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05/03/26 Luke 7:24-30 Grace Methodist Church
In just the last passage, we had a deputation from John the Baptist come and ask Jesus if he was the one who had been promised to come or if they were waiting for someone else. In response, Jesus did a bunch of healings and then told them to share what they have seen and heard. Even if they weren’t sure that Jesus was the one who was to come, if they actually did what Jesus told them to do, and share what they had seen and heard, this was going to be big news in Judea, the region in the South of Israel. Even if the general population doesn’t conclude that Jesus is indeed the one who was to come, they will be hearing about, and probably talking about, this marvelous wonderworker in the North.
Because of all of this, Jesus has set the ball rolling. It may be that the excitement that both made his reputation soar among the people and also that put target on his back takes a while to build to the boiling point, but the trajectory has been set. As people who know how the story turns out, we can see that it is now only a matter of time until everything plays itself out.
The last passage was all about Jesus and about both who he was and what he was doing. Today, Jesus himself turns our attention onto John the Baptist. We have not considered him for several chapters. Honestly, there is a part of me that doesn’t really want to turn my attention to John. After all, we have been paying attention to Jesus. Jesus is God in flesh, God with us. We need to hang on every word that he speaks. We need to dwell on every action he makes. John seems to be so much less important. We can appreciate who he was and what he did, but shouldn’t we move on?
Well, we might feel that way, but before we go too far down that road, we need to realize what it means to be consistent with our convictions. If Jesus really is God with us and if we really do need to hang on his every word, we need to also remember that it wasn’t our idea to change the topic to John, it was Jesus who did it. He clearly has something for us to consider and we won’t really be taking Jesus as seriously as we need to if we don’t listen to him here, too.
Jesus asks his hearers what they were expecting when they went out to listen to John. To be clear, he knows that not everyone went out to John, but even those who didn’t actually go would certainly have heard about him. He also knows that not everyone who went out to John really received what he was saying. Further, he also knew that he had a mixed crowd right at that moment. Some of them would have gone out to John, received his teaching, and received his baptism. Others would have also gone out but refused to take that next step. The very question is loaded.
Jesus asks the crowds, “What did you go out to the wilderness to see?” That is to say, when you went to hear John, what were your expectations? This is really important. Our expectations can shape nearly everything that we experience. It is true that we are sometimes caught entirely by surprise but that is not usually the case. Usually, if we have set ourselves against something, we will have a hard time hearing anything worthwhile, even if there really was something worthwhile. On the other hand, if we go somewhere and we are expecting to hear things that will impress us and move our hearts, we will often have that experience, even if it wasn’t really all that significant. That is part of why it is so important to occasionally be outside of our usual routine. If we don’t really know what to expect, we can be more open to what God might be saying to us.
In any case, Jesus knew some things about the people who went out to hear John the Baptist. It took some effort to get out there. Nobody ended up hearing John by accident. You didn’t stumble into his preaching but went there on purpose. That means that you were hoping to hear something worth hearing. You had heard that he might be a prophet from God. Now, you may not have believed that, but you would have heard it. Maybe you wanted to go check it out.
The first thing that Jesus asked about their expectations was whether they expected to see “a reed shaken by the wind.” This is a metaphor that may not be obvious to us in our time and place but it would have been a fairly common one at the time. To call someone a reed shaken by the wind was not a compliment. It sent the message that someone was the kind of person who changed their message and their convictions depending on which way the political and social winds were blowing. We have all seen people like that. We may have even been people like that at some point in the past. The point is that you don’t go through the trouble of traveling out into the wilderness to hear someone like John if you think that he is just going to tell you what you already want to hear. You are expecting a person of some substance, even if you disagree with him.
The next option that Jesus gives is asking them if they went out to see “a man dressed in soft clothing.” Again, his point is that it is absolutely clear that this is not what they were doing. After all, John was doing his ministry out in the wilderness. You don’t find some important cultural or political figure out in the wilderness. “Important” or “powerful” people don’t hang out in the wilderness, by and large. They are in important buildings wearing comparatively fancy clothes. The point is that they went out to hear someone who didn’t fit in, who had no official power or authority.
