I’m going to ask you to take a moment and think back before Christmas, if you can, and think about the last time we heard about John the Baptist here in the gospel readings. That was back in Advent, and there was a lot about John the Baptist. We hear about him then 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. And John had 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 right in front of him he looked right past him as just another follower, one of the many who surrounded him, 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 that later when John was in prison, he sent people to ask Jesus, Are you the one? Should we still be waiting? Nothing about Jesus, 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. He was passionate about his religious vision, and urgent, and obviously inspired, and frankly, that can make him pretty off-putting. But today, we can see ourselves in him, in his not being so certain, looking for someone, wanting to see God, and not seeing — or at least, not seeing what he expected.
Apparently even this great saint, inspired by God, didn’t immediately realize something about God that is hard to learn, and it’s that God doesn’t do anything the way we would do it. Humans might have been made in God’s image, but God was certainly not made in ours, because if God were like us, this would not be how Jesus would have come into John’s life. Instead, here’s how it would go, the most significant presence of God in history would have looked like one and acted like one from the first moment. When Jesus walked up, the crowds around John would have fallen silent, there would have been a glow where Jesus stood, and then there would have been a movement that got rid of the Romans forever, and that would just be for starters, it would turn the world upside down forever. Instead, that is not how God did this. It was only later that John stopped looking for something else long enough for the Holy Spirit to show him that this face in the crowd was the one, the one who was greater than them all was hidden in plain sight.
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 the world is back surrounding us with scenes where we want to see God present, even in the middle of this world with so much conflict and just mean-spiritedness, we want to be inspired, we want good to be visible and triumph, we want to know where to turn, and what to do and who to follow. 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.
The only solution is to allow the Holy Spirit to do what it did for John the Baptist, to turn our eyes in the direction of something so ordinary that we are looking past it, something so low on our scale of importance that we are usually looking way above 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 whose love is unspectacular, towards people who need help and redemption just as much as we do. That is where Jesus wants us to look for him, and it’s the only place we will be sure to see him.
This is a very cynical world, and if we are cynical, the suffering and the neglected and the ordinary can look to us like they deserve their suffering, at least, they don’t remind us much that suffering, and servanthood, are divine. It makes it hard to look into someone’s face closely to look for the signs of God’s presence when we are so distracted and frustrated we just want to withdraw from everything. But being present with those who are bowed down by life and lifting some of their burdens, that is where God is present, and wants us to be present with him. What God does by being present in this quiet and persistent and powerful way actually makes life simple. 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, every interaction she’d had, thinking about the possible divine significance of who she’d seen, Jesus in the form of the sometimes invisible person next to us. So if you want to get a look at the God you’re waiting for, he is not hiding, but he is not where we’re all looking.