SKANDALON (e): Jesus a ,scandal, to John the Baptist

If “Jesus was amazed at the lack of faith” of his own fellow townsmen, the next on our list of those ‘scandalized’ by Jesus is even more surprising: John the Baptist. Imprisoned by Herod, he learns of Jesus’ ministry and sends some disciples to ask him: “Are you ‘the one who is coming’- the Messiah – or are we to expect another ?” (Matt 11.3, Luke 7.19). Jesus tells these disciples to report back to John what they themselves have seen: his miracles of healing and his preaching good news to the poor, which fulfilled the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah (35.5-6, 61.1). Then he proclaims another beatitude: “blessed is he who is not ‘scandalized in’ me”. The implication here is, surely, that John has briefly tripped and stumbled in his faith in Jesus as Messiah. Perhaps, like the disciples in Gethsemane, this is the ‘scandal’ of disappointed expectations. Whereas the disciples, maybe, were expecting Jesus to be a mighty ruler who would use his divine power to triumph over his enemies, and so were demoralised by his meek submission to the arresting soldiers, John, it seems, was expecting a Messiah who would come in judgement to separate the righteous from the unrighteous. This is certainly the implication of his words in Matthew 3.12: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor, gathering his wheat into the barn, and burning up the chaff in unquenchable fire.” The imagery here is reminiscent of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds, which we looked at earlier, but there he makes it clear that such judgement is reserved until the end-time: then indeed the Messiah will come as Judge, but now he has come “to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10.45). Maybe John was hoping that Jesus would establish a reign of righteousness in which he himself would be freed from prison, and Herod would be justly punished for his wickedness. We must assume that Jesus knew that the answer he had sent him would restore John’s stumbling faith, but his momentary doubt typifies the difficulty the Jews had in accepting Jesus as their Messiah. They knew well all the Messianic prophecies of scripture, but could not understand that they spoke not of two different Messiahs (Matthew’s version of John’s question, otherwise identical to Luke’s, could be translated “are we to expect a second ?”), but of the two comings of the one Messiah, first as the ‘suffering Servant’, and only at the end of time as the mighty King and Judge.