Sally A Brown, Professor Emerita, Princeton Theological Seminary
The gospel reading for this third Sunday in Advent, Year A, Mt 11:2-11, can be jarring for preachers, to say nothing of their prospective listeners. What merit is there in forcing ourselves to grapple with the consternation of John the Baptist, locked and silenced in Herod’s prison, just days away from the celebration of the birth of Christ?? Even the lectionary offers an off-ramp; an alternative Gospel reading is Mary’s Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55; see commentary attached below). Behind the wrenching question John sends to Jesus via his disciples—“Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?” (v 2)—lies, no doubt, many a sleepless night spent in anguished second-guessing: could John’s reading of sacred writ and the signs of the times have been fatally flawed? Was it the holy Spirit or some alien spirit that had persuaded him that his cousin Jesus of Nazareth was God’s anointed one, sent to sift and refine Israel with pitchfork and fire, readied for the Day of the Lord?
To John’s dismay, Jesus’ ministry, to date, has featured neither metaphorical ax nor figurative pruning hook. Divine wrath has not consumed the complacent leadership castigated by John at the Jordan. Finally, gaunt and silenced in Herod’s prison, John seeks confirmation: “Are you the one–?”
Truth be told, this very question, or others like it, hover in the church pews during Advent. A skeptical spouse accompanies his or her partner to church, restlessly watching the children star as sheep or angels in the annual Christmas pageant. Is the whole story a fairytale? If not, how many more ruthless regimes need to rise and fall, how many countless innocents must die, before Christ returns to crush the last tyrant and pour out healing mercy on this hell-bent world?
Jesus does not respond to John with a clear “yes,” nor provide a strategic plan to reassure John (or us) that our faith in him is not misplaced. Nor does Jesus promise John release. Instead, he sends testimony: “Go, tell John what you see and hear: the lame, deaf, and blind are healed. The dead are raised. The poor have good news preached to them.” Turning to the crowds (vv 7-11), Jesus affirms the validity of John’s ministry and praises him as “more than a prophet . . . [such that] none greater [has been] born of women” (vv 9, 11), although he adds a mystifying postscript: “the least in the kingdom of heaven’ shall be greater than he” (v 11). God’s future for the world will transcend the reach of prophetic imagination. Jesus does not shame either John or us for our misgivings; but neither does he deliver us from open-endedness, mystery, and waiting. This is what faith looks like.
About one point, Jesus is clear: the reign of heaven shall not be advanced by violence or vengeance. Jesus condemns impatient efforts to “seize” or enforce the reign of heaven. We can be sure that the community for which Matthew wrote knew what John did not know and could not know: the divine strategy for the world’s transformation will not be to call down fire on worldly tyrants, but to absorb Empire’s violence, bending its tool of terror—a cross—to heaven’s life-giving design. A Roman execution will not defeat God’s Anointed One. It will lead, instead, to the disarming of death itself; and death disarmed is death no longer feared. No wonder the angels sang the night Jesus was born!
Insights into Biblical Greek Grammar and Syntax 