We Are Beloved

Last week we heard about John the Baptizer preaching repentance in the desert and baptizing people in the River Jordan. Today we fast forward: John is in prison. He is in prison because he preached against the Jewish ruler, Herod. Herod had left his own wife and got involved with his half-brother’s wife. In Mark’s gospel  (6:18), John is recorded thundering to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife."  Like any autocratic leader, Herod had no scruples about throwing John into prison for that!

In today’s gospel reading, John sends a couple of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “are you the one who is to come or are we still waiting for someone else?”

Why was John asking?

Some people think that John was depressed in prison and close to losing his faith. Yet another possibility is that he was puzzled, even confused, by Jesus.

Remember how intense John was in his preaching? No gentle persuasion but straight up “You brood of vipers!” and “The axe is lying at the root of the trees.” Talking about Jesus he said, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” And now he sees Jesus, preaching the Beatitudes – blessed are the poor in spirit and so on - and healing the sick.

Perhaps John was expecting a very different Messiah. Perhaps he was expecting a Messiah who would free the land from Roman rule, a Messiah who would have power over others. But during his time in the desert, Jesus had already said no to the temptation to take short cuts, to use his power in the wrong way.

So in the reply Jesus sends, he claims his Messiahship by referring back to the Old Testament prophecies of redemption and renewal, “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’ ministry of healing is old hat to us, but at the time it was pretty amazing not just because people got well, but because in 1st century Palestine people who got chronically sick were thought to be being judged by God. In healing them, Jesus was not just providing medical services, he was making it clear that they were not garbage who should be thrown away but were beloved of God. He was extending God’s love to include everyone – especially those thought to have been punished or abandoned by God.

So on the one hand we have John preaching God’s judgment and on the other, Jesus showing God’s love and grace.

You might expect Jesus to tell his followers that John was wrong or at least that John was not understanding the reign of God but he doesn’t do that at all. He says, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

Now there’s a paradox.

“among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

We can think of John as being at a pivotal point in our salvation narrative – he is the last of the prophets and the greatest of these, but in the new era, the reign of heaven, he is no more important than anyone else.

Every year we spend two Sundays talking about John the Baptizer yet in the new era, the kingdom of heaven proclaimed and demonstrated by Jesus the Christ, he is no more important than you or me.

Isn’t that astonishing? We are equally beloved of God and equally important in the reign of Christ.
The coming of Christ in Jesus opens up an entirely new way of understanding humanity’s relationship with God. We are not condemned, we are not punished, we are beloved. We are called into relationship with God, more than that, we are called into unity with God. We are called to be Christ-like beings.

Jesus brings us the astonishing gift of grace – we are reconciled with God not by anything we do or don’t do but by God’s gift alone.

This was Martin Luther’s great insight. He was an Augustinian friar, and apparently a very timid one who was afraid of God’s judgement. He was afraid of doing it wrong and being punished for his sins. But when he was studying the book of Romans, he had this transformative insight. We are not saved by what we do or by how much we contribute to the Vatican or any other religious authority. We are saved by the grace of God alone. It is God’s action that draws us into reconciliation, not ours.

 We are saved, he declared, by grace through faith.

In other words, God’s gift to us in Jesus is reconciliation but we get to accept the gift and trust in it.
You may remember that when Jesus visited his hometown of Nazareth, he found he could hardly do any miracles there (Mark 6:5). Why was that? Because the people thought ‘that’s just Joseph’s son’ and didn’t trust him as the Messiah. They didn’t trust so they were not healed.

The gift that we celebrate every year at Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, is that God loves us so much that she chose to become human, to take on all the limitations of being human, and in so doing showed that all flesh – all matter – is beloved. God’s longing is for the redemption of the world when all her beloved beings will be brought into right relationship and we will no longer be separated from the triune God, in any way.

Jesus did not come to judge us.

Most of us can remember some version of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  But do you remember the next verse? Verse 17? “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.

A lot of people still don’t get this. They think that we are flawed, and that we are condemned and we have to grovel to God. Or they think that other people are condemned, that they are the chaff which John the Baptizer said would get thrown into the fire.

But, people of Advent, people of the Coming, this is what gives us joy, this is what gives us hope, this is what gives us peace. This is what set Isaiah’s feet dancing when, in the first reading today, he proclaimed, “the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert…” This is what made Mary sing “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.  We are beloved, the earth is beloved, the cosmos is beloved. We need do nothing to earn God’s love.
We need do nothing except say thank you, rejoice and live like it’s true.

Because it is.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall