When, O Lord?

The scriptures referred to are James 5:7-10 and Matthew 11:2-11.

Every morning at the church I see my computer do an electronic impression of what I did just a couple hours before: an old man waking up. I turn it on and then wait for several minutes for it to actually be ready to do something. The blank screen comes up and then the logo and then a pleasing photographic vista of some exotic location in the world. And then the clock shows up and often bits of info about the picture. And then I click on the picture and hope I see the prompt where I can finally get into the programs. And even when I pull up the internet and my word processing program it only looks like they are ready to operate. Nothing is actually interactive. Because I used to be in radio, writing and timing commercials, I have timed just how long it takes and sometimes it approaches 5 minutes before my computer is anything other than screen shots of the last time I used it. And heaven help me if it starts to download a software update!

I wish I could say this teaches me patience but my basic reactions are frustration and resignation. Yet I remember when it took longer and going onto the internet involved listening to the electronic screams of a dial up connection. But things got faster and we got used to instant gratification. Wanna watch a movie? Go to your streaming service. Wanna a hot cup of tea or even a meal? Just pop it in the microwave. Wanna buy something? Do it with 1 click and it will be here in a day or two. So it may be that this has simply conditioned me to think my computer is taking forever to start up. Convenience has obliterated patience.

And we have lost our patience with solutions. We want ideas and technology that fix things magically and overnight. But that's not how the real world works. And in our New Testament reading James, as Jesus often did, uses an agricultural example. The farmer can't hurry the crop and can't speed up the rains. Growth and development take time. There is no quick fix.

It looks like the patience of John the Baptist was being tried. He was in prison for criticizing Herod Antipas. He had to know there was no forgiveness coming from that quarter. And John knew that Jesus was out there baptizing people as he had been and preaching the coming of the kingdom of God. And yet the expected build up to creating a kingdom was not there. Nobody was gathering an army or stocking them with weapons. No one was rising up against the powers that be. Maybe John was anticipating Jesus leading his followers to storm Herod's palace to free him. Nothing like that was happening.

John can been forgiven for thinking that way. In the days of the prophets of old, there was no separation between what we now call church and state, nor was there anything like the Native American tribes who had a war chieftain and a peace chieftain. The judges were often both prophets and war leaders. Moses lead the Israelites into battles. The priests carried the Ark of the Covenant into the fray. And John the Baptist has been called the last prophet of the Old Covenant, or to use more traditional nomenclature, the Old Testament. But things have changed. And it is Jesus who is changing them.

To prepare for a revolution, as John apparently thought of the kingdom of God, you get people stirred up about their fears and grievances. You want to get them angry. That's the effect John had. It brought them to repentance but it also got people thinking John might be the Messiah, God's anointed prophet, priest and king. And it may have been rumors of this, along with John's fiery rhetoric about judgment, that was as much a reason for Herod arresting the Baptist as his denunciation of the tetrarch's incestuous marriage to his brother's ex.

Jesus does begin his ministry by saying, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 4:17) John probably thought Jesus would continue where he had left off. But Mark, the oldest gospel, summarizes Jesus' message slightly differently; “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15) Mark emphasized not only the kingdom and repentance but the necessity to put one's trust in the good news, or gospel.

In his account of the start of Christ's ministry, Luke recounts how Jesus attends the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. When given the scroll of Isaiah to read, he finds the passage that goes, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) This is Jesus' mission statement. He is announcing freedom and healing and God's favor or acceptance. And it is interesting that Jesus breaks off his reading of the first 2 verses of Isaiah 61 just before it says, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus' ministry is one of good news. This is not the day of judgment.

So John sends some of his disciples who were visiting him in prison to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And Jesus simply points to what he is doing. “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Notice that these are primarily works of healing and restoration and education. But they aren't things associated with preparing for a war on evil. Jesus isn't doing nothing; it's just that what he is doing is not what John expected.

