So let’s take a moment and think back before Christmas, if you can, back when we heard about John the Baptist here in the gospel readings. We heard about him back in Advent because he was someone who felt called by God to be on the lookout for God alive and active in this world. He believed that God was sending someone to us, someone who would change everything. John attracted huge crowds and gotten them very excited, telling them that he, John, was not that person, but that when that person came, you’d know him.
And yet, when Jesus came, John did not know him. He says twice in this gospel that even with Jesus standing in front of him he looked right past him as just another follower, until somehow, through the Holy Spirit, God revealed to John, that this person who up to that point looked like everyone else was the one he had been looking for. And even afterwards, John had reason to wonder if he was right, we hear in another gospel that later when John was in prison, he sent people to ask Jesus, Are you the one? Should we still be waiting? There were so many things about about Jesus that were so ordinary, so unspectacular, nothing seemed like what John had spent so long waiting for.
We usually don’t think of John the Baptist having anything in common with us. But today, we can see ourselves in him, in the moments when he was not so certain. Like him, we find ourselves wanting to know that God is there, where he promised to be. And also like him, we often find ourselves not being so sure: Was that God I experienced? Where can I look to see where God is? Why isn’t God what I was expecting?
So here we are, facing this same challenge that God gave John. We are supposed to be on the lookout for God’s activity, and of course we have just spent Christmas hearing the stories of how close God wants to be to us. But now Christmas is over, and we want to see God present in this everyday life, even in the middle of this world with so much conflict and just mean-spiritedness. We want to be inspired, we want to know where to turn, and what to do and where to look. But Jesus’ presence, especially his presence in other people, his active presence redeeming this world, all that is not always where we’re looking for it.
God does give us an answer to this puzzle, though. It’s to change where we are looking. Somehow we need to be open to something we don’t often do and look for something so ordinary that we are usually looking past it, something so low and quiet on our scale of importance that we don’t usually put much value on it. God sent a suffering servant to a world that was looking for a great man, and even now, God is trying to point our eyes away from the supposedly great, towards where God sent Jesus, towards people whose problems are great but who look ordinary, towards people who are demonized and criticized by others, towards moments of unexpected and out of the way quiet where God is speaking to us in a voice so much like an ordinary voice we sometimes don’t even hear.
The ordinariness of God can be an obstacle for us. We are hoping for voices from on high and dramatic messages, and instead God communicates through the faces of friends and strangers and the day to day interactions of our lives. Even prayer isn’t what people often think it is, many of the great masters of prayer say that we need to begin by speaking with God not in exalted language but as one friend to another, a conversation where there is nothing that we can’t say and there is nothing we can’t ask, and where answers aren’t nearly as dramatic as we sometimes want them to be.
The place to start looking and listening might be to be present with those who are really being beaten down by life, with the suffering servants of this world, that is where Jesus was to be found when he was on this earth so just maybe it is where to find him now. It’s why one spiritual writer of our time tried to train herself to review in her mind each evening every face that she’d seen during the day, thinking about the possible divine significance of who she’d seen. She was looking for Jesus in the form of the sometimes invisible person next to us.
So if you are like John the Baptist and want to get a look at the God you’re waiting for, he is not hiding, and is not impossible for us to relate to. Sometimes we are the ones who are keeping that God at a distance. We don’t see him where he is, which is where he is needed the most, including here with us.