A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Advent 2A and Advent 3A.
The text: Matthew 4-10.
John was just in the desert, proclaiming the coming unquenchable fire. Now he’s like Fat Thor in Avengers: Endgame: morose, but with a slight Lebowski vibe. He’s seen things, but would rather ignore it.
Of course, we don’t get to see what he sees. It’s more of a game of telephone with him. He’s relying on what he’s hearing. And can you really trust the word on the street?
There’s something provocative in imagining the John experience of Jesus. It’s a really cool alternate history. And I love exploring that stuff.
But we get something different. And that something spans over 7+ chapters of material.
The Baptism
Much like we explored last week, the sequence of events has to be played with so we can maintain the plot of the seasonal story. So we’ll come back to the Baptism in January.
But it is worth noting now that for the church, the baptism is a much bigger story than John showing up like a lunatic or rotting in a cell. What we’re doing now in the lectionary is the backstory.
John shows up and starts baptizing people in the Jordan. Jesus shows up and so does the Holy Spirit. Historically, that is one of the big three. The baptism, the resurrection, the coming of the Holy Spirit: Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost.
John baptizes Jesus. And then the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days. There he is tempted/tortured by the Adversary. And when he gets out, he finds out John has been arrested.
Separate ministries
There is an interesting tangle in the John/Jesus connection in both versions which deal with it directly: Matthew and Luke.
We get enough about John to know he has his own deal. A deal that predates Jesus’s public ministry.
And of course, he isn’t Jesus. We would never confuse the two.
But they are intertwined, aren’t they? Not just overlapping like two churches in the same neighborhood. More like uncoordinated partners from the same church.
Each account more or less describes a sense of Jesus continuing John’s ministry, or building upon it. And this always strikes me this time of year, because that message we got last week of repentance is a message we hate talking about. And yet, the gospel clearly wants us to see it as the heart, or at least the origin of Jesus’s Way of Love.
So are we willing to deal with that aspect of the message? And of John?
It is here, in early chapter 4, that the paths diverge. John is arrested. And Jesus goes home. It sounds like he’s recouping. The narrator wants to remind us how it fulfills Scripture. But the reader is probably more captivated by Jesus than any prophecy. This is a moment of hurt. So he goes home. And from there it begins.
Recruiting disciples and healing people.
Everywhere. The disappointment spurs innovation. And quickly. In just a few verses, Jesus’s celebrity spreads like wildfire.
Now it’s time. The big teaching.
We know it as the Sermon on the Mount. But in Matthew’s gospel, it’s like Jesus’s thesis. This is the summation of everything he’s learned about what God wants, God hopes, God encourages us to do. Three chapters (5-7) of incredible, convicting, and emotionally-connecting teaching on community, relationship, and becoming the kin-dom of God.
Then it’s back to healing. Outcasts. Gentiles.
The Game-Changer
Chapter 8 provides the game-changer: when Jesus stills the storm. Without going too deeply into the details, this is perhaps the most significant unheralded moment in the synoptic gospels. Until this point in each of them, Jesus is followed like a faith-healer and a prophet. He speaks for God, heals the sick, and punishes demons.
In a sense, Jesus fits the stock stereotype. It’s just that he’s really good. Perhaps he’s a kind of exceptional normal. Like the best at being human. Of all healers, he’s the one to follow.
Then his followers see him control the storm. And none of them know what to do with that information. This freaks them out way more than the storm. Something bigger is happening.
They cross over, and Jesus heals a man possessed by demons on a massive scale. This is not a “peak healer” they’re dealing with. This is a meta-human. Or perhaps he’s precisely who he says he is: he is just a human and the one doing all these amazing things is in fact, God.
Calling Apostles
Once we get to chapter 10, we can see the tone has shifted. Jesus is beyond what they thought. His followers aren’t following a regular rabbi. So now he ups his expectations of them.
He calls his elite squad together and tells them they will have his power, too. This means they get this incredible connection with God, but the world hates this because it fears it. So you all have a long, hard road ahead.
John, from prison
This is the news filtering to John’s cell. We’re not sure what version of it he’s hearing. But when he reappears to us in the story, he’s obviously starting to freak out. Maybe he was wrong about Jesus. Maybe Jesus is not the one.
It’s the stewing of a man locked in a cell. The pain of questioning his life and being dependent on others. This is what happens when our certainty of truth is offered to the cosmos and nothing comes back. At least nothing like a pat on the back and an “atta boy!” we so desperately desire to hear.
But reading these chapters, eight through 10, the ones immediately before this encounter with John’s followers, reveals the inherent tension in what John is really asking. I think we’re too prone to accept his disbelief as natural and justified. From his perspective, it sounds reasonable. Therefore, we’re not likely to see how even he is far from the vision—even as God called him to proclaim it.
There’s something wonderfully tragic in this figure of John we get in Matthew. One who gets far less time to do his proclaiming than Jesus. And instead, he is left to rot as a pawn in the schemings of the powerful.
The Bigger Story
But narratively, his denial and doubt are thrust against the radical revelation of Jesus as the nexus of God’s earthly power and presence. He is disbelieving at precisely the moment the junk is getting real.
This occurring at the meta-level of the story is deeply symbolic of how trapped we get in our own doubts and convictions. How often are we most prone to doubt? When nothing’s happening and we’re chilling in a hammock? Or when junk is going down; just not the way we want it to?
In a sense, this moment reads like any number of church conflicts when a lifelong member speaks up about all the new changes coming to the church. Changes that often come along with the Spirit’s movement in the church. Often miscategorized as changes meant to attract people, many are changes brought in with the people who need them.
The point isn’t to argue over the change—like the doubt of John the Baptist. It’s to see how this doubt and discouragement prevents John from seeing what the Spirit has actually been doing while he’s in prison. That his work is working. And that the unquenchable fire is spreading.
He just can’t see it.
And maybe, like him, neither can we.