The last time we saw John the Baptist, he was at the Jordan River. He baptized the crowds that came out to him, called out the religious elites for their hypocrisy, and proclaimed the arrival of God’s Kingdom in the One who would baptize in fire and the Holy Spirit. His reward for his faithful truth-telling? Jail. Go directly to jail. John had the temerity to tell the Galilean tetrarch, Herod Antipas, that his marriage to his sister-in-law was unlawful (besides being gross!). Herod’s response? He did what all thin-skinned, egomaniacal rulers have done. He got revenge.
So, John is rotting in prison at the beginning of our reading. He knows his end is near. He also knows what Jesus has been doing. Since chapter 3, Jesus has been quite busy. He’s been on an extensive tour of Galilee, preaching and healing. He preached the Sermon on the Mount. He stilled a storm. He called Matthew and sent the disciples on their first mission. And he healed a lot of people. Crowds of the sick and demon-possessed are brought to him. Of special note are a man with a skin disease, a centurion’s servant, two demon-possessed men, a paralyzed man lowered through a hole in his roof, a dead girl, a bleeding woman, two blind men, and a man who can’t talk. Yet, for all that, John is still in prison. The messianic age has not arrived. So, John sends two disciples to find out if Jesus is for real. “Are you the One—God’s Chosen One—or not?”
It's easy to understand why John may be doubting Jesus here. When we suffer, particularly when we suffer severely as John does, questions start to pop up. Is our God a God of love, grace, and mercy—or not? The more we suffer, the easier it can be not only to doubt, but to be cynical. C.S. Lewis expresses this temptation to cynicism in A Grief Observed, a memoir written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer’”.[1] Surely, John wants what any human being in his situation would: immediate liberation and vindication.
But Jesus gives a rather odd answer to John’s question. He quotes from our first reading: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer….” To this, he adds: “those with a skin disease are cleansed, and the dead are raised.” But it’s the end of this sentence that really goes off the rails. “And the poor have good news proclaimed to them.” You would expect that the poor would be made whole, right? They would at least have some parity with those who have more. There’s a great tradition of such prophetic critique in the Old Testament. But that’s not what Jesus says! The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the sick are cured, the dead are raised, and the poor…get a sermon!
And this gets us to the audacity of the Word of God. Lutherans speak of three ways we receive the Word of God. The first is the primary sense: Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. A second is the repository of the Holy Scriptures, which point to God in Christ and his salvific work. And the third is the preached Word of God. When the Word of God is preached, whether from the pulpit, at the hospital bed, or on the soccer field, something is going to happen. The Word of God, by being spoken, has the power to create faith, transform lives, and bring the Kingdom of Heaven among us. The Word of God has the power to transform someone—anyone—even if they are rotting in prison on death row! That’s exactly what Jesus tells John’s disciples to do. He tells them to bring Him in the spoken Word to John in prison. The great preacher needs preaching. The one who pointed to the Light needs light. The incarnate Christ will be there with John. John won’t be delivered from an unjust and cruel death in this realm of sin and suffering. But he will be saved through that death for the Kingdom of Heaven, where even the lowliest resident is greater than John is in this one.
This Kingdom is not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It breaks into our age and turns our understanding of reality upside-down. The Kingdom breaks in whenever Jesus Christ and his saving work is proclaimed. This reality breaks in whenever Jesus Christ and his saving work is received in the sacraments. When that happens, reality as we know it shatters. And the Word of God, the incarnate Jesus Christ, brings salvation into every possible situation we may find ourselves in, even the most hopeless ones, like John in prison.
There are many ways we can find ourselves imprisoned. In addition to the literal sense, there are prisons of unhealth and addiction. Prisons of fear and rage. Prisons of hatred, contempt, and unforgiveness. Prisons of broken relationships. In all those prisons, in all those chaotic places, the Word of God brings forth the new creation, just as it did at the beginning of time. God’s new creation is born from the death of the old. And even if we don’t receive the liberation we’d hoped for, like John, it ultimately doesn’t matter. Because our liberation is on a higher plane than the one in this life. Jesus Christ welcomes us all onto that plane—into that Kingdom—with open arms; the same arms that opened to the whole world from the cross.
So, how will we live, knowing that when Jesus is proclaimed, transformation happens? We trust Jesus. Whatever happens, we trust Jesus. When we are lost, we trust Jesus. When we are sick, we trust Jesus. When we are in despair, we trust Jesus. When we are broken, we trust Jesus. Jesus is faithful beyond our understanding. After all, it was he—the Lord—who led the children of Israel to the promised land out of the house of slavery. It was he—the Lord—who led them home from the prison of exile. And it is he who will bring us all into his Kingdom. This has already happened through our death to this world in our baptism. And when we die to this world, we are born to the new, where God dwells with his people forever—our Emmanuel. Thanks be to God. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes.
[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, p. 659