Rev. Paul A. Hottinger

John the Baptist versus Christ Final Days of Advent Wednesday, December 16, 2015 8:15 AM Is 45:6c-8, 18, 21c-25; Lk 7:18b-23 (Jesus came to save all of us from the consequences of our own stupidity and ignorance and to transform us into what God really intends.)

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

This is not only the question of John the Baptist, but many through the ages really wonder.

There is a big difference between John the Baptist and Jesus. John the Baptist was, to put it

bluntly, a prophet of the coming wrath, and actually that’s what many people would prefer.

The reason is they don’t imagine the wrath would affect them, since they are self-righteous. They

are right. They are doing what’s right, so the wrath would only be for everybody else, like

Muslim terrorists or drug cartels or crooked politicians or greedy bankers or somebody else, but

not me. So many people really do await the return of John the Baptist. They do not await

the return of Christ.

So when you hear that the practice of Christian religion is going down, well, actually there

was always a very strong vein of hypocrisy within Christianity, always, the hypocrisy of

people who don’t see that Christ came for them, to save them from what they had become. And

that is why Christ came. He came to save all of us from what we’ve become. He came to save

all of us from the consequences of our own stupidity and ignorance and to transform us

into what God really intends.

Now as we learn every day, God’s intentions take a long, long time to bear fruit. Even

St. Paul would have been probably quite astonished to find the world still in the present state two

thousand years after he spent his life for the gospel. And most of the early evangelists and early

Christians would have said, well, I mean, the end must be soon, right? Well, that’s what they

thought; but, no, they didn’t know. Even Jesus in his human nature, in his humanity, claimed

John the Baptist versus Christ he didn’t know the time or the day of the end. So God became human in Jesus Christ, and that

human person knew something of God, had a unique and powerful relationship to God, but

didn’t know everything. Jesus shared our humanity and Jesus shared our ignorance.

But Jesus knew the Father and he served the Father and he loved the Father. And in loving

the Father he brought healing and peace and wholeness to what was broken and diseased

and disturbed. And he called forth a handful of people to work with him in rebuilding the

world. That’s what salvation is about, what this redemption is about: rebuilding the world.

The sign is the deaf hear, the blind see, the demonized are free, the lepers are cleansed. That’s the sign of what God is doing, not the whole content, just the sign, the indication of the nature of the work that Jesus has come to inaugurate and to pass onto his believers. But it turns out that a lot of people who said they were believers really aren’t, and don’t even want his work, and don’t want anything to do with it. They want John the Baptist. That is the actual situation we are dealing with.

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