Excuses, Excuses

Jesus had been preaching and teaching, healing all kinds of sicknesses and casting out demons, up and down the Sea of Galilee for months. Everywhere he went people gathered, waiting for hours - some just to hear him speak, others hoping for the chance to ask him a question or even just to touch him. There wasn’t any advertising, no advance teams of publicity people stirring up interest in a new sensation. The word just spread, from house to house, from village to village. “Have you seen the new rabbi?” people would ask one another. “Did you hear what that healer Yeshua bar Joseph did in Capernaum? They say he’s even healed lepers!” Or, disapprovingly, “Can that Reb Yeshua really be all that holy? I hear he heals on the Sabbath and - the real shocker - “eats with tax collectors and loose women.”

There were even beginning to be rumblings that maybe - just maybe - this might be the long-awaited Messiah. The rumors were widespread enough that John the Baptizer, stuck in Herod’s prison for criticizing his wife Herodias, had heard them and sent a couple of his followers to find out what, if anything, was going on. But Jesus doesn’t answer them directly; instead he tells them to go back and report to John what they have seen and heard, and let him draw his own conclusions.

And then Jesus addresses the crowd again.

Remember, they would probably have all gone out to see John, too, when he had been busy baptizing people up and down the river Jordan. It was quite a show, well worth the dusty walk in the hot sun, to hear John blazing away at the Pharisees, calling them vipers and hypocrites, just the sort of thing they’d always thought, too, only they hadn’t said it out loud. He looked just like they had imagined Elijah to be, too, wild-eyed and bearded. He could really work an audience; if you got carried away and walked the aisle when he called for sinners to repent, why, it didn’t hurt anybody to repent and maybe actually did some good. You did feel kind of different for a while, at that, until the daily grind started to get to you again.

So Jesus reminds the crowd of all that John had been and done, of how many of them had gone to hear him speak, and affirms they were right to admire John.

But - John was in prison, now, so what good had it done to be one of his followers? If they had actually left their fields and homes and followed him, they’d have been left just as abandoned and bereft, just as empty-handed and purposeless as John’s disciples were now. So it was just as well, the listeners might have thought, that they hadn’t gotten carried away. Although of course some of John’s disciples were now in the group traveling with Yeshua... But no, this rabbi might be a whole different cup of tea than John was, he might not get in the same kind of trouble with the authorities, but they weren’t about to stick their necks out for him, either. Come to hear him, yes, ask him for healing, yes, but that was as far as they were going to go.

And what Jesus is saying now is beginning to make them uncomfortable. Some of them begin to slip away. They didn’t come to be yelled at, they’d had enough of that with John.

“What’s your excuse this time?” Jesus was saying. “You didn’t like John, he was too wild-eyed and radical for you, what with the fasting and camel’s hair clothes, not to mention hell-fire and brimstone sermons. Some of you even thought he was possessed by a demon, just because he said things that weren’t said in public, things the powerful people didn’t like to hear.”

“What’s your excuse now?” Jesus went on. “You complain about me because I don’t preach hellfire and brimstone sermons. I don’t fast like John, I laugh and tell stories, I eat and drink, even with people who you think aren’t as good as you. You think you’re so smart, standing at a safe distance, finding fault with both of us.”

“But I tell you,” Jesus added, “time will tell who’s really on God’s side, who’s really operating with God’s wisdom. The time will come when you will wish you had followed one or the other of us, because when you stand on the sidelines you miss out on what God is doing.” [v. 18- 19]

Everybody has an excuse for not getting seriously involved with God, don’t they. And some people’s reasons are genuine - they don’t know what God wants, or they were burnt by rigid, legalistic versions of the Gospel, or they’ve been taught that there is no such thing as truth. But some excuses are just another way of saying “I have more important things to do with my life, don’t bother me.”