Jesus then makes the obvious point. “But what did you go out to see? A prophet?” Of course they went out to see a prophet. Maybe some people expected him to be a genuine prophet and others may have thought he had to be a false prophet, but that was the kind of person they were expecting. If someone was convinced by John, they would have called him a real prophet and received his baptism. If they were unconvinced, they would stand off in the back and refuse that baptism.
Just to jump ahead in the passage for a moment, I think we need to notice that there is a correlation between the people who listened (or didn’t listen) to John and the people who listened (or didn’t listen) to Jesus. I need to say something that probably applies to people like me far more than it applies to most people in this room. People like me like to think of ourselves as being pretty proficient in the Bible. We like to think that we have a pretty good grasp on what God is about and the way we should understand things, theologically. If there is someone who is popular, one of the first things people like me will do is assess what they say and how they say it and, in response, pronounce judgment over whether they are right or wrong, whether they said things in a theologically clear way or whether people are likely to misunderstand what they are saying.
There is a time and a place for that kind of evaluation, but I try to remind myself not to let myself get carried away with that kind of thing. After all, that is what the Pharisees did. They were unable to see God at work in John the Baptist but they were sure they would recognize it when they saw it, so they stood in judgment. The thing is, the people who recognized the work of God in John were also able to see it in Jesus. The people who couldn’t or refused to see the work of God in John were unable to see it in Jesus. The one place we should be able to see God at work is in Jesus because that is the one place where we know, for sure, that other things didn’t get in the way or make things complicated. Human beings can have mixed motives. God can do something mighty in the midst of our weakness. With Jesus, it is all God. The Pharisees and the lawyers couldn’t see it and it seems to be connected with their inability to see God at work in John.
Pay careful attention to who “gets it” in this story. The “people” got it and the “tax collectors” got it. They were the ordinary folks. They didn’t have all the Bible knowledge in the world. They didn’t have all the training in the world. They couldn’t sift through the words of these preachers and make fine distinctions to be absolutely sure about the orthodoxy and the accuracy of what was being said. And yet none of that stopped them from understanding what God was doing in their midst. The people who could do all of those things missed the boat completely.
Last week, I commented that Jesus didn’t tell John’s disciples to become experts on every aspect of Jesus’ ministry and the whole Old Testament, but to tell what they had seen and heard. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone say that they can’t share their faith because they don’t know all the answers. Don’t forget that, in this passage, the ones who had all the answers were less able to follow Jesus, not more. To be clear, I love the Bible and I love to teach the Bible. I will gladly tell you what I think on any topic you can imagine under the heading of Bible and Theology. However, I don’t think that you need it for you to be faithful where you are. Do you want to learn more and grow? Great. Just don’t let the fact that it hasn’t happened yet stop you from following Jesus today.
When I was first a Christian, I was aware of a small handful of what we could call Christian Celebrities. There were some people who were famous pastors of mega-churches or were well known writers of devotional books that it seemed like everyone knew. Maybe this was always the case, but it seems like there are more Christian celebrity leaders now than there used to be. Maybe it is the internet that made it happen. Maybe it is social media. I am not sure.
I kind of distrusted the idea of Christian celebrities back then, although I wasn’t totally hostile to the idea at the time. After all, you hear a name enough times, you start to imagine that they must be good teachers, or else they wouldn’t be so famous. I must admit that I am considerably less impressed with Christian celebrities than I was back then, and I wasn’t particularly a fan then.
To be clear, I am not trying to give anyone a hard time who is just doing their best. I am sure that many of these celebrities are doing good and solid work and are well worthy of the trust that has been put in them, although we also hear about a lot of scandals these days, too. My point is that I think there is a temptation to check out of certain processes because we believe that some celebrity out there does it so much better than we do. We sometimes act like everyone that we might hear about who is from somewhere else, especially if they are from somewhere far away, are inherently better at all of this stuff than anyone we know is.
