There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last week he comes out of the desert in a spectacular way, brimming with confidence and certainty and dramatic things to predict, ready to say the Messiah is here, to proclaim a new age of liberation for everyone listening to him. This week, he is in prison, a prison that we know he will never leave alive, and his certainty has deserted him. He’s not so sure, apparently, that Jesus is the Messiah — and he sends some of his own followers to Jesus to see and hear what they can and report to him: Is it really happening the way I thought? Is Jesus the one, or was I wrong?
We can sympathize with him. Because more than anyone, he was justified in expecting more than he got from a Messiah — more action, more visible signs of God’s sudden appearance, more drama. Up to this point, John the Baptist had a life filled with miracles, he was born to a mother and father so old they had given up hope, his father was given a vision by an angel of the Lord of how set apart his son would be, and suddenly, his life seems over much too quickly. He wants to know: Is God really with us the way I predicted?
Advent is the season when everyone, John the Baptist included, and us included, everyone gets two answers to that question he asked, two answers that can be frustrating to hear and yet this is the season when we have to think clearly about both of them. The first answer to John’s question — is God really with us now? — is a complete yes, and the second answer is an equally resounding: not yet. Yes, the Messiah is here, God has entered this world once and for all, given us a way to see him and follow him that has changed everyone forever. Nothing better than Jesus could possibly come. But with the yes, a not yet, the liberation we long for has not come for us yet, God’s kingdom is not here yet, evil and weakness are all around us. Our enemies might be vanquished and defeated — but they’re still here.
Who can believe those two things at the same time? The answer is: we can. It’s easy for us to be in John’s position, wrestling with the frustration that comes from seeing how far we are from all those things we heard about in the first reading from Isaiah: the blind seeing, the lame walking, the weak taken care of. John may have felt that God was underdelivering on this promise, and we’d be blind if we didn’t feel like agreeing with him. All it takes is one picture in the newspaper of Fallujah or the Sudan to show us how far God seems from some places. Advent is a time, actually, when God wants us to see this, to see and feel how far the world is from readiness for Jesus, to see all the gaps between what the world is and what it should be, between what the church is and what it ought be, between what we are and what we want to be, between how much time it feels like we ought to get and how little time we have. All that distance between what we want and where we are could stop us in our tracks, convince us that nothing more is coming, that it’s just the way things are.
But then, there is that yes answer, the idea that we have not seen everything there is to see, that there is more coming. We’re used to hearing that Advent is all about waiting, and we often make the mistake of assuming that it’s waiting-room waiting, or plane-sitting-on-the-runway-for-two-hours waiting, waiting for something to happen to us, and we’re just passive actors. What Jesus tells us during Advent, though, is that the waiting he means isn’t about doing nothing. Christian waiting means being constantly observant and Christian waiting means while we wait, we work. The letter to James today says that farmers have to wait, those whole season reminds us that expectant mothers have to wait, but while they are waiting, they are working, doing what they can to make the soil ready, their houses ready, the world ready. We can wait in prison, like John, frustrated that so little seems to be being done for us, or we can rejoice in the work we have been given to do. We work on our little victories in the life of one person, one parish, or one family, or we take on even larger challenges in this world because while the Kingdom of God is not here yet, God is with us.
Two weeks away from Christmas: we can ask ourselves the question John asked: Should I be waiting for Jesus, or for someone else? The wait for someone else besides Jesus to come and liberate you and liberate everyone else might be a long one, unless that someone else turns out to be you. In that case, your wait for someone to come along and be the presence of God for this world that needs it so much, that wait might be over.