I don’t know if you follow football, but last week there was a brief story that might help us think about today’s Gospel. A player for what everyone agrees is a bad NFL team dropped several important passes that apparently he clearly should have caught, and he single-handedly turned a losing effort into a disastrous one. After the game, on his Twitter feed, he sent a message to God, to whom he apparently prays very devotedly, and who, apparently, is also on Twitter, which of course makes sense if you think about it. And this player wasn’t happy. Unfortunately I have to leave out all the exclamation points and question marks, but here’s what he said in his message, all in capital letters, of course: I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! I’LL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!!
It might not immediately seem obvious, but John the Baptist in today’s gospel was in a similar situation, although of course he hadn’t failed his team. In fact, he had done his job perfectly. Just last week he came out of the desert in a spectacular way, brimming with confidence and predictions of the future, ready to say the Messiah is here, to proclaim a new age of liberation for everyone listening to him. It’s exactly what he was meant to do, to introduce a new era of God with us. But this week, suddenly he is in prison, a prison that we know he will not leave alive, and certainty has deserted him. He’s not so sure right now that Jesus is the Messiah — and he sends a message to some of his own followers to find Jesus, to see and hear what they can, and report to him: What’s happening? Is Jesus the one, or was I wrong? The unspoken question being, if Jesus is the one, why am I in prison?
We can identify with John the Baptist. Because in Advent, every week we are told that God is coming, that we should watch for the signs, that liberation is at hand. And yet there are plenty of signs that what we are looking for isn’t there, that the world is in as sad a shape as ever. For every sign that the world is headed in the right direction, we see more still more evidence of intolerance and violence, people of faith are divided, even in our own church. And closer to home in our own lives, many of us have hopes for ourselves and for people we love that have been disappointed, a prayer for health that hasn’t been answered, maybe just unspoken discouragement that there isn’t all that much liberation ahead for us. The Kingdom of God sounds great, but you’d think after all this time we’d see clearer evidence that it’s actually here.
If there is an answer to this question, and John the Baptist’s question, it is not an easy one. Like him, we don’t always see what we think we ought to be seeing. It turns out that the Kingdom of God is still an unfinished place. As St. James said in that second reading, our life here is still an exercise in hardship and patience — why it’s that way we don’t know, but it is. There is plenty we have to endure together while this Kingdom is coming. But even in the midst of that hardship, John the Baptist did get another answer to his question, and so do we.
It’s the answer that Jesus sends back to John the Baptist: The evidence of that Kingdom is there for us is what Jesus does in the lives of other people, inspiring them, healing them, taking them in a new direction. And the evidence is what Jesus does in our lives, helping us to see what is around us, the presence of God in unexpected places. Every time we see a life that is healed, every time we recognize how much we want that healing in our own lives, everytime we realize how much freedom we have to begin again, we are seeing the Kingdom of God being built. John the Baptist wasn’t looking for that, he may have wanted something different, someone who would take the world by storm, and solve everything, and instead he got Jesus, who healed people, called them to begin their lives over again. God has entered this world once and for all, given us a way to see him and follow him that has changed everyone forever. It isn’t always apparent, that’s why in Advent we are told over and over again to look harder, to look around us and inside ourselves, to see what God is doing, and to see what God is building in our own lives.
Two weeks away from Christmas: we can ask ourselves the question John asked: Should I be waiting for Jesus, or for someone else? We can wait in prison, like John, frustrated that so little seems to be being done for us. Or we can realize that if we train our eyes, the signs of what we want, and what we need to see, are already here.