Matt 11. 2 – 11
If you want to make a baptism memorable, then having it with a cousin is quite a way to do it. And having it on the day when the church remembers John the Baptist, who baptised his cousin Jesus…well that’s more than memorable. We want Rudi and Ella to be reminded of this for powerful. When you create memories for Rudi and Ella, make sure that they get the whole picture. The cousins John the Baptist and Jesus told it like it was. You had to listen to them. And they could make you less than comfortable even as they showed the way to hope.
For the last four years of the last century I was Vicar of Teversal. If the name of the village sounds familiar to you, it’s close to where D.H. Lawrence was raised, and Teversal is the name he gives to the village in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I was Lady Chatterley’s Vicar. We all know what we’re looking at when faced with a novel like Lady Chatterley. Not so the reviewer in Field and Stream, who reviewed it thus in 1959.
“This fictional account of the day-by-day life of the English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s ‘Practical Gamekeeping’”
[The truth is that it was actually a humorous piece, by a writer called Ed Zern, but you get the point]. How we approach something depends on what we are looking for: the pussycat who went to London was more interested in the mouse under the chair than the Queen she was supposed to be visiting. We can miss things if we choose not to look. So what are we looking for, for ourselves, for Rudi and Ella as they start their journey of faith?
John is looking for “the one who is to come”, the Messiah. Throughout the Gospels he’s determined to ask the right question, to look for the right thing in the right way. Again and again he gets an answer: at Jesus’s baptism, when in John 1 he sees Jesus and encourages his disciples to follow Jesus, when he points to Jesus and says ‘Behold the Lamb of God’. But even as Jesus’s ministry unfolds John is determined to keep asking the question, to ensure that his faith is in the right person, that Jesus is the Messiah.
So it is that, at the very end of his life, when he has already pointed to Jesus, and been locked up for speaking out, he sends his friends to check it one more time, and asks again: “Are you the one who I’m looking for?” Jesus’s answer does two things. It reminds people what John was all about, and affirms that mission and ministry. And then Jesus shows how he goes beyond what John did, and how he fulfils John’s work of ‘preparing the way of the Lord.
John had looked at the world as it was, and got angry. He was angry at injustice, at oppression, at the soldiers occupying his land, at the collaboration of his people in corruption and oppression. Soldiers came to him and he told them not to take bribes or extort people. Tax collectors came to him and he told them not to fleece people. The Lord knows what he would have said to politicians revealed as liars, to financiers shown to be fraudulent, to the manipulators of social and other media.
The way John spoke about the world would not have been out of place in the Election campaign. John was so angry about the world as he saw it that the only thing he could do was try to drown it. He’s John ‘the Baptist’, remember. Sometimes the Bible makes it easy for you. Baptism is John’s thing. It’s what he does. The thing is, no one had ever done it before. Baptise is a new word for a new action. Up to then baptise meant to drown, to drench. You baptised cloth when you dyed it. Baptism taps into an ancient symbolic life: water washes the body, water transforms someone from being religiously unclean to being able to worship (every archaeological site has its ritual bath and the ritual bath remains part of Judaism today), water drowns and puts people to death. But no one had taken on the injustices and wrongdoing and general sinfulness of the world in this way before and said it had to be drowned. People came to him to admit their part in it all, to drown it, and to turn to something new.
It all works. But John is clear that it’s only the beginning, and he continues to ask his questions: of the world, and of his hopes. Perhaps, in prison, in despair, he is doubting a little. So he asks the question again. Is it you? Jesus’s reply is instructive. He takes John’s concerns, and adds to them. Injustices are put right. The poor have good news ‘delivered’ to them. Unfairnesses are resolved. That’s John’s thing. And Jesus goes beyond. There are healings, and the giving of sight. Eyes and ears are opened. The unclean are made clean. Even death is put under authority. John was right, says Jesus. And he was right to point to me.
I wonder how you feel about being greater than John the Baptist. Because that is what we who are ‘in Christ’ are called. We know not only the call to right wrongs, but know the one who rights them, the one who baptises us on the inside, who enables us to die to wrong and be raised for right. It is in his strength and power that we listen to the advent call to demonstrate the values of the Kingdom of heaven right here and right now. That will mean pointing to Jesus, and offering hope and new life. And it will mean being as angry as John about injustice, and as determined as John to point to the Messiah.
Today we pray that Rudi and Ella will be included in the life of God in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.. We pray that we, with them will ask the right questions and look in eth right places. And, in finding Christ as the answer, we will show that we have understood by righting injustices in this place, and across the world, and by pointing to Christ, whom we worship, now and unto ages of ages. Amen.