Casting light in our darkness

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 2-11) shows us two contrasting scenes, both of which cast a light on our faith in the coming of Christ, our Saviour. In the first scene, the disciples of John the Baptist approach Jesus and ask Him, apparently at John’s behest, whether He was the One who was to come. John did not send them for his own satisfaction; he knew full well who was to come, had been familiar with His coming since his earliest infancy, and likewise must have known the dignity of his aunt whose visits were always a blessing beyond all hope in the house of John’s parents Elizabeth and Zachariah. Rather, John sent his disciples to Jesus to learn what they needed to know in order, finally, to abandon the path of the Baptist, and follow Jesus instead. In the second scene, which immediately follows, Jesus asks the crowds, who had gone to see John previously, what it was that they saw in him – a reed shaken by the wind, or a man clothed in soft garments? The possibilities are ironic and deliberately provocative. Answering His own question, Jesus concludes by revealing John’s real identity as the prophet of the Messiah.  Jesus affirms, again with an enigmatic paradox, that John was great but not as great as the least in the kingdom of heaven.

In this complex scene, what is it that the Lord seeks to teach us? We might say it is something about the complexity of vision and the need for faith before the approaching mysteries of His coming into the world. For in the first instance, John’s disciples are invited to look at the plain evidence: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, leapers are cleansed and the deaf hear. There were an increasing number of recipients of such miracles in the days of Jesus: those who had been once afflicted and now walked free of their burdens. This was tangible evidence of who Jesus was, not least because it was a fulfilment of prophecy, for these were the very signs the prophesied Messiah was meant to produce. Jesus came to build a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, but its fruits spilt over into the material world, and the healing from sin brought with it healing from the other disorders of this life. His invitation to John’s disciples, therefore, was for them to look and see; not to ignore the obvious; not to turn their eyes from the evidence on the basis that perhaps there was another explanation for what they saw. The challenge to them was to be simple, for it is perhaps one of the sins of the devout, as John’s disciples were, to be too complex, too involved in theological wrangling and minutiae. Their tendencies were those of the learned, and they needed this lesson of simple observation to set them free.

The lesson of the Lord to the crowds, however, is quite different. For the sin of the crowd, of the generally undevout, is not to be too complicated but to be too shallow; to be so immersed in this world that they cannot see beyond the surface level; to be so unreflective that they ricochet off the atmosphere of the mysteries before them. To the casual observer, driven on by no more than sensation-seeking curiosity, perhaps John appeared as a reed shaken by the wind, a wild and insubstantial thing; a creature of the desert, a holy mad man. John’s attraction for the shallow observer could have been the attraction that all curiosities hold for the vulgar crowd. So, Jesus shakes them with His question, and then He follows home with some of His often-searing irony:

What did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft garments? Behold those who wear soft garments are in kings’ houses.  

But what is going on here if not that Jesus is now wrong-footing them, passing from one extreme to the other? Any half decent teacher should immediately spot the tactic: show the shallow ones some obviously wrong answers, and they have a chance of alighting on the right one. And then the right one comes as the fulfilment of the prophecy:

Behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.

In citing these words of Malachi, Jesus is saying that John is the prophet, and, if not yet that He Himself is the Christ, at least that the Christ is among them. The people would have to join up the dots for themselves, especially those who had heard Jesus’ reply to John’s disciples.

Today’s gospel then offers us these contrasting lessons. John’s disciples must approach the mystery of His coming through simplicity. They have vision but it needs to become focused. The crowd in contrast must approach this mystery through coming alive to faith. They have their reason and their wits, but they need to be enriched.

There are lessons for ourselves in both regards. Those who are devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient humility; perhaps they are mislead into the shallows by believing their learning will be enough, as if Divine Revelation were a communication package and not an invitation to a divine communion. Those who are not devout rarely approach the mysteries with sufficient faith; they barely approach the waters of the divine mysteries, believing that worldly insight will be enough, as if in this life God were another system to game, like all the others.

And, so why, in Jesus’ concluding remarks, was the least in the kingdom of heaven greater than John? Here, Jesus leaves the crowd, and John’s disciples if they were still in earshot, with a paradox that again is an invitation. There they were, awaiting the coming of the Prince of Peace who was expected to sweep away the enemies of Israel, and here was the Messiah, now revealing Himself in an unexpected mystery of divine humility. Jesus is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven simply because He makes Himself the least, the servant of all, emptying out His dignity to walk among us, to eat with us, and even to lie in the filthy surroundings of a tumbledown dwelling among animals, like the poorest of the poor. For this is how He intends to break through our complexity and our shallowness, our pride and our self-sufficiency, and to cast some light into our darkness to reveal to us the eternal depths of the love of the Father who sent Him to save us and bring us home.