Homily at the Thursday Eucharist at St. Thomas' Church, December 16, 2021: Luke 7:24-30
It can give you literary whiplash, what Jesus has to say about John:
I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
John’s moment of greatness does not even last through the sentence! These are hard words, especially if you are John, yet I suspect if anyone could understand what Jesus is taking about it would be John.
John seems to have always understood that his role was a preparation for something greater, someone greater. His job was not to point to himself but to another. Everything about John was preparing for a future.
That was true even of his call to repentance. Of course, it was a call to people—to us—to examine our lives and change the things that keep us from fully following God. But the purpose of John’s call to repentance was not only about getting our lives in order, it was and is about enabling us to see rightly and to hear rightly: to see Jesus clearly and hear his message clearly.
The part that John perhaps did not yet understand was that in seeing and hearing Jesus clearly we would also be given eyes to see and ears to hear the world clearly, and the greatest ramification of that Jesus clarity is to recognize the great equality.
In Luke’s story that carries through the Gospel into the Book of Acts, Peter has this experience. Through his encounter with a Gentile—someone his every instinct was to exclude from the household of God—he finds rather God acting to include. He says, in stunning words,
I truly understand that God shows no partiality. Acts 10:34
And a bit later, while explaining what has happened to him to the leaders of the Christian community in Jerusalem, he says
If then God gave them the same gift [that is, the Holy Spirit] that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God? Acts 11:17
In Advent we prepare to celebrate the great coming of God to Bethlehem even as we renew our longing for the second great coming when God will make all things right. But in the meantime, we also must grapple with the many ways God comes to us day by day.
And there may be nothing more important, and more shattering to the way we human beings tend to live, than the reality that God comes to everyone equally. There is no greater or lesser in the household of God. There is no deserving of this coming. There is only mercy and there is only grace and there is only love.
Luke the Gospel writer sensed that this great equality would turn our world upside down, and indeed, this becomes the complaint in Acts:
They dragged . . . some believers before the city authorities, shouting, “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come her also. Acts. 17:6
May our experience of God’s coming to us in the coming days turn our world upside down, so that we may now what Jesus said of John,
The least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
Or you. Or me.
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