May Our Hope Be Big

So many questions put to John the Baptist in today's gospel of John.

• Who are you?
• Are you Elijah?
• Are you The Prophet?
• What are you then?
• Why do you baptize?

And it seems that the one question that could have been most natural with which John could have responded is the questions is the one that he never asked, namely “Why do you care who I am? And why have you traveled for miles and miles to try to find out? What’s going on with you? What’s going on in you?”

One of the biggest differences between the time of Jesus and our own time is this: In Jesus’s time in Israel there was widespread hope and expectation that God was about to do an important and amazing and grand new thing in this world, something that would delight us and save us from ourselves and from our apparent fate. So when even a person so eccentric as John the Baptist showed up in a very remote and desolate place preaching astonishing words of hope, he attracted attention. He made people curious about the whole God question.

Are we there anymore? Do we still dare to dream so largely and extravagantly? Do we even risk to ask these enormous questions, not only about how the scientists might fix COVID-19 or how the politicians might fix the economy, but about how profoundly God might have plans to change the circumstances of our world and our relationships? Have we become too small in the things for which we presume to hope?

If so this is why we need Advent. Yet again this week we hear from the Prophet Isaiah, who is preaching to a people who believed that they had lost absolutely everything in which they had placed their trust. And he announces things that must have seemed like madness to many of those listening, imagining a world which God would not only fix, but recreate. Glad tidings to the poor, healing to the brokenhearted, freedom to the captives, release to the prisoners, justice and peace where there is none. Advent is not a season for giving up on our best efforts to right the things that are wrong in our communities. But is a time for letting go of the limits to which our best efforts and imaginations confine us. Real hope, as St. Paul tells us, exceeds what we can reasonably expect as the outcomes of our best labors and wisdom. It’s about dreaming bigger than ourselves.

Hope is about what God can do, and what we can never adequately figure out how to do, and isn’t that the best news of all?

So many questions for John the Baptist, all of them in this gospel constrained by what we think of as the limits of what humans can figure out and understand. Who? What? Why? Not bad questions, but not big enough!

John the Baptist wasn’t in the business of solving merely human problems. He was, and remains, all about challenging us to think bigger, and not to be discouraged by what seem to be the dead ends of what we think we can resolve on our own. By all means let us strive to be intelligent and industrious, but let us never confuse either of those talents with what God can do.