Sermon Tone Analysis

There is a saying: the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

It speaks to our arrogance as humans.

We often believe in very specific, black and white ways.

We do this about many things, and while we often want to blame the arrogance of youth, adults are not exempt.

How we think life is going to go is rarely how it actually goes.

What we believe about certain people is sometimes proven wrong when we actually get to know them.

Even some of our deeply held beliefs are sometimes shaken when confronted with tragedy or when someone we love walks a different road.

Think about politics for a moment.

I know, I shouldn’t even bring up the subject of politics, but bare with me for a moment.

If you are Democrat this morning you might look at Republicans as enemies with no good ideas on how our society and government should work.

The opposite is also a possibility, if you are a Republican then you might look at Democrats being all wrong.

The truth of the matter is that their is a lot that members of both parties can agree upon.

We are witnessing one of the most tumultuous times in our federal government.

If something unexpected does not occur then the articles of impeachment will be passed against President Trump and the movement will head to the Senate where it will fail and then what?

I believe that there were unmet expectations following the election of President Trump.

Democrats and some Republicans fully expected Hillary Clinton to be elected as our next president.

When we woke up the next day we learned that Donald Trump had been elected.

Unmet expectations can lead to shaky ground.

Our equilibrium is thrown off.

How can what we always believed to be true possibly be wrong?

Have you ever been there?

I read a story about expectations from a teacher.

The story went like this:

After school one day, a young first-grade boy was sitting at the kitchen table, eating his afternoon snack, when he blurted out, “Mom, the teacher was asking me today if I have any brothers or sisters who will be coming to school.”

The boy’s mother replied, “That’s nice of her to take such an interest, Dear.

What did she say when you told her you are an only child?”

She just said, “Thank goodness!”

(https://www.preaching.com/sermon-illustrations/illustration-expectations-children/)

You might laugh at that.

The first day of 7th grade and I was sitting in history class.

The teacher began calling the roll.

When he got to me he said Zipfel, oh my and then there were a few curse words, not another Zipfel.

I recall saying, yes and I am the last one and he replied, thank God.

He had had 6 of my siblings before me so his expectations of me were not very high as I came to learn.

I thanked my older siblings for them introducing me to the fun of high school!

Have you every had something confront your expectations, or even your belief systems, so drastically that you began to wonder what is true?

That is where John is in this text today.

He had these ideas about who the Messiah would be and what he would do.

He was anticipating this radical, cataclysmic judgment for those not following God, for those who have oppressed the people of God.

We saw this clearly prior to Jesus’s baptism when John references an ax at the root of the trees and says that the trees that don’t bear fruit will be thrown into the fire (Matthew 3:10–12).

John was obviously waiting for the ax to fall.

Yet here he is in prison.

He was Looked up in the fortress of Machaerus east of the Dead Sea, back in the wilderness.

Instead of watching his enemies fall by the ax of God, he now awaits the ax of his own death.

So, he doubts.

He wonders, Have I been wrong?

Is Jesus really the Messiah?

John was the first to recognize the Messiah—while still in the womb—yet here he is, wondering.

If the Messiah doesn’t look the way John thought he would, is he still the Messiah?

If Christ isn’t working in my life or in the world the way I want him to, is he still Christ?

John questions whether Jesus is the Messiah.

He heard what Jesus was doing, and it wasn’t what he expected of the Messiah.

We saw in Matthew 3 that John expected more judgment from the Messiah.

This is consistent with what we know most of the Jewish people believed about the Messiah.

I do not want to paint a picture that John the Baptist was doubting that Jesus was really the Messiah.

Remember, John’s mother and Jesus’ mother were related.

John would have grown up hearing all about his cousin Jesus and the miraculous nature of his birth.

He would have heard about the Angels that announced Jesus birth.

I believe that was firmly set in his mind that Jesus was the Messiah.

Consider that in the scripture text that Matthew wrote that when John

heard in prison about the things the Christ was doing

The word Christ is not a name but is rather a title.

Christ wasn’t Jesus’ last name, it was his title, Jesus Christ, Jesus, the Messiah.

John heard while he was locked up in prison all about with Jesus the Messiah was doing and wasn’t what he was expecting.

John like so many others were many awaiting a political king.

It should not be surprising that John the Baptist doubted Jesus’ messiahship.

A wide diversity of messianic hopes existed in Jesus’ time.

Militaristic, political, priestly, and spiritual understandings of the Messiah competed for people’s commitment.

If John was hoping for a militaristic Messiah, he naturally would question Jesus’ ministry because it failed to challenge Roman domination.

At the least, John could have expected the Messiah to set him free from prison.

Instead Jesus seems to have used John’s imprisonment as an opportunity to expand His own ministry.

We even know that at the time of Jesus’s birth the Magi went to Jerusalem seeking him since that was the logical place for a king to be born.

The freedom they desired was from political oppression.

Remember Jesus words in John?

Jesus was talking about freedom from sin and the ways of sin while the people were wanting political freedom.

Jesus was not what they were expecting in the Messiah.

We know that there was a great fear of Herod.

Herod Antipas was a jealous king who murdered his own family to stay in power.

At Jesus’s birth he put out an edict to kill all boys under the age of two in order to get rid of the threat of a new king.

This paranoia is still present since Herod fears the followers of Jesus, and an uprising.

Herod also seems to assume that the Messiah is going to come for political rule.

Herod is going to be quick to stomp any movement to challenge him.

So it is in this culture that we find John sitting on death row in prison.

John was in prison and Jesus was free and he was preaching, teaching, healing and raising the dead.

He had been the one to introduce Jesus to the world at his baptism.

John expected what the words of the Prophet Isaiah wrote:

This probably led him to some doubt about who Jesus was.

If John was a faithful servant and prophet for the Messiah, why was he sitting in prison?

He is there because of his outspoken words against Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife.

Herod had divorced his wife and had seduced his brothers wife to leave her husband and to marry him.

John called him on that and told him that it was against the law for him to marry his sister-in-law.

John’s faithfulness to God led him to prison.

The works John hears about are not works of uprising or overthrowing governments but are acts of mercy.

John is looking for the ax to cut down the unfruitful trees, but instead he hears are about healings.

He has heard rumors about the grace-filled works Jesus is performing.

This is very different from the political uprisings he expected.

There were two words that jumped out at me as I studied for today.

Those words are proof and evidence.

If I say proof and evidence would you say that they mean the same thing?

Proof means: evidence or argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of a statement.