We have said that John is an Old Testament kind of prophet. But his message lacks something they had. Yes, they would preach impending judgment but then they would also preach God's forgiveness and his restoration of his people. John is mostly about the first part, judgment; Jesus is mostly about the second part, forgiveness and restoration. You could oversimplify it and say John is about justice and Jesus is about peace. Justice is about fairness and putting things right when everyone isn't being treated equally. Peace is not merely the absence of overt conflict but the absence of covert or hidden conflict, such as you see in passive-aggressive relationships or in a person's inner conflicts. That said, Jesus is also interested in justice and the instructions John gives to the newly baptized, like don't cheat or take advantage of others, would go a long way towards keeping the peace.

It would be a little closer to the truth to say that John was more focused on punitive or retributive justice, which is about punishing the offender, while Jesus is more focused on restorative justice, which is about making the victim whole. Ideally, restorative justice is also about restoring the relationship between the offender and the victim. Jesus spoke of leaving your gift at the altar if you realize you have to repair your relationship with someone you've hurt and so reconciling with them first. (Matthew 5:23-24) In the Lord's Prayer we ask God to forgive us our sins to the extent we forgive others their sins against us. (Matthew 6:12). And when Zacchaeus is visited by Jesus, he decides to make reparations to those he cheated. (Luke 19:1-10) In that case Zacchaeus is trying to make right the wrongs he did to others.

Which leads to rehabilitative justice, that is, making the offender whole as well. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. If the world seems to have treated you unfairly, you tend to lash out at others. We see this in children who are abused or neglected. If they do not continue living their lives as victims, they can become victimizers. Those who are damaged tend to pass that on by damaging others. Jesus realized that and that he is why he spent so much time with those society labeled as “sinners.” In actuality, we are all sinners but we tend to be harsher on people with different sins than ours and especially sins that cause more disruption in society. Thus we blame the loud and obnoxious and violent drunk more than the bartender who should have cut him off long ago, or the system that treats this one very powerful drug, alcohol, differently than other powerful drugs and makes it available to just about anyone in whatever dosage they feel like taking.

Jesus went to "sinners", the way a doctor used to make house calls on the sick. (Matthew 9:12) Because sin can be seen as a spiritual sickness. And just like a physically unhealthy person is impaired in how they act physically, a spiritually unhealthy person is impaired in how they act spiritually. To fix the impaired outcomes you have to treat the disease. Thus Jesus forgives people their sins and gives them a prescription for spiritually healthy living. The most dramatic example is the woman who is caught in adultery and dragged to Jesus to be stoned to death, as set down in the Mosaic law. But Jesus points out that everyone who judges her is similarly infected by sin and they are too affected to deal justly with her particular sin. When they all slink away, Jesus asks the woman about her accusers. “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. Jesus said, “Then neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no longer.” (John 8:10-11) I know that some quibble because this story is not found in the oldest manuscripts of John but it is totally in line with Jesus' other actions. For instance, Jesus, who is vocally against breaking the marriage vows, did not make a big scene over the many marriages of the woman at the well (John 4:4-32). And he forgave the notorious woman who washed his feet with her tears. (Luke 7:36-50) Jesus refused to do more damage to those who were already damaged. Instead he forgave and healed them.

When Jesus does sound like John, that is, judgmental towards the sinful, he is invariably addressing those who do not acknowledge their sin, such as the religious leaders of his day. This is Jesus showing tough love, trying to wake them up to their very real spiritual and moral disorders. Jesus saw what psychology has only recently shown scientifically, that those who are powerful tend to feel more entitled to special treatment and tend to feel less empathy towards others. Jesus sought to shatter their smugness and self-righteousness. Maybe the rich man has such a hard time entering the kingdom of God because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that he is just as much in need of God's grace and forgiveness as the pimp, the murderer, the drug dealer, and those whose sins he looks down on. Without humbling yourself and admitting your sins and asking God for the mercy we find in Jesus Christ, you cannot be healed of your spiritual ills, just as a person cannot be cured of a physical illness without admitting how seriously sick they are and going to the doctor and following the doctor's orders.

