Advent 3-A 12/11/22 St. John’s
Advent 3-A
12/11/22 St. John’s
Mt 11:2-11; Isaiah 35:1-10
One of the great Spiritual Classics from the Middle Ages is a book called The Cloud Unknowing. It was written in the 14th Century by an anonymous monk. It’s a called the Cloud of Unknowing because it teaches that God is unknowable, that our minds are separated from the mind of God by a thick veil of silence and mystery. Even the Christ of scripture is mysterious and enigmatic in his teachings, his actions, his promise of eternal life through the cross. And so, the mystics said, the best way to union with God is to embrace that not knowing. And to have faith. So that’s why we have faith because we don’t know. That’s how, as Paul said, we are saved: by faith.
We see John the Baptist struggling with this not knowing in our Gospel reading this week. When we saw him last Sunday, he was almost a different person – confident, sure of himself and what he knew and where he was going. He made a grand entrance from out of the wilderness – very macho – a full-blown prophet with a spectacular style and a big clear, simple, understandable message: Repent for the Lord is coming. And he was sure he knew who this Lord was. And it was powerful – it grabbed people and spread like wildfire. And as we read last week, “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region along the Jordan” were coming out to be baptized by him. Throngs of people made the plunge into the waters of the River with him, confessing their sins, and yes repenting.
And in his seeming crowning moment, Jesus himself, the one whom he seemed to know so well, waded into the water with him and John baptized him too. As though to authorize John’s message. But in the wise words of one-time world champion boxer Mike Tyson, everybody’s got a plan, until you punch them in the face. By the time we hear from him today, life has punched John the Baptist in the face. He has gotten in big trouble for preaching the truth to King Herod about his illicit relationship with his brother’s wife. He has spent two years alone out there in prison on the other side of the dead sea in a dark corner in one of King Herod’s palaces. Wasting away. And he is having doubts. Especially about Jesus because of what he hears.
Jesus is not the savior he expected him to be, that he was so sure of. Jesus is behaving mysteriously. Healing the sick instead of judging them. Forgiving sinners, instead of condemning them. Welcoming everybody and gathering people together to bless and feed them, instead of separating them from one another and casting some of them aside, as John seems to have thought he would.
John is definitely lost in a cloud of unknowing and he doesn’t like it. When he sends some of his followers to ask Jesus if he is really the one we’ve been waiting for, Jesus gives a mysterious answer, as usual. Tell John what you see and hear.
Maybe we know that feeling. Maybe sometimes scripture isn’t clear to us. Maybe we have been taught to think that we should have it all figured out, and that we should be certain about who we are and who Jesus is in our lives. I attended a funeral recently and the preacher spent a long time urging us to read the bible. He assured us that we would know Jesus if we just read the bible faithfully. Because it was all right there, clear as day, for anyone who wanted to see it. Perfectly understandable. The answers are all right there, in black and white.
But that’s not what happens to me when I read the bible. Sometimes the more I read the bible, the more confusing it seems. That’s why I need to get with other people and read the bible together, praying together – maybe they can help me get a glimpse. You know the mystics talked about how in prayer, especially contemplative, silent prayer, when we are listening to God instead of talking to God, we are knocking on heaven’s door. We are trying to open ourselves up so that maybe God might show God’s self through that thick cloud that sometimes seems to separate us from God.
And the older I get, the more convinced I am that that is as it should be. I am leery of people who tell me that the bible is simple, and that Jesus’ message is clear. Usually, it means their message is clear, but I’m not always sure it’s that easy. In our Advent bible study, we read last week about Mary and her visit from the angel Gabriel, who told her she was going to have a baby even though she was a virgin, and that furthermore the child would be the Son of God. Mary didn’t have a clue, she was completely bewildered, didn’t understand a lick about what was going on. The author Debie Thomas calls it, Holy Bewilderment and she says that’s where we spend a lot of our time. Just bewildered, like John was when in his prison cell he heard those stories about Jesus and said, how can this be. Tell John what you see, Jesus said, maybe that strengthened his faith, to think back to the prophets who predicted the miraculous healing the savior would bring.
Mary was bewildered. It wasn’t certainty that made Mary a great example of faith to the church it was her faith. Let it be with me according to your word. In the midst of bewilderment.
In our individual lives and our life as a church, I think many of us are often bewildered, we live in that Cloud of Unknowing. We try to give and serve and try to live a good live, we make sacrifices for the good of creation, we work hard to love one another and to love the world not because we know what we’re doing. But because God is calling us, that finally that is the example the Jesus set for us. That’s why they call it faith.