The Greatest Mother's Son

Jesus is continually unexpected. We’ve heard the parables. We’ve read the verses. We know his life story by heart. But still, his way of life goes against our natural tendencies. His way of thought goes against how our brains process reality. His way of loving goes against our built-in self preservation tools, so that he is continually unexpected, and we are left reminding ourselves of who he was.

I thought I knew him at 18. I was at the pinnacle of my faith. I was super active in the youth group, a singer in a local Christian band, going on mission trips, wearing the Jesus Freak t-shirts, and had just enrolled at King College to get a degree in missions. As we said it back then, I was sold out, and I was telling everybody.

It’s like if John the Baptist had been a young adult in the late 90s, except I was a girl and I was cool. I knew just what I was doing, where I was going, and what God was about. I had Jesus figured out. My job: spread that good news.

I imagine the pinnacle for John was the baptism of Jesus. There was even a voice from heaven. A cosmic dove. Imagine getting the cosmic dove confirmation.

Then John got himself in prison.

2 Meanwhile, John, who was in prison, heard about the messianic goings-on. He sent word through his followers. 3 “Are you the one who is coming?” he asked. “Or should we be looking for someone else?” 4 “Go and tell John what you’ve seen and heard,” replied Jesus. 5 “Blind people are seeing! Lame people are walking! People with severe skin diseases are being cleansed! Deaf people can hear again! The dead are being raised to life! And—the poor are hearing the good news! 6 And God bless you if you’re not upset by what I’m doing.” 

John had warned everybody of the coming wrath, told them to repent, told them being Jewish wasn’t enough, warned them of being thrown into a fire the Messiah was gonna start. He was so sure of what Jesus would be that he was genuinely shocked by the news about healings, driving out demons, raising people from the dead. “Should we be looking for someone else?’”

It was the end of my freshman year at King when the Bible I was studying at school didn’t line up with what I’d been taught at church. I couldn't find answers for my questions about faith and problematic scriptures. I decided I’d gotten the wrong person. Maybe I needed to look for someone else.

In the passage, we don’t see John waiting in his cell to get word back. We don’t see his mental process. We don’t know what he was feeling or the tone of his question. We don’t know if he questioned his own message. We just go from a guy in the desert eating bugs and prophesying to a guy wondering if he got the wrong person. He’d painted a picture in his mind, and it was looking very different from the one Jesus was painting.

We do this. We doubt because we have an expectation, and it’s not going that way. And because we are still on this broken side of things, our doubt lands on God instead of on the expectations.

But for John, there was a seed. And I like to think that’s all it takes. Remember: he was preaching some Jesus words, maybe without realizing it: “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same…” So when Jesus sent back an answer, he made it a word that pointed to the healing and the helping more than the judging and the fire. I believe that Jesus’s gift to John was showing him what was really going to grow from the seeds he’d been planting.

There’s a tendency to want to make ultimate decisions about John, about ourselves when we question. So let’s get an answer about that now. There’s a moment where we see deep into Jesus’s heart, one of those rare moments when he was’t hiding his meaning in a story or in an action. After he answered John’s question, he went and told everyone within earshot: “John the Baptist is the greatest mother’s son there ever was.”

It took me about 20 years to begin to understand what the seed was supposed to grow into. I am still in a genuine state of shock. Jesus hasn’t come in and overthrow my mind. He hasn’t fixed all of my doubts or weaknesses. He just moved into the place “as is” and started doing that weird thing he does where he’s the example and not the renovator. “Not what you expected,” he says to me all the time. “God bless you if you’re not upset by what I’m doing.”

“Should we be looking for someone else?” The words hang there in the dark of a prison cell, in the dark of grief or loss or misplaced expectations, missed opportunities, loneliness, depression, ignorance—those desert days we all go through.

When Jesus learned that John had been killed, he finally managed to get away from the crowds and went up a mountain alone to pray. We don’t know what he said, but it’s not unreasonable to think he talked to God about the greatest mother’s son there ever was. Even if John didn’t know exactly who Jesus was, that was okay, because Jesus knew more about John than John knew about himself.

What is it that you’re expecting Jesus to do or be that—he just isn’t? What, instead, is he turning out to be?