthew, unlike Luke, starts off by writing, “When John the Baptist heard in prison of the works of the Christ . . .” Luke does not yet refer to Jesus as the Christ, but Matthew, looking back, cannot restrain himself from confessing what he so firmly believes, God bless him. Still, come on, Matthew; the whole question here for John is whether Jesus is the Christ or not!

We might ask, “What does it take to convince you, John, that Jesus is the one to come? Restoring sight to the blind, curing the lame, the deaf and lepers, raising the dead, and comforting the poor is not good enough?!”

This problem is, however, another example of the hindsight fallacy. We now understand that healing the sick, raising the dead, and serving the poor were all essential to Jesus’s messianic mission. But the people of Jesus’s time had very different messianic expectations.

They expected the messiah would be a political-military leader, like King David. The NJBC[i] tells us the term “Christ” means “anointed” in Greek (“messiah” in Hebrew) and it refers to “the anointed king of the Davidic dynasty who would establish in the world the definitive reign of Yahweh.” John, it seems, shared the view that the messiah would be a military-religious leader, as this was Israel’s history. This is one example of how John and Jesus differed, of how John is still essentially an Old Testament figure. Yes, the messiah would be religious just as King David was, but people wanted deliverance from Roman oppression and the corruption and complicity of their Jewish leaders. Healing the sick and serving the poor was not going to get that done.

Why was Jesus Scandalous?

Jesus had a problem with these erroneous expectations, and that explains why he says something that is also, on its face, puzzling. After listing his many mighty deeds, Jesus adds, “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Why would anyone be offended at his restoring sight to the blind? Because that is not what messiahs are supposed to do! They are supposed to win battles and establish the just reign of Yahweh through military force. Ironically, we today are offended, scandalized, anytime a religion uses violence to achieve its ends. I would argue this is because whether we believe in Jesus as Lord or not, his message has carried the day. We believe religious leaders should be as non-violent as he was. But in Jesus’s time, people held contrary views.

The word we translate as “offense” is skandalisthē̃ͅ. It is connected to our word “scandalize,” and it originally meant a snare or stumbling block; it also means “to stumble.” It appears in the passive voice here, and Abbott-Smith’s Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament tells us that in this case, it is always a metaphor for that which hinders right conduct or thought. In his A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, Walter Bauer reports it means to be repelled by someone, as a result of refusing to believe a person falls into sin.

I suggest there is another, more modern sense in which Jesus’s mighty deeds are “scandalous.” We don’t really like miracles—they are an embarrassment for most modern believers. They offend the dominant modern Western model of reality that is based on empirical scientific methods. Miracles are, by definition, events that are not in accord with the laws of nature. Therefore, miracles are difficult for us to believe because our vision of reality is defined (dare I say limited?) by scientific plausibility. Miracles were also an embarrassment to the early Church. In those days, there were charlatans and mountebanks who worked wonders by means of tricks in order to hoodwink people.

More recently, however, science itself has stepped away from such a rigid conception of reality. Quantum physics has revealed that randomness—or mystery!—is built into the way nature works. Genuine novelty is a real possibility in our universe. In the words of Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet, 1.5.166).

Still, even if miracles cannot be ruled out by the latest laws of physics, it does not follow that we can or should believe in all the miracles in the Bible. Interpreting Jesus’s miracles has become so fraught for us that I have devoted an appendix article to it (see Appendix D on this website under the “Appendices” tab.)

When Jesus listed his mighty deeds, he may have wanted John to think of our first reading from Isaiah, verses 5–6. Although Jesus was not fulfilling the Davidic messianic prophecies, he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy of the restoration of Israel. Jesus added cleansing lepers, raising the dead, and preaching the Good News to the poor. He was guided by Isaiah, but not restricted by him.

Isaiah is more poetic here than Jesus, as our text reads not that the lame walk but that “they will leap like a stag.” The beauty of the passage is a reminder that today is Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, a time of rose-colored vestments and beautiful music in the liturgy. In the midst of this dark time of year and the penitential time of Advent, today is a day to rejoice and give thanks to the Author of Beauty. It is time to anticipate the joy of Christmas, lighten up and have some fun.

In our gospel passage, Jesus is making two points in his answer to the question from John’s disciples. First, in asking people why they went out to the wilderness to listen to John, Jesus is trying to build on the people’s love of John. The same hunger that drove people out to the desert, away from the Jerusalem temple, to be baptized by John would also lead them to follow Jesus. John was the last prophet in the Old Testament tradition, the best that tradition could offer.

Why is John Inferior to Everyone in God’s Kingdom?

Jesus was a prophet, yet he was “more than a prophet.” His second point is to distinguish his mission from John’s. Did John cleanse lepers, raise the dead, heal the lame, the deaf, and the blind? No, but John offered judgment and hope for a better future.

In these reflections on the gospels, I will often refer to a wonderful collection of ancient Christian commentaries on Matthew, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.[ii] G. K. Chesterton wrote that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” I think it is important for us to read the Bible in the company of those who came before us.

Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315–67) believes John symbolizes the Law and that “he thoroughly accomplished all the work that belonged to the law.”[iii] Hilary goes on to say,

“Therefore, when the law (i.e., John) was inactive, oppressed as it was by the sins of the common people and held in chains by the vicious habits of the nation, so that Christ could not be perceived, the law (John) was confined by chains and in prison. But the law (John) sent others to behold the good news. In this way, unbelief would be confronted with accomplished truth of what had been prophesied. By this means, the part of the law that had been chained by the misdeeds of sinners would now be freed through the understanding of the good news freely expressed.”

The religious tradition of Israel is often referred to as “the Law and the Prophets.” John represented both the culmination of the Law and the Prophets and the transition to something that transcends this tradition: the gospel of Jesus Christ. And because John is the transition to Jesus’s kingdom, he is also “more than a prophet.” No prophet before John was so close to the arrival of God’s kingdom. Yet because he was killed just as the Kingdom was arriving, Jesus adds the words of verse 11: “but a lesser man, in the Kingdom of the heavens, is greater than he.”

While John threatened people with judgment and fire in an “Old Testamentish” way,Jesus offered mercy and healing to the lost children of Israel and fulfilled the hope John foretold. Jesus followed the tradition of the Law and the Prophets—and transcended it. John was still beholden to the law of Israel in a way that Jesus never was. For example, John was imprisoned, and ultimately executed, because he attacked Herod Antipas for marrying his brother’s wife. John said such a union was unlawful, forbidden by Leviticus 18:16 and 21L21. As far as we know, Jesus never mentioned the matter, although he was no fan of Herod, calling him a fox at one point (Luke 13:32).

Jesus got similar questions about his authority from Pharisees and Jewish leaders, but here he answers forcefully without getting offended. He did have to prove himself. He did so, in part, with miraculous healings—and blessing the needy and the “lost children of Israel,” helping them, and serving them, not judging them by their adherence to legal norms as John did. As prophets often did.

[i] NJBC, 1310.

[ii] Manlio Simonetti, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vols. 1a and 1b, (Downer’s Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2001) Abbreviated as ACCS.

[iii]Ibid., 1b, 217.