Living Like John the Baptist
Sermon — December 14, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11)
John the Baptist is an unusual man. The story of his life couldn’t be more different from what any of us experience day to day. And yet, of all the people in the New Testament, John the Baptist has an experience of God that’s the most similar to ours.
Last week we heard the story of John’s ministry in the wilderness: how he dressed himself in camel’s hair and leather, eating locusts and wild honey, baptizing people and preaching words of warning to the crowds. His unconventional charisma soon attracted a significant following, and the powers-that-be began to see him as a threat. Their suspicion turned to anger when John criticized the local ruler Herod Antipas for marrying his half-brother’s former wife Herodias, who was also his own cousin. Herod arrested John and had him thrown into prison, where he was ultimately beheaded as a birthday favor for Herodias’s daughter. The story of John the Baptist is a story of drama and intrigue, of religious fervor and court politics.
All of which might lead you to believe that your life doesn’t have much in common with his. But our Gospel reading today finds John in a situation with which every one of us is familiar: hearing good news of miraculous events that he cannot see, being told of things that sound like they change everything and then seeing almost nothing change.
By this point, John has known Jesus since he they were both kids. His mother Elizabeth and Jesus’ mother Mary are cousins, and John himself had baptized Jesus just a little while before. But now John has been imprisoned, and he’s starting to hear from his own disciples, when they come to visit him, that Jesus is doing remarkable things. John had preached and prophesied and baptized people, but Jesus is doing miracles, they say. So, John sends a few messengers to his cousin to ask: What’s going on? Are you the one I’ve been looking for all of my life? (Matt. 11:2) Are you the one who will finally bring about the kingdom of God that I proclaimed—or is it someone else?
Jesus doesn’t answer the question directly, but he answers it, nonetheless. He knows, and he knows that John knows, what the prophet Isaiah said when he was imagining what the world would be like when the Messiah appeared: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame shall leap like a dear, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” (Isaiah 35:5) So Jesus tells John’s disciples: “Go and tell John what you see… The blind are seeing. The lame are walking. Lepers are being cleansed, and the deaf are hearing. The dead are being raised, and good news is being proclaimed to the poor.” (Matt. 11:5) These are the things the prophets said would happen when the Messiah comes. These are the things that are happening now. Go back to John, he says, and tell him these things, and you tell me if you’re still waiting, or if I’m the one who is to come.
But there’s an irony here, something Jesus doesn’t quite acknowledge but we can recognize, if we take the time to think about it. Jesus sends word to John: he really is the Messiah John’s been waiting for. But John’s also still going to have to wait.
Jesus really is the anointed King who will set his people free. But John won’t be set free.
Jesus really has come to proclaim good news to the poor. But there’s no good news for John.
Jesus really will raise the dead. But John will still die in prison.
“Go and tell John what you see,” Jesus says. But John himself will never see those things. He won’t see the miracles being done. He won’t see Jesus, risen from the dead. John will spend what little remains of his life in that same cell where he first heard the good news, waiting and hoping and praying for God to come. And God won’t seem to intervene.
And that’s why, as different as John’s life is from ours, it often seems to me that we find ourselves in the situation of John. Like John, we too hear the good news that the Messiah has come to bring about a world of everlasting joy—but in the world we live in, that doesn’t seem complete.
You could be excused for walking into this church on any given Sunday and thinking we were all nuts. You could be excused for thinking Christianity was a denial of the realities we see right in front of us. In just a few minutes, I’ll stand at the altar and say a prayer that says that “in [Jesus], you [God] have delivered us from evil... In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” (BCP p. 368) You have done these things, we say to God. You have delivered us from evil; and yet people around the world are still afflicted with evil. You have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness; and yet we still err and sin, at least as often as we end up in truth and righteousness. You have brought us out of death into life, and even though the disciples excitedly told John that Jesus was raising the dead—even though we celebrate the joy of the Resurrection of Christ—every one of us will still die. Every Sunday, we declare that God has done any number of things that don’t seem to be true, as far as you can tell just by looking around.
In a way, Advent is the most honest season of the church year, because it reminds us continually that God does do all these things, and God will do all these things; but not in the way that we expect, and maybe not quite yet.
And yet the good news that Jesus has for John is good news all the same, and it’s the same good news that Jesus has for us: that our life in this world is not the end of the story, and that God’s work in this world is not yet complete.
“Are you the one to come?” John asks. Yes! “or are we to wait?” Also yes! And that’s the paradox of Christian life, in a nutshell.
“Be patient, therefore, beloved,” James tells us today, “until the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7) “As an example of suffering and patience,” James says, “take the prophets,” like John the Baptist, “who spoke in the name of the Lord.” (5:10) Patience is a good and holy thing. Patience is what it takes to endure the “not yet” of Advent and of Christian life: patience is what it takes to hold onto hope in the face of the reality that the world is not what it should be.
But patience isn’t the whole story, because “not yet” isn’t the whole of the story. Christianity isn’t only about what God will do one day. It’s about what God has already done, and it’s about what God is doing now. It lives not only in the future, but in the present tense.
We see that presence tense in the psalm, which reminds us that the life of the kingdom of heaven exists already now. It exists precisely where God is already working now to fulfill those promises. When we see “justice” being given “to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger,” we see the promises of God beginning to be fulfilled. (Psalm 146:6) When we see prisoners set free, we see them experience what John never did. And in fact, if we mean what we say when we say that we are members of the Body of Christ, then we have to believe that our own actions are one of the primary ways in which God works in this world. So when we “care for the stranger,” when we “sustain the orphan and widow,” we are the way in which God is carrying out God’s love for humankind.
That work of love is not yet complete. And so we find ourselves in the position of John the Baptist, living our lives suspended between the promise of a new and better world and the reality that isn’t here yet. But we’re not quite like John. We’re not left passively waiting for God to act. Even in this long season of Advent, there is good news—not only for the future, but for the present. The love of God is being poured out all around us, and the question is not whether we’re still waiting for God to act—it’s how we will be a part of God’s patient work of love.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
