Is This A Curve Ball? (Advent 2009)

IS THIS A CURVE BALL?

Text: Matthew 11:2-11

I read about someone’s recollection of a performance that he (Tom Wright) had been rehearsing for on stage at an earlier time in his life. He mentions that all had been going according to plan most of the time. “We had all rehearsed the show for weeks, and reckoned we had it pretty well sorted out. We were a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs, but we were quiet pleased with our singing, acting and dancing. The show was going to be good, funny and exciting. People would love it. And they did.

“But in the last performance, the star of the show had a new idea. He didn’t tell anyone. He simply, at a crucial moment, did the opposite of what we had rehearsed. He realized that we were in danger of getting stale, and he knew that if he shocked us on stage our reactions would be all the better. He was right. We all jumped like startled rabbits, just as we had been practicing the move for ages. The audience loved it. We all responded, and the performance became electric. It wasn’t what we head expected, but it was better than we’d dared to hope.” (Tom Wright. Matthew For Everyone. Part 1. Great Britain. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2002, pp. 124 – 125). The author of this story talks about an episode his life relates it to the anticipation that John the Baptizer must have had about Jesus. He relates how John the Baptizer must have felt surprised about the direction that Jesus had begun to take.

This story describes things that come unexpectedly. Like in the game of baseball, it is like a batter expecting a straight pitch only to be surprised by a curve ball. Life is like that with us sometimes, it throws a curve ball when we were expecting a pitch straight across the plate.

THE ANTICIPATION

John the Baptizer had confident expectations of who the Messiah should be. In his mind, it seems that John the Baptizer---Jesus’ cousin, had an idea of how things ought to play out. John the Baptizer knew that Jesus is the Messiah. So why then does he send others to ask Jesus if He is the Messiah? Some have speculated about why John the Baptizer sent others to ask Jesus if He was the One---the Messiah who was to come.

(1) Some have claimed that John the Baptizer asked this question for his own benefit.

(2) Still, others have speculated that John the Baptizer asked this question for the benefit of his disciples.

(3) Perhaps, John had faith that was tinged with a little bit of doubt. After all, Abraham believed and yet desired a sign as did Gideon. (Matthew Henry. A Commentary On The Whole Bible. Volume 5. Iowa Falls: World Bible Publishers, n.d., p. 148).

(4) John’s Gospel records Jesus getting Baptized by John the Baptizer who sees definite sign that Jesus is Son of God when the Spirit descends and rests upon Him (John 1:33). After all, it seems that this was a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah 11: 2: “The spirit of the Lord shall rest on [H]im …” (NRSV). It seems that John still needed some sort of confirmation once again about who Jesus is.

It is possible that John’s environment of being in prison might have strained his belief---his faith. If that is the case, then we are not any different than John the Baptizer at this point. We find ourselves questioning our faith when we have difficult times. When we have difficult times we become prisoners of whatever the circumstances are that makes us prisoners. We all have expectations of the ways that we think that things ought to be. We are like batters at the plate expecting a fast ball to be pitched straight across the plate only to find that we got a curve ball instead. Life is like that, it throws us many curve balls. This was quiet a curve ball for John the Baptizer. As someone (William Barclay) has noted, “For any man that would have been a terrible fate, but for John the Baptist it was worse than for most. He was a child of the desert; all his life he had lived in the wide open spaces, with the clean wind on his face and the spacious vault of the sky for his roof. … For a man like John, [the Baptist] who had perhaps never lived in a house, this must have been agony”. (William Barclay. The Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel Of Matthew. Volume 2. Revised Edition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975, p. 2). Like John the Baptist, we have all had times in life when were prisoners of agonizing circumstances that made us confined and strained our faith.