This is a dangerous perspective. Part of the problem with it is that it misses the fact that you have at least one crucial quality that is necessary for Christian leadership in this context that those other people cannot possibly have, and that is that you are here. You don’t have to travel to be in ministry here, you are already here. It doesn’t matter how good some leader is in Texas, or in Africa. It matters how willing we are to let the Holy Spirit fill us and bring the presence of Christ to this place. Nobody can do that if they aren’t here. You are here and they are not.
The other big reason to not get too caught up in Christian celebrity is what Jesus says here after acknowledging that John the Baptist was not only a prophet but even more than a prophet. He takes this compliment and amplifies it even further, saying that “among those born of women there is no one greater than John.” Up until the point where John was born, he was the greatest man who had ever lived. He is the epitome of what it means to be great in Israel.
And yet, Jesus then turns the script upside down. He says, “Yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” When Jesus talked about being “born of women,” he was making a distinction and contrast with being born of the Spirit. What that means is that if you are born of the Spirit, you are greater than John. The way this is worded is clear. It does not matter if you see yourself as totally insignificant. In the eyes of God, if you have been born of the Spirit, you are greater than John and so you are greater than every single person who had ever lived before John. It is left unsaid, but this clearly means greater than David, greater than Moses, greater than Abraham.
That may feel a bit overwhelming, but it isn’t the only place where we find things like this in the New Testament. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we read about people who are suing their fellow Christians over various things and Paul hates to hear it. This is what he writes in response: “If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!”
When we think of heroes as being great and mighty in the sight of God, it is worth making sure that we remember who we are and what God has in mind for us. It is true that there are limits to this line of thinking. We cannot say that we are promised that we are greater than Paul, for example. After all, Paul was born of the Spirit. However, any example we can possibly point to in the Old Testament is not really someone to look up to, not because they are necessarily bad (although some folks that we read about in the Old Testament certainly were bad). It is because God has much more in store in us and through us.
I once read a sermon by the famous nineteenth century preacher, Charles Spurgeon, where he tells a kind of parable and I think that it drives this very point home in ways that are helpful. He tells the story of a great and mighty preacher, the kind of preacher who drew crowds wherever he went. Week after week, people flocked to him to hear the word of God, and there were conversions all the time. In short, he was the kind of person we would think of as a Christian celebrity today, known widely and admired widely; the kind of preacher we would all want to be. One night, he had a dream and in the dream, God or an angel (I don’t remember which but it doesn’t matter as this is a story, not history) tells this preacher that, though God is working mightily through him, the crown for the work will not ultimately go to him.
The preacher was almost certainly disappointed but also knew that God’s ways were best, and so he asked who it was who would receive that reward. The answer was that there was a little old man who would sit on the steps leading up to the pulpit and he would pray for the preacher. He is the one who would get the crown because it was his prayers that made the preacher so effective. In the story, it is clear that the message was not one of condemnation. The point is that we are not always good at seeing and understanding what is going on when it comes to what God is doing and how he is doing it.
John the Baptist made a big difference by listening to God and by following God’s call. However, we should not look to him as if he represents some unattainable and heroic faithfulness. We have something that he did not have, the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us. There is no reason whatsoever to think that God cannot be calling us to something equally impressive as what God called John to.
That all being said, we need to make sure that we don’t get too caught up in our own sense of what counts as “impressive.” The single most important thing that anyone can do is pray. It probably shouldn’t be the only thing you do in discipleship, if you are able to do other things, too. However, it is something that each of us should do. Never underestimate the power of prayer.
I am going to finish by stepping back in the passage again because it is important for each of us to consider the question. Jesus asked the people “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” We aren’t going out into the wilderness, but the question for us is, “What did you go to church to see?” What are your expectations when you walk through those doors on a Sunday morning? Is it just to hear a nice message to make you feel good? Is it just to do your duty? Is it just to feel ready for the week? Or do you come hoping and expecting to hear God speak to you and fill you? The last of those is really why we are here. Whatever brought you here, may you be touched by God today, tomorrow, and everyday. Let us pray.