John the Baptist had one mission.
It was a mission that was a long time coming. Isaiah predicted it, as St Luke reminds us. God had been laying the groundwork for centuries, but also humanity had been hungering for redemption for a long time. At least Israel had. They looked forward to a day when something would happen. God would do something. God would fix things, because things were broken. They still are in a lot of respects. We’ll talk about that next week. {see the readings appointed for this day}
This was John’s mission: to help the people to see Jesus.
Of course people could see Jesus. He wasn’t a ghost. Wasn’t invisible. By the time he shows up for his baptism he’s 30 years old. People had been seeing him all that time. Of course they could see him. They just couldn’t see who they were seeing.
For 30 years people had been walking past him, studying with him, working with him, liking him or not liking him, ignoring him — 30 years of perfectly ordinary human interactions the same way you interact with all the people in your life. 30 years, and nobody could really see him. A few had an inkling, maybe, that he was special, or smart, or charismatic, or whatever. They could see him. They just couldn’t see him.
It’s no easier for us today. We can’t see him at all, not like you can see me up here or see your self in the mirror. We’re creatures of our senses, after all, and nobody has actually seen Jesus in his human flesh since the day he ascended. We know how it is with other human beings: when they’re here they’re here, and when they’re not, they’re not.
We’re told that Jesus is here in the Scripture, here in the Sacrament, here in the gathered community of the church, here in your own heart, but we have a real hard time grasping this.
St. Teresa of Avila reports a story in one of her books that she would sometimes hear people say basically, “I wish I lived back when Christ walked in the world. It would have been nice to be with him.” When she heard that she chuckled to herself because she knew that he was as truly present in the Blessed Sacrament that they had received at mass that morning as he was when he walked in Galilee.
It’s really hard for us to see Jesus. It was hard back then, too.
Plenty of people back then actually saw Jesus, but they didn’t see the Savior. The saw the man. They didn’t see the God.
So the need is the same today as it was there on the banks of Jordan: it doesn’t matter whether we can see Jesus in the flesh. It matters whether we can see and perceive and sense and trust and know and believe that the Savior is present with us.
It was John’s mission there on the banks of the Jordan river. In a sense it is the whole purpose of the church, to do John’s mission, to help the people to see Jesus.
John the Baptist had one mission, to help people see Jesus when he arrived. And the primary tools he used to help the people see Jesus? A baptism of repentance, and a bold preaching about repentance. John stood there day after day in the river, shouting about repentance. Yelling about repentance. The voice of one crying out in the wilderness… repent of your sins so you can see the Savior when he comes.
Now let us pause for a moment. For some of us there is a whole set of church vocabulary that makes us anxious because we have heard this language of sin and repentance used as a weapon. I’ll keep saying it until y’all believe me that these are diagnostic tools for health and healing, not legal tools of condemnation.
We all do sin, to one degree or another. It’s the human condition. And it really doesn’t matter that some of us sin more than others or worse than others. Your sin hurts you, and my sin hurts me. And sin’s consequences scramble the spiritual geography of our lives. Sin messes up our landscape.
Those people who flocked to John the Baptist carried with them all this baggage — emotions that seem stuck and never resolve, troubled thoughts, destructive habits, harmful relationships, shame, fear, doubt, all the rest of the tragic landscape of our lives. These are the mountains and valleys and crooked paths and rough patches of their lives.
Now when Celeste and I lived in South East Kentucky, we were in the middle of some very crinkly mountains. As we drove around, there would be some places where it was a mountain straight up on one side and a mountain straight up on the other. Twisty road. They were always canceling school for the slightest snowfall which made me, a kid who’d grown up in Massachusetts, chuckle. Don’t these people in Kentucky know you can drive in a little snow? Then someone pointed out to me that the roads were so curvy that the school buses couldn’t go out, because a little ice would send them down the mountainside. It is much, much easier to drive where the land is more or less flat and the roads are well paved and straight. Easier to travel.
And John the Baptist had one mission, a mission foretold by Isaiah: to flatten all the mountains, to lift up the valleys, to smooth out the land and straighten the roadways. He wants to make an interstate highway through the wilderness of the human heart, so that nothing will stop us from seeing the Lord.
And how is this landscape molded and shaped? Repentance.
And what is the core of repentance? Nothing more or less than admitting that our lives aren’t perfect, and that we cannot save ourselves. You need a savior.
Here’s how it worked: once those people on Jordan’s bank could admit that they needed saving, they began to look for a savior. Once those people on Jordan’s bank could examine the needs of their hearts and the wounds in their souls, they began to look for the one who could heal them. Once they began to see themselves clearly, the mountains around them dropped and they could see all the way to the horizon of their lives. They began to understand for whom they were searching.
They gained the eyes of faith. They knew their need, and so they could know the fulfillment of their need. What was true then is still true for us.
We cannot see you, O Jesus our savior, because you are not standing here in our midst as a man like when you greeted your cousin John on the Jordan River. We want to see you, but we cannot with our eyes. We are told that you are mystically present, that you are here now even in the gospel which was just read, and soon you will be here with us in this bread and wine, and you are with us in the church. Yet we cannot see you in these things unless we see you with the eyes of our faith. Give us grace to walk safely in your glory. Grant that we who have sowed with tears may also reap with joy. Help us to see the salvation you have promised for us.