Tests of the Deliverer

The passage: John, hearing in prison of the works of Christ, sent two of his disciples to ask Him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

The Gospel for today was chosen, I have no doubt, mainly for Christ’s words about John — that the ministers of the New Covenant are Prophets of the Advent of a King, Messengers to prepare His way, and that their work, however small they may seem, is greater than that of the greatest who came before the Incarnation.

But those who framed our services could not separate that teaching from what called it forth: the message John’s disciples brought. That message shows John not as the preacher of repentance or the reprover of Herod, but as a man uncertain about his own mission — wondering whether he had deceived the people in telling them a greater one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Was John, here too, a lesson for the ministers who would follow him? Does the Collect’s prayer touch this very question — “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”

I. I have assumed the question expresses a real doubt in John’s own mind. Many suppose he asked it only to satisfy his disciples. We would not say that if we met the story in any other book, and I see no reason to say it just because this book is the most honest one about its heroes’ weaknesses. Christ’s words, “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me,” were part of His answer sent to John — were they not meant specially for him, addressed by One who knew what was in every man? It would be wrong to overlook the disciples, or to forget that John himself sent them with the question. They may well have raised it first, adding another: how could the noblest witness for God be left in prison if the Deliverer were truly at hand? John may never have spoken such thoughts aloud, may even have resisted them — yet resisted, they may have stung and tormented him more than if they had been spoken, for he would know they had not come from outside him but had woken in his own heart out of a brooding, threatening sleep. This, I think, is how such a doubt is generated and ripens in us, and so we naturally attribute it to one who is expressly shown to us as having passions like our own.

II. If this is reasonable, there is a lesson here for the New Testament minister. Is it that he should shut his ears to his disciples’ anxieties and questionings, and scowl at them for feeling what causes him so much pain and self-reproach? No result could be worse than that — worse for those forced to stifle their worst perplexities or feign a satisfaction they do not feel, and worse for the teacher himself, who must either pretend to be better than he is or brood over a scepticism he lacks courage to bring into God’s light. The teacher who deals this way with those who look to him is treacherous — to them, and more to his own heart. If he lets them think God is pleased by the suppression of doubts, even doubts that seem most injurious to His providence, he is turning their questioning into unbelief and training them for atheists. If he is afraid to admit he shares their difficulties, pretending to be of a higher nature than they are, he is on his way to becoming a hard, unfeeling Pharisee, secure in himself, incapable of sympathy, and treating God as an enemy. He would not be following John the Baptist, who was brave and sincere; to take this course is to be out of fellowship with everything brave and sincere that has ever lived on God’s earth.

III. There is one fear a teacher may rightly have about such questionings. When they take the form — as they so often do — of a complaint that he has been personally wronged, has received too little reward or suffered too much, they no longer speak to his sympathy or his love of truth, but to his self-conceit; they feed something in him he should wish to kill, not nourish. John’s disciples might be excused for thinking his imprisonment a greater proof against the Deliverer’s coming than the subjection of their nation to Rome or to its own sins — but John himself could not safely hold such a thought. If he felt himself drifting toward it — toward making his own case the test of God’s faithfulness — he would have felt a kind of giddiness that only self-love can produce, confusing a man about his own place in the world and how much the world needs him. Yet how easily the best may be so confused; how necessary that the best should know they face the same danger as the worst.

IV. Besides these personal doubts, there were others that might trouble earnest, patriotic Jews about whether Jesus could really fulfill the promises to their forefathers. What deliverance had He wrought for Israel? What signs were there that His kingdom, which He preached as John had preached, was actually being established? He called men to repent as John had, yet He mixed with sinners far more than John did, and the most religious avoided Him while He denounced them. Such facts must have troubled John’s disciples, and likely added to John’s own trouble. He took the one simple, manly course: he did not argue one side against the other, but sent his disciples to Jesus Himself, to ask Him to explain His claims and to see whether He was truly the one they needed.

I can think of no act of John’s life more exemplary for later ministers than this. Disciples, or others, come to them full of doubt whether the Gospel has fulfilled its promises. If they have the courage to speak their minds — if they have not concluded that a Christian minister is exactly the person they must not speak to, who would be shocked at their honesty or too committed to his system to be roused from it — they would likely ask whether Christianity, tried for eighteen centuries, has not been found wanting; whether the state of the world, or worse, the sins and divisions of the Church in its most favored parts, is not conclusive against its truth or its power. When such doubts come from someone who would gladly believe if he could, but cannot pretend belief he does not feel, and regards falsehood as damnable, is it of any use to offer clever apologies — to show that Deism or Atheism has just as many contradictions as Christianity, or to argue, all too persuasively, that some cherished conviction must logically be given up? Does taking that course not rob our brother of the very thing he has, and put the Gospel of Christ in the lowest possible position — one of mere defense, as though we knew it could make no positive claim, and were content only to show it no worse than the systems we call godless?

If, as St. Paul taught us last Sunday, the Bible is a book of Hope, recommended to any man, Jew or heathen, only as such — then no method of pleading for it could be less apostolic, more suicidal, than this. Men want to know whether there really is a Saviour of the world who actually saves — and we answer by offering them a document to be accepted because we have clever arguments proving that rejecting it is dangerous, and that, being a revelation from God, it leaves us no darker than if no revelation had been given at all.

