Saturday of Pentecost 18

October 10, 2009

John the Baptist in today's Gospel reading (Matthew 11:1-19) publicly asks the question that everyone has been privately asking themselves in the past week's readings. "Are you the one who is to come?" John seemed to be thinking that the coming Christ would bring judgment. Earlier he had proclaimed "Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire...His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor and gather His wheat into the barn, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:10,12).

Jesus responds by pointing to the miraculous works which He is doing, the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up. These are the things prophesied by Isaiah about the coming One. The fact that Jesus is doing these things points to the fact that He is the promised Messiah who was to come.

This interchange between the disciples of John and Jesus brings into sharper relief the all too human experience of the great let down we often experience when someone does not live up to our expectations. We find this to be true of our friends, our spouses, our children, our pastors, and sadly even our God. We expect the Lord to act in certain ways and to do certain things for us for our benefit. But when He doesn't do what we expect we are let down and perhaps we even get a little angry.

The same thing seems to be true of John here. He was expecting a certain type of Christ but what Jesus was showing was something else. This didn't mean that Jesus was not the coming One only that John's expectation was wrong. It is an important lesson for us too. Christ is Lord. He will do what He knows is best for us and the world regardless of whether we agree or not. As Christians we need to simply look to Christ on the cross where we see His immeasurable love for us and we can be reassured that no matter what we are currently experiencing God is for us because Christ died for us and gives us His own righteousness through the gift of Holy Baptism.