In fact, Jesus says there is only one unforgivable sin. He was healing people and his critics said he was using demons to cast out the demons they held responsible for disease. And Jesus cautioned them by saying that blaspheming, or insulting, the Holy Spirit was the only unforgivable sin. (Matthew 12:22-37) They were saying that an objectively good action, healing, was evil because they couldn't believe God was working through Jesus. When you are so morally screwed up that you say that good is evil, you cannot be saved. A doctor cannot save a patient who is so distrustful or paranoid that he sees the doctor's actions as evil. And God cannot save those who cannot see his Spirit at work in making people better. And if you think what is good is evil, then it is a short step to seeing what is evil as good.

For the most part the people saw Jesus as God's agent in the world. But they still thought of the kingdom of God as analogous to an earthly kingdom and they were impatient to see it now. After feeding the 5000, we are told, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.” (John 6:15) So he sends the disciples ahead by boat and in the middle of the night, walks across the water to meet them. When the crowd catches up to him at Capernaum, he says that they are only interested in him because he provided physical food. When he presents himself as the Bread of Life, whose flesh they have to eat and whose blood they have to drink, many stop following him. He says, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of Spirit and life.” (John 6:63) In other words they are still thinking concretely, as if he is endorsing literal cannibalism. They cannot see the spiritual meaning, that he is as necessary to our spirits as food is to our bodies. Just so, they wanted a physical, political kingdom, and could not see what Jesus was really talking about when he spoke of the kingdom of God, which is not from or of this world and which is within the people of God.

I don't think John got it either. He knew the kingdoms of this world were corrupt now. They needed to be changed now. But Jesus knew you need to change people first. The best system in the world won't work if the people running it and participating in it are spiritually blind and morally impaired. They say Hitler made the trains run on time but a lot of those trains were taking people to death camps. Even communities conceived of as utopias collapse because of the moral lapses of their leadership and followers. As Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born from above.” (John 3:3) Only those spiritually reborn can be a part of God's kingdom.

But, as anyone who's had children can tell you, it takes a long time from conception to birth; it takes a long time from the first pangs to the actual birth; and it takes a long time from birth to maturity. So, of course, it takes an even longer time for the whole world to be reborn spiritually. And it takes patience on our part. Especially when we suffer the pain evil brings.

Jesus will come again, when the time is right, when all the second and third and fourth chances have been given and all those who will accept God's love have done so. There will be a time when the wheat and the chaff, the sheep and the goats will be separated. There will be a day when “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be paid back according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or evil.” (2 Corinthians 5:10) No one will be neglected. No one will get away with anything. No good deed will go unrewarded.

Scripture assures us that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1) What does being “in Christ” mean? Paul writes, “In Christ you are all children of God through faith. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” (Galatians 3:26-27) Paul is not talking about literally dressing up like Jesus, the way a fan at Comic Con dresses up like Spiderman or Wonder Woman. Christianity is the process of becoming like Christ. It is asking yourself, “What would Jesus do?” and then doing it. Of course, Jesus could do things we can't. But we are not alone. We are part of the body of Christ. If the situation calls for gifts that I have not been granted by the Spirit, I can call in another who has those gifts. For instance, I cannot do much to get someone housing but I can refer them to Catholic Charities, which has made that a priority here in the Keys. In the aftermath of hurricane Irma, we saw many parts of the body of Christ here: Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, and more. They helped rebuild this community.

Jesus was a builder. Jesus was a healer. When John needed to know if the kingdom of God was being built, Jesus pointed to his work: rebuilding lives, healing people, physically and spiritually. And if we are in Christ, if we are clothed with his Spirit, we are to be doing the same work. The kingdom of God is built one person at a time. And it doesn't matter if they are what the world sees as the least, the last or the lost. God made them. Jesus died for them. We serve them.