There’s been a dramatic change in John the Baptist from last week to this week. Last weekend we heard that he came 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 seems to have 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. 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. With a history like that, John maybe was justified in expecting more action, more drama, more immediate victory over enemies. Instead, he’s in prison, and the victory doesn’t seem so immediate. 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. 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, there is also a not yet, God’s kingdom is not here yet, we see signs that some people are building it, but still, evil and weakness and shocking injustice are all around us. Our enemies might have no ultimate power over us – but they’re still here.
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. Advent is a time, actually, when God wants us to see this, God wants us to notice 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 could be. All that distance between what we are promised and what we have could convince us that nothing more is coming, that we may as well just go back to normal life and lower our expectations.
But then, there is that yes answer, the idea that we have not seen everything there is to see, that there is more happening even now that we can’t see from our prison cell. 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, waiting for something to happen to us, and we’re just passive actors. What Jesus tells us during Advent, though, is that Christian waiting means being constantly observant, and it also means that while we watch, we work. The letter to James today says that farmers have to wait, the 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 we can see so little that we want to see, or we can rejoice in the work of Jesus that it is clear to us we have been given to do.
As always, only you know what work is there for you, your own agenda of what you could do, or want to do, or need to do. I will wager you already know what it is that needs to be done if you had to focus your attention and decide, if you knew the hour was come when you in particular are needed. All of us tend to think forever about a change we wish we could make in our lives, a relationship that needs healing, a mistake we made that needs undoing, an injustice very near to us that needs someone to protest it and draw attention to it. They reported to John in prison that that is the kind of work Jesus was doing. This is the moment to join that project of making the kingdom ready.
It’s less than two weeks away from Christmas, and we can ask ourselves the question John asked: Should I be joining Jesus, or waiting for someone else? Jesus is here now, his work is amazing and life-giving, not in the way that John the Baptist or anyone else expected. Here on Gaudete Sunday it is time to rejoice, but also time to be at work, taking these last few days to make everything ready.