What does John the Baptist see and hear in Jesus? Or, what does John expect to see and hear from Jesus? Yes, even John the Baptist has expectations of Jesus that need some correcting. While he’s in prison, he sends a message to Jesus: “Are you the coming one, or should we wait for someone else? (Matthew 11:3)” Whatever Jesus has been doing is not completely matching up with what John thought the Messiah would be doing, including the release of prisoners like himself (Isaiah 61:2). Jesus tells the messengers, “Go tell John what you hear and see.” He then speaks of his ministry to the blind, the crippled, the sick, the deaf, the dead and the poor. But missing from this list, probably to John’s dismay, is anything about release for prisoners. “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” Jesus concludes. The blessed life is the one that takes Jesus for what he is, not what we think he should be. Unfortunately, too many people are so preoccupied with their expectations of Jesus that they miss out on this blessed life, this invitation to joyfully dance with him, and to bitterly lament with him (11:16-17), instead being stuck in an unfeeling middle ground.
Jesus is a teller of parables, but he is himself a parable as well. A parable is a story that doesn’t tell us what to think, but invites us to explore and find new meaning every time we return to it. In the same way, there is no straightforward, mathematical answer for what Jesus means to us, but an invitation to discover and rediscover him every time we are with him. Three times in Matthew 11:2-19 Jesus says “hear.” Six times he says “see.” It’s like he’s putting the question to us: when you are around me, what do you hear? What do you see? The answer is not as simple as 2+2=4, even though we might wish that were the case.
What we see when Jesus is in front of us, what we hear when he speaks, says more about us than it says about him. What we believe about him most likely reveals much of what we believe about ourselves. We’d like to believe that reading the Bible and encountering Jesus in the Gospels is as simple as reading the plain text on the page. But Jesus (and the Bible as a whole) is too slippery for that. He is a mirror. He is a parable. What we see and hear from him depends on what assumptions and expectations we have brought to him.
So, let us take him up on his invitation – “Let anyone with ears listen. (11:15)” Never stop listening to him, and never stop watching him, because we’re never going to solve him like an equation. He will never be finished showing himself to us. And the more he holds up that mirror to us, the more our reflection will begin to look like him. This is why we stay in the Gospels, so Jesus can slowly rid us of the expectations of him we shouldn’t have. Like John, we must be open to the possibility that he is not simply the straightforward answer to whatever question we have at the moment. He will always amount to more. To stay in the Gospels is to see him more and more as he wants to be seen – as healer, as friend of sinners, as the one who makes us joyfully dance, and who makes us lament. We’ll keep watching and listening for as long as it takes.