Poor old John the Baptist had a rough ride. Partly it was self-imposed and partly definitely not so. To begin with it was the wilderness, with little about him apart from camel’s skin and locusts and wild honey. He got the name, ‘the Baptist’ or ‘the Baptiser’ from baptising not only a crowd of people who wanted a fresh start in life, but Jesus himself.
Baptising Jesus was against John’s initial inclination, as this 18th century painting by Aert de Gelder shows. He was reluctant; he recognised Jesus as someone greater than himself. Perhaps it should be the other way round, he probably wondered: shouldn’t Jesus be baptising me? He told the crowd, ‘I baptise you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.’ And later he referred to Jesus as ‘the one who is to come’, that is, the Messiah. So John was full of optimism and confidence, confidence in Jesus, confidence that Jesus was quite ‘Someone’.
But John, as I said, had a rough ride. He finished his days in gaol. He had criticised King Herod Antipas for falling for his own brother’s wife, Herodias, while on holiday with them, and marrying her. Herod couldn’t stand that, and had John locked up in gaol. Protest can get you into that situation, as we know only too well today, particularly at the hands of authoritarian regimes.
In fact, as we know, John was beheaded soon after, most unjustly and at the behest of the vindictive Herodias, Herod’s new wife. Have a look at chapter 14 of St Matthew’s Gospel if you want the full story. And you can squint at the piece of mediaeval stained glass here in the Cathedral, propped against the back window in the Morley Library in the Kings and Scribes exhibition. It shows Herodias hacking with a knife at John the Baptist’s head on a plate – a bit of gory artistic licence by someone who clearly didn’t think much of Herodias.
But, when today’s gospel story opens, John is still alive, but in prison: incarcerated, depressed, doubting his initial view of Jesus. His initial confidence seems to have evaporated. There’s been no revolution, no shattering change, and no sign he can detect that Jesus really is the Messiah after all. He is riddled with doubt. He remembers the significance he previously attached to Jesus, but now he’s not so sure. So he sends him a message: ‘are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’
And Jesus’s reply suggests he looks at the evidence: ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them’. Jesus is quoting Old Testament prophecies by Isaiah of a wonderful time ahead. He is announcing that these are signs that the kingdom of God has now arrived, and is there to be seen.
To this, the 21st British sceptic might reply: ‘Yes, but isn’t that exactly what the NHS is doing today, but on an even bigger scale: curing blindness when it can be cured, helping the lame to walk, dealing with terrible disease, and so on’? And the answer to that is this: ‘Yes, yes, precisely so. Because the kingdom of God is all around us in every century. Jesus personified the kingdom of God. And that is because the kingdom of God is where goodness prevails, where love abounds; in other words, where God reigns.
But John is depressed. And who wouldn’t be, stuck in prison, unsure whether he’ll ever get out? John is doubting. And who wouldn’t be, expecting dramatic events that don’t seem to be happening? Inevitably we probably, occasionally at least, feel a kinship with John, unsure of the future, worried about world events, worried about personal circumstances.
You perhaps know about the teacher who asked the class to put up their hands if they thought the world was a place of fairness. Two children up their hands. ‘Detention for both of you’, said the teacher. ‘There you’ll learn if the world is really fair’. (I think the original story had the two children caned, by the way, but that’s thankfully a thing of the past.)
So the world and its inhabitants aren’t always fair. But, ‘courage, mes braves’, Jesus might have said if he’d been French. His response to John is for us too. The kingdom of God is all around you. It doesn’t always look that way, with natural and human-generated disasters all around us. But actually, there’s a lot of goodness in the world.
Look at the NHS and its staff at their best. Look at people who care for deteriorating spouses for years on end. Look at the parents who devote themselves to caring for children with multiple disabilities. Look at the heroism of the life-boat crews.
Look at the valiant protesters for justice and mercy. Look at the UN negotiators and all peace-makers and who try to heal conflicts. Look at environmentalists, bent on healing the world. And so I could go on.
‘Look up’, says Jesus. ‘See the healing, see the goodness, see the love. In a Christian, theological sense as well as a romantic sense, it’s love that makes the world go round.
And of course it’s we Christians who can be in the forefront of providing that love, in the way we treat people, the gifts we make for the poor and starving, and so on.
And what do you know? A surprise! I put ‘Love makes the world go round’ into Google to find out the origin of that song. In fact there have been various songs of that name ever since 1896. But, amidst the Google links to the various versions of ‘Love makes the world go round’ there was a surprise. There, for no obvious reason, Google threw up a link to ‘Away in a manger’. How extraordinary. How providential. How seasonal. The love of the Christ child. That’s the wonder to behold, and the answer to John the Baptist, to us and to the world. Love personified, the kingdom of God.
