Matthew 11:2-11
John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb in recognition of the miracle Mary carried. John the Baptist left behind his comfortable birthright for a short life of locusts and wild honey and persecution. John the Baptist was the voice crying out in the wilderness even when his voice grew hoarse and the listening crowds went on their way. John the Baptist witnessed the Holy Spirit’s descent upon Jesus as they knelt together in the waters of the Jordan, heard the voice of God call Jesus his beloved Son. John the Baptist confessed Jesus was the Lamb of God before Jesus had performed a single miracle or called a single disciple. If anyone in the history of the world was entitled to unshakeable faith and a front row seat for Jesus’s best sermons, it was John the Baptist. But tragically, John and Jesus actually got very little time together before John was taken prisoner by Herod, and for the remainder of his life, John only learned about Jesus’s teaching and healing ministry second and third-hand. Shortly after the exchange we witness in today’s Gospel passage, John was executed for speaking out against an oppressive regime. With the sword hanging over him, John sent a desperate question to a man he would never see again in this life. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
At the end of a life of belief and conviction and wildfire preaching, John doubted. And the Christian community heard that doubt, and remembered him. We hold John’s truth with tenderness as we remember him year after year, two thousand years after he asked the question. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” That doubt, that unsure question, has been handed down alongside the miracles and healings and extraordinary acts of faith in scripture. The wilderness preacher, in his moment of doubt, is preaching to us one last time.
In some circles of Christianity, doubt has been identified as a sign of sin, a crack in the armor of righteousness to be blamed on our own negligence in prayer or failure in faithfulness. In these kinds of church cultures, to admit to having doubts or to ask questions is to risk isolation and rejection from the faith community. People who have left these systems often speak to the enormous weight of shame and how that burden was the real stumbling block placed between them and their relationship with God. Sometimes they feel they have to prove their faith, or apologize for having doubts. To them I say this- no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, and he confessed his doubts and his questions by telling a friend, a messenger who brought those doubts to Jesus. John was brave enough to admit when he wasn’t sure, and to ask God for a little guidance.
When I was a hospital chaplain, I was paged one night to a patient’s room. Her nurses seemed exhausted when I arrived, and one of them shared with me that the patient was hallucinating and wouldn’t believe them when they told her what she was seeing wasn’t real. I went into the dimly lit hospital room and introduced myself to the woman lying in the bed. I told her I was a chaplain, and she reached for my hand. When I asked her to tell me a little about what’s going on, she told me she was suffering a spiritual attack. Demons had been sent for her by the Devil himself, and they were speaking to her. When she told me what they were saying, I knew this was more than a hallucination. What she described, what the overburdened nurse had chalked up to mental illness and medications, was doubt. She was being plagued by the sense that God had abandoned her, that God did not love her and had left her alone and unprotected. The thoughts in her mind, the demons attacking her, were that God was not real, that she was not beloved, that everything she believed was a lie. She told me she knew in her heart it couldn’t be true- she read her Bible every day and prayed to God for more faith. She believed in a God of love and mercy, a God who had promised to be her Good Shepherd and her savior. But she was being kept awake by the possibility that she’d been wrong, and whether those demons were in the room with us or a symptom of an illness or a side effect of a medication did not matter. What mattered was that no one had ever told her that faith and doubt could coexist. She was not forsaken, just because she wasn’t sure that night. In that dark room, while I held her hand, I told her the story of John the Baptist and his questions. I told her the story of Peter, who just kept getting it wrong. I told her the story of Paul, who thought he had it all figured out until one day he learned he’d been all mixed up about who God wanted him to be. I told her my story, and she told me hers. We prayed together for protection, for the assurance of God’s never-failing mercy even when we aren’t sure there’s a God at all. And those voices that tried to convince her that she was not beloved- they didn’t go away completely. We talked about what she might do when they came back. Scriptures that brought her comfort and songs that helped her rest. She fell asleep still holding my hand, and I don’t know what happened to her after I left that room. But I know that someone two thousand years ago heard the story of a prophet’s doubt, and some instinct told him to write it down. Someone might need to hear this someday. Some days that someone is me.
Even the righteous prophet carries doubts in his heart. Even the most assured person of faith has questions and concerns about what God might be up to. Even the greatest saints ever born find this world troubling, and scary, and lonely. Even in the seasons when we are meant to feel the thrill of hope, we still live in a weary world that has forgotten who made it and lost sight of why. Jesus’s response to John is not a defense of his own ministry or a theological treatise on his identity as the Messiah. Jesus hears the doubt of a beloved child of God, his own brother in ministry and cousin by blood, and Jesus responds to the messenger with these words: “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” Jesus says look around my friend, look at what God is doing in the world right now. I see you in your doubt, and I offer you evidence of hope. Those who are prevented from proclaiming the Word of God are freed to do so- ears unstopped, eyes unveiled, voices unleashed, hands and feet unshackled. Jesus tells John to look at the hope of others and see that it belongs to him too. That same hope belongs to us. Even on the days we doubt, or feel overwhelmed by the pain in the world. Especially those days.
Mother A Writes 