John the Baptist

Sermon Notes for Sunday 14th December on Matthew 11:2-11 Advent 3a by Desiree Snyman

I find the story of John the Baptist profoundly archetypal. It is, I think, the true story of many people’s faith journeys. I began preaching when I was eighteen. When I look back at some of those early sermons, which I have thankfully destroyed, I cringe. The faith of that eighteen-year-old has died, and it needed to. That faith could never have sustained me through the realities of life, through loss, grief, complexity, and the long arc of human vulnerability that any ordinary life brings. 

Whether I am visiting people in aged care, sitting with those who have attended one funeral too many, or standing beside hospital beds, I recognise this story again and again. John the Baptist, imprisoned by darkness, confined by doubt, remembering a faith that once burned far brighter before loss and suffering began to close in around him. What once felt like conviction now feels fragile. What once felt clear now feels distant. This is a deeply human experience. And the human instinct is to try to escape the darkness. We want God to break us out, to restore the light we once knew, to return us to something familiar. 

Yet the mystery of Christmas, prepared for through Advent, teaches us something far more unsettling and far more hopeful. The darkness is not a prison we must escape. It is the womb of God’s own darkness, the place where a deeper radiance is conceived and brought to birth. 

This is why I see John the Baptist as an archetypal faith journey for those of us who have followed Christ for many years. The faith of our younger selves had to die. We had to enter the womb of God’s darkness so that a greater faith, a more spacious faith, could be born. 

I have written a meditation from John’s perspective as he sits in that space of loss. It traces the grief of losing one faith while waiting, often painfully, for the rebirth of something deeper and truer. 

The Gospel is cheeky here, and deeply honest. When John questions Jesus, Jesus replies, “Go and tell John what you see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them.” This draws on Isaiah 35 and Isaiah 61. But notice what Jesus leaves out. Isaiah also proclaims freedom for captives. John is in prison after all. Surely that is the line you would include. But the prison John inhabits is not something he is meant to escape. It is the womb in which his faith is being transformed. So rather than rushing to free John, Jesus invites him to wait. To gestate. To trust that God is still at work, not despite the darkness, but within it. 

So let us sit with John for a while: 

He sits in Herod’s prison with nothing but time. Time to think, and time to pray. 

His mind drifts back to the early days, the good days, when he was fearless. His voice had carried conviction like fire. He can still hear himself by the Jordan, crying out: 

“Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptise you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. He will clear his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

John looks down at his camel-hair cloak. It has been a long time since he has washed. He longs for the Jordan. He longs to be submerged again, to be rinsed clean of politics and pressure, of worry and weariness, washed free of Herod. 

He remembers the day Jesus came to be baptised. John had been preaching about a new kingdom, the reign of God, a world where Pharaoh-like rulers do not have the final word, where taxes do not steal daily bread, where there is enough for all. And then, suddenly, the kingdom was standing in front of him in human flesh. Jesus. The Lamb of God. The One. 

And surely now, John thought, the reckoning would come. The Pharisees and Sadducees, the tax collectors and soldiers, the whole machinery of exploitation and hypocrisy would meet the axe. The new day would dawn. 

Except it has not happened. 

John sits in prison and the promised day of judgement has not come. His prayers for a better tomorrow seem unanswered. Fire has not fallen on those who have stolen bread, clothing, and life from his people. 

Instead, the Messiah has done something else entirely. 

He has called tax collectors as disciples. He has spoken kindly to soldiers. He has eaten in Pharisees’ homes and preached in their synagogues. Instead of curses, there are beatitudes. Instead of a cleansing fire, there is “love your enemies.” 

And in the silence of prison, John begins to wonder if he was wrong. Misgivings rise. He begins to think that perhaps Jeshua ben Josef is not the One after all. 

At last, he sends his disciples with the question he can no longer keep contained: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?” 

The answer that comes back lights up the prophets he has known by heart: “The blind receives their sight. The lame walk. Those with leprosy are cleansed. The deaf hear. The dead are raised. The poor have good news preached to them.” 

And then the final line, unexpected, almost sharp in its gentleness:

“Blessed is anyone who does not take offence at me.”

What can this mean? 

John realises at once that it sounds like an additional beatitude, a mark of those who truly belong to the kingdom. A call to patience with the love of God and the way of God. A call to trust that God’s mercy is not weakness, and God’s timing is not absence. 

And as he waits in prison, John learns again what he wanted others to learn. The covenant does not allow you to manufacture God. You can only be surprised by God, even unsettled by God, even carried beyond what you expected. 

The God he expects and the God who comes are not always the same.

So, he mutters the words of his favourite prophet, not as a slogan now, but as a lifeline: 

“Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, be strong, do not fear. Here is your God.”

Slowly, very slowly, peace settles upon him like a dove. And he knows, whatever happens next, God is still God. And it will be well.