Are You The One?

"Are You The One?"
Matthew 11:2-6

I'm going to do a little name dropping.  Back when I was in college, at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, I met a girl by the name of Leilie Weyerhauser.  My girl friend (who would eventually become my wife), in fact was roommates with Leilie in the dorm.

So I got to know Leilie and her future husband pretty well.  So well, in fact, that I and my future wife got to be in her wedding.  Leilie had talked about her father a lot.  He was the CEO of Weyerhauser Lumber, a multinational company, that at that time, controlled most of the world's lumber supply and lumber-related products.  Through my conversations with Leilie, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of her father.  He was a huge benefactor to Whitworth College, and many other charities.  He was a Presbyterian, and active church goer with his family.

I got to chat with him a few times during the wedding weekend.  They were good conversations, but something seemed to be off.  He didn't quite measure up to what Leilie had told me.  I began to see a different kind of man than the one described to me.

After the wedding, held on their huge family estate in Tacoma, Washington, just south of Seattle, I was leaving.  I was saying goodbye to different friends and some of Leilie's family.  I shook hands with Leilie's father George and said, I don't know why, "Let's keep in touch."
He replied, "I don't think so."
What do you say after that?  Like I said, I'm not sure what I was thinking, or assuming when I said that to George Weyerhauser, CEO of this huge conglomerate, multinational corporation.  He knew I was headed into the ministry, so I wasn't hitting him up for a job in the head office.  It was just, "I don't think so."  In other words, "We're done here."

I walked away feeling like an idiot.  But I also walked away understanding my friends father a little more and a little less at the same time.  He certainly wasn't the person that Leilie saw.  And that's OK.  I understand that.  A daughter will see her father much different than just some guy like me who happened to be in her wedding.  I learned, also, not to let my preconceptions of someone determine how I saw them as a person.  It's better to figure that out through actual experience.

Most of us probably are like my experience with George Weyerhauser.  We form these ideas of how we think people are based on what we've heard, or read, from reliable sources.  Maybe you did that with your future spouse—you acted towards them based on your assumptions, and then found out they were totally different.  You can do that with a boss or a co-worker.

I've seen parents do it with their own kids, acting towards their kid as if that child was a certain kind of person.  Or a parent acts toward their kid based on how they want their child to turn out, and totally misread who they are as a person.

I've done that with other ministers I've worked with, totally misreading them, for the better and for the ill.  Some who I thought were morons ended up being insightful and fairly competent.  Others I thought were extremely gifted ended up being narcissistic nightmares in their churches.

It appears this is what's going on between John and Jesus.  Something happened to John's evaluation of Jesus between a time early in Matthew's gospel, and here in the middle of it where John asks his question:  "Are you the one…"  At first, John said of Jesus that this was a person he, John, was not worthy to even carry Jesus' sandals.  That Jesus was more powerful.  That Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.  John sounds really sure about Jesus, who he is and what he's about.

But now, in the story read this morning, John's not so sure about this Jesus guy.  "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?"  John is wondering if he's misread who Jesus is.  The stories John was hearing about Jesus weren't meeting his own, personal expectations.  John seemed to be expecting a different kind of Savior.

John's views of Jesus as the Messiah would have been forged by his many years spent in an Essene community.  The Essene's were a strict Jewish religious community who lived in caves around the Dead Sea.  The Essene communities started up around 2 B.C.  Only men were allowed in these severely monastic and communal groups.  It took a year or two of rigorous practices to even qualify to be a part of an Essene community.  The Essene's believed they were the true Jews, separating themselves from normal Jewish society, especially the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem.

The main area of study for the Essene's was the coming Messiah.  They had huge expectations of what they thought the Messiah was supposed to be like, based on years of study in the Jewish scriptures.  The Essene's believed that there wouldn't be just one Messiah, but two who would appear.  There would be a King David kind of Messiah who would be a royal and military leader of the nation of Israel.  And the Essene's believed there would be a High Priestly Aaron type of Messiah, who would restore the Jewish Temple to its rightful place of prominence in Jerusalem.

So John the Baptizer had these many years of severe study and expectation behind him.  He's looking at Jesus.  He's hearing stories about Jesus.  And Jesus the person is not measuring up to the Messiah expectations piled up in John's head from being an Essene.  Jesus didn't seem to fit either of the two Messiah expectations of a David King or an Aaron priest.

It seems John has two choices here.  Either John has to throw all his expectations from past Essene teaching out the window, and, by faith believe Jesus is the Savior.  Or, John can keep his Essene teachings and expectations, and throw Jesus out the window as not the Messiah.