And is not the real reason for such arguing, if we are honest, that we do not believe God has revealed Himself or can reveal Himself to men? If we believed that the Jesus to whom John sent his disciples truly is the Christ, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, should we not also believe He has the power and the will to make Himself known to the hearts and consciences of His creatures? On what other faith did John act? “If this man called the Carpenter’s Son is indeed that King, that Word, that Son of God I have testified to, He can make it plain to my disciples and to me — He will give evidence no amount of arguing ever could.” Is it not the same now? Must not the minister of Christ confess, for himself, for his disciples, for those he has tried to argue into belief — “Son of God, it is not by this means that I can bring my own heart or any man’s to receive Your yoke. My logic is as powerless to bind the human will as to still the wind and the waves. We need One who can do both. Out of the confusion of my own spirit I cry to You: show us whether You are He that should come, or whether we must look for another”?

V. Then comes the answer, from the only voice that can give it: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” This was the fulfillment of John’s own words — “I baptize with water, He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost.” Here were signs not of a Teacher but of a Ruler; acts of deliverance. The Kingdom of Heaven was not merely near — it was coming with power. People were learning in their own bodies and spirits what kind of Kingdom it was. They were not merely told how they might be made well; the wretched were made well. They were not commanded to act and live; a Gospel of life was proclaimed to them, and the One proclaiming it was Himself giving the life. John’s disciples were to see, hear, and report, so that John, and each of them, could decide whether this was the Person they needed, or whether they must wait for another kind of king, ruling elsewhere, for other ends.

We are not told the result. It is quite possible these two disciples did not confess Jesus as the Christ. Seeing these acts compelled them to acknowledge His claims no more than it compelled the Pharisees, who said He cast out devils by the prince of the devils. And this is the most striking part of the evidence. The King to whom nature bowed was claiming a higher sovereignty still — lordship over the human will, which no force can subdue and which defies force even to its own destruction. This meek and gentle King does not beat down that rebel will but seeks to win it by humility, endurance, and sacrifice. Here is the strangest paradox: the Divine Will shows itself in Jesus as a will of surrender and abasement, while the creature’s will aspires to set itself above the stars. Which will prevail? Which will be defeated at last?

That is exactly the problem for those who now stand where John’s disciples once stood, and it is what the ministers of Christ who succeed John must declare. They are not to speak of one who sets the world right by decree and statute while leaving people inwardly unchanged — obstinate and rebellious, submitting only through force and fear. They must speak of one who could not prevail by such means, because His kingdom is within; because He baptizes with the Spirit; because His rule is not complete until His subjects are made willing. They must speak of one who is mightiest in the depth of His weakness, who in death proved love stronger than death, whose sacrifice triumphed openly over malice and selfishness. So they must meet the objection that evil still grips a world — and even a Church — that has received the Gospel, not by disputing the facts, not by claiming some place or people is exempt, not by the poor excuse that unbelievers are no better — but by appealing to the conscience of every man, whoever he is, asking whether there is not in him a battle between light and darkness, good and evil; and telling him that the Christ the Apostles proclaimed is precisely that Source of Light he fights against whenever he yields to baseness, and the source of everything manly and true within him; and asking him further whether the Jesus of the Gospels — who healed the sick and comforted the poor — is not exactly what that unseen Lord would be, must be, if He took flesh and dwelt among men. Are not these acts of fellowship with human misery the very proof of both His Manhood and His Godhead?

VI. Arguments from Christ’s miracles, treated as strange exceptions, have, I believe, little force with people today. A minister might blame the hardness of his hearers’ hearts, but does he find such proofs soften his own? It is when these acts are recognized, not as proofs of a doctrine, but as signs of a living Person still healing the sick, raising the dead, preaching good news to the poor now as in the days of His flesh, that they give him patience and hope. Then he feels himself only a minister, a messenger, whose whole task is not to intercept his Master’s message to men, not to spoil the good news in delivering it. Then he understands why a written record is needed to sharpen and expand what he says, and equally why a book alone will not do without a living voice to speak it — for readers so easily forget they are not merely reading letters but listening to the living Teacher. Then he can bear, as those who use it only as grounds for unbelief cannot, the heavy fact — heavier to him, in truth, a greater temptation to his own deeper unbelief — that the earth is still full of cruelty, some of it done in Christ’s name. For he will remember that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater in this than John the Baptist: he is the herald of the Advent that will complete all that Christ’s first coming promised for the saving and judging of the world. He will find in every page of the history of persons and nations tokens of Christ’s rule, preparations for its complete revealing. He will receive every baptism — claiming Christ’s promise for infants, which He will surely keep — every communion — giving thanks for the sacrifice made for the sins of the whole world — every burial — committing a brother’s body to the earth in sure hope of the resurrection — as testimonies to that unchangeable truth which his own slow mind and wavering faith are so unwilling to embrace and so ready to deny. By these means he will learn, little by little, to see the darkest clouds around us as signs of the Son of Man — hiding His light for a time, only at last to break forth and reveal Himself, and no other, to the eyes of His waiting servants.