This Sunday, like last, brings John the Baptist on stage once more. Throughout my Christian life, things St John the Baptist said have impacted me and stayed with me. When I was entering the monastic life, over 50 years ago, it was his words, “bear fruit that befit repentance”. Stop wasting your life by just doing your own thing, live for God. And it leaves me still, years later, asking myself, am I bearing fruit? Last Sunday too, we heard him say, “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. There’s a whole Christology there. I’ve known people deeply moved by him saying: “He [Christ] must grow greater, and I must grow smaller”. This can so guide people when the time comes for them to give up role or position. As we diminish, Christ can grow. And the whole Church has been so struck by him looking at Jesus and saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”, that we repeat this at every Mass before the raised Chalice and Host. Herod took John’s head off, but his voice lives on.
And today we hear his last recorded words in the Gospel: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
This is extraordinary. He doesn’t end with a great rhetorical flourish; he doesn’t end with a thundering profession of faith. He ends with a question.
What kind of ‘place’ in himself do these words come from? We must be careful here, of course, but let’s venture something. They come from his imprisonment: John’s freedom was gone. He was a captive of the fear of Herod and the hatred of Herodias, execution would follow, his mission cut short. These words must have come too from the uncertainties of his disciples. And was he personally baffled, disappointed even by Jesus, who was not acting in the way he had anticipated? Did he wonder why this Jesus who was supposed to set prisoners free hadn’t come to rescue him? Was he perhaps – this is plausible – suddenly questioning his whole life. Had he got it wrong? Was he experiencing a dark night of the soul? A final purification of his faith and his hope? Did he, like St Teresa of Calcutta, feel he’d been abandoned by God? Was there suddenly a wall between him and God’s kingdom such as St Therese of Lisieux lived in the last months of her life? Was he in mental anguish? Was this his Gethsemane?
Not impossible, surely. In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus’ last words are a question more terrible still, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But what really stands out is that John sends his anguish to Jesus. He continues the conversation. He makes it a question. He doesn’t answer for himself. He goes to the source and the love of his life. And in doing that, he is doing what the prophets and psalmists and Job had done before him. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?” (Ps 13:1). And thereby John gives us permission to question God, to send our anguish, our fear perhaps that our whole life is imploding, that our faith has been misplaced, to the Lord. He is giving us permission to show our weakness to Christ. “Are you the one who is to come?” Show yourself. We can do this. We can ask this. It’s not to put the Lord to the test. It’s to ask for consolation in our weakness, light in our darkness. It’s to keep trusting when we may feel we hardly can. So, to the very end, this great prophet – out of the depths – is still pointing us to the Lamb of God. And by putting this as a question, as prayer, he is allowing the Lord to have the last word on his life. He wants the truth, not from inside himself, but from the one who is greater than himself. He wants the Lamb to be his Shepherd. John is humble to the last.
And the Lord does answer. And he answers with both delicacy and power. “Go and tell John what you hear and see”. It wasn’t Jesus’s way to thump his chest like a gorilla, and say, “I’m the Messiah”. Instead, he mentions six signs, allowing John to read them: “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk etc”. 5 of the 6 echo Isaiah – hence our 1st reading. Here’s the delicacy. Wasn’t it in Isaiah that John had always found himself? “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…” So Jesus gently takes John back to this. He says, yes I am the One who is to come. I am the fulfilment of prophecy. And therefore, John, my friend, be sure that you have not got it wrong. Your life is valid. And what, then, is Jesus’ last word to John? It’s a beatitude: “Blessed is the one who is not offended – who doesn’t stumble and fall – because of me.” Imagine the impact of that on John when it reached him. Here’s the power. This word was sacramental in its effect, ex opere operato. It gave John assurance. It gave him the capacity to suffer and endure, like the prophets before him. It gave him the patience of our 2nd reading. It sent him forward with a quiet mind, and a silent trusting heart. It perfected his life and mission. It built the bridge he needed to future joy. No wonder when John’s disciples had set off back to John, Jesus launched into a paean of praise of John unlike anything he ever said of anyone.
“Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” We seem to have an answer.
St Mary’s Cathedral, 14 December 2025