We all have that choice when we meet someone new.  If we are unwilling to let them be who they are, we have to jam them to fit into our box of expectations.  If we are willing to let them be who they are, we throw the expectation box away, and roll with the relationship—with the person as they are.  That's John's dilemma.  That's what John is dealing with here in his question of Jesus.

We're dealing with the Savior.  We probably didn't have many, or any clear-cut and entrenched expectations of the Savior, like the Essenes did.  We may not have had someone tell us about Jesus way ahead of time, so we could build up these expectations over time.  And I wonder, which is better?  Going into belief in Jesus with a lot of specific expectations, or having none at all?

Just like the Essenes had expectations for two kinds of Messiah's, based on their years of study and religiosity, I think we are expecting two kinds of Messiah's as well.  Both Messiah's are based on two very strong and popular mythologies in our culture.

The first Messiah/Savior mythology is the super hero.  Think of how many there are:  Superman, Supergirl, Batman, Thor, The Flash, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Aquaman, The Silver Surfer, Iron Man, and on and on.  There are over 100 Super Heroes.  Many of them come from other worlds into our world to live among us and save humanity from evil.  Sound familiar.

We have this understanding that our world is in a mess beyond our control to fix it.  Or there is an evil force in the world that threatens to take us all over, and put us under its control that is more powerful than we are.  So we need some super hero to enter our realm and clean up the mess, or vanquish the evil force.  That's what our collective mythology, similar to the Essene theology, expects of a Savior.

The other popular mythology about a Savior in our culture is the Thinker.  This is the one who we expect to help us make sense of our lives.  Some Thinker, maybe the author of a self-help book on the current bestseller list, or some pop psychologist, with ideas and views that will finally help us see and experience the Truth about ourselves and Life.  We embark on reading such a book with the thought in the back of our minds:  maybe this will be "the one."  Maybe this will be the Thinker or the paradigm (as I explained last week) that will put my broken life back together.  Some Dr. Phil, or Dr. Oz, or Joel Osteen who will, with their schlocky bon mots of wisdom put it all together for us.

Both mythologies—the Super Hero, and the Thinker—are strong in our culture.  Just as strong as the Essene beliefs were about the Messiah.  We measure Jesus by those expectations.  We still ask John's question:  "Are you the one who is to come?"  The super hero who will save us from the grip of evil; or, the great thinker who will put all the broken pieces of our past together and help us finally feel whole?

Jesus' answer to John is also his answer to us:  "The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news proclaimed to them."  Does Jesus' answer, answer John's question?  Or ours?  Jesus' answer was probably disappointing to John.  And to us.  Does Jesus' answer speak to the King David royal conqueror expectation, or the High Priest Aaron temple builder expectation of John?  Does Jesus' answer speak to our Super Hero Messiah expectation, or the Great Thinker truth finding Messiah expectation we have in our day?

That's why Jesus said at the end of his answer, "Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."  In other words, anyone who doesn't think Jesus' answer is the wrong answer.  The Greek word for "taking offense" is scandalon, where we get our word scandalize from.  It means that Jesus hopes that we don't stumble in our faith in him because of his answer to John.  That we don't begin to distrust him based on our expectations of him rather than who he really is.  That we don't feel cause to fall away from Jesus because we don't understand his own self-definition.

Is Jesus' answer a long "yes" to John (and us); or a long "no"?  Or neither?  If you were blind, lame, a leper, deaf, dead, or poor, then, yes, this is a great answer.  But if you're just trying to figure out what it means to be a human being in a tough world, it may not be so helpful.

There are really two questions in John's question.  First, "Are you the one who is to come?"  That's a question with a yes or no answer.  Either you are, or you aren't, Jesus?  Tell us, yes or no.

The second question is, "(If not) shall we look/wait for another?  The implication of this question is, Shall we look/wait for someone who is substantively different, in a different class, or by nature, different?  Shall we look for someone who will measure up to OUR expectations?  As I said earlier, Jesus and his answer is forcing John to decide between throwing his expectations for a Messiah out, or throwing Jesus out.

I want you to ask John's question as we journey through the rest of Advent towards Christmas:  Are you the one, or should I look for another?  This question forces us to think about what our individual or collective expectations really are for a Savior.  "Are you the Savior I'm expecting?  Are you the Savior my extensive or limited biblical reading has formed.

The point we may need to think about, also, as we try to answer those questions is that Jesus often answered a question that wasn't asked, but should have been.  Based on Jesus' answer, what is the question John should have asked?  It would be more along the lines of, "If you are the Messiah, what kind of Savior are you?  How are you defining yourself as Savior, that I need to either accept or reject?"  "Who is really in charge of your self-definition about what kind of Messiah you are—you or us?"

That's what Advent is about—struggling with those questions of the Savior's identity, and any subsequent answers we get.  May God bless you as you ask, and as you hear his answers.