Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Luke 7: 18b-23

It's the rare extremely reassuring gospel today. Most of them are challenging, provoking. Even the ones that talk about God as our Shepherd, who knows us all and loves us all reminds us that we must trust, and that all other creatures are His as well. There's a challenge to that.

But here we see even John the Baptist - recognize Jesus instantly in the womb and the moment He came up to him to be baptized John the Baptist - have a moment of doubt. Of course, at this point he had been put in prison, which is presumably why it was his followers who came to ask for clarification. Even for John the Baptist - John the Baptist! - it was hard to leave the clarity of the hardships in the desert for the imposed hardships of prison. Not the chosen renunciations of sacrifice and an austere life but the punishments of the world for violating their ways.

Even John the Baptist had a moment of doubt - is it You after all? Is the boy I grew up alongside really the One? And if so, why has He not freed me? Why am I still in chains? If the Savior has come, why still do we suffer?

John knew about Jesus. He knew this was a different kind of Savior than the one his people had been expecting - someone to overthrow Rome - but still, he had a moment to wonder. Did he cede his position warning and baptizing in preparation too soon?

The certainty of the desert, like the certainty of the womb, had left him. In both states, there was a kind of purity of his state - and he was ripped from it to be imprisoned and soon to be killed because Herod's wife's daughter danced sexily and took orders from her mother. Purity can makes things so easy to see, so easy to understand. It is important - and that's why it's sacrifice is too beautiful to waste - because it brings a clarity to your relationship with God.

But you can't rely on it alone. You have to know, in the dark, dank prison in which you have been thrown, as you are executed because of court-gossip nonsense, the same thing you knew in the desert. You have to have faith and trust even there. We all probably have this moment of doubt - because live too long in the desert and the arresting officers are sure to come eventually. The world does not take kindly to being renounced.

The only answer Jesus gave was the evidence. And as a lawyer's kid I kind of love that. It would have been so easy to say, as Jesus did to so many others, Yes. Perhaps an added, "Chill. Keep the faith, dude." But when we cannot know, in the purity of our hearts in uncluttered and uncorrupted environments for listening to God, we still have the evidence of our eyes if we have the wit to see it. We can still see the world around us. We can still judge the tree by its fruit (a recent parable not far behind this gospel). We can still look at the world and see God's hand in it, even when we are too distressed to feel His presence with certainty.

It feels less good and certain and reliable - but it is just as real. And we are called to it just the same.