[Notes of a sermon preached at St. Andrew’s, Eaton (Norwich) on 14th December, 20025.  Video below.  An earlier version of this message was preached at Holy Trinity Norwich in November 2019]

Who are you?

Our culture is pre-occupied – obsessed, even – with questions of identity.

These often cluster around gender and sexuality – ‘I identify as straight, gay, transexual, bisexual, asexual, and so on.’

Sometimes they refer to political views: I identify as a socialist.  Or religion, ‘I identify as a non-practicing Jew’.

TV shows – ‘Who do you think you are?’, ‘DNA Family Secrets.’

Our Scriptures are by no means silent on questions of who we are.

Psa 8 – ‘When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?’

Our reading poses three questions of identity.

1. Who is Jesus?

V3 “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

John was puzzled by Jesus’ ministry.  If Jesus was truly the Messiah, and if he came to bring release to the captives, Lk 4:18, then why was he, John, languishing in jail, apparently defeated?

God’s choicest saints have sometimes been beset by doubt and uncertainty: Moses, Num 11:10-15; Elijah, 1 Kin 19; Jeremiah, 20:7-9,14-18.  They might have echoed the complaint of St. Teresa of Avila: ‘Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!.

Here’s our Lord’s reply:

4 “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

This is a clear echo of…

Isaiah 35:5–6 (NRSV) — ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.’

So Jesus isn’t only pointing to the deeds themselves.  He’s saying that in performing them he was fulfilling what the OT prophets had foretold; that he was indeed God’s longed-for Messiah.

2. Who is John?

After John’s messengers had gone, Jesus addressed the crowd with biting satire.  “When you flocked out to see John in the wilderness, what did you expect to see?  A trembling reed?  No – a sturdy oak.  A slick, well-groomed celebrity?  No –you went out to see a prophet, didn’t you, and so he was.”

In fact, Jesus says that John was ‘more than a prophet’, because Isaiah and the others had anticipated the Messiah from afar, but John had welcomed him at the door.

John may have been languishing in a dungeon, puzzled and confused.  But Jesus knew his true worth.

He was a man of great:

Insight: announcing at the outset of Jesus’ public ministry what the outcome would be: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’, Jn 1:29.

Forthrightness: fearlessly proclaiming the importance of repentance and conversion, Mt 3:2.

Humility: calling attention away from himself and towards the Messiah, Jn 3:30. – “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

V11 “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.”

3. Who am I?

Matthew 11:11 (NRSV) — “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

Why so?  Because John was the last of the old dispensation, which led up to Christ.  But the humblest of those who come after Christ have the honour of experiencing the gospel in its fullness.  Ours is a superiority, not of character or of achievement, but of privilege and position.  John did not live to witness the death and resurrection of Jesus, nor experience the Pentecostal fulness of the Spirit.  He belonged to the period of preparation; we belong to the time of fulfilment.  John was a herald of the kingdom; Christians today are children of the kingdom.  Jesus doesn’t call us servants, but friends, John 15:15.

If Christ puts such value on membership of the kingdom, should we not hold it in similar estimation?

Fellow-believers, let this define us above all else – that we are children of the same heavenly King; that we have been ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’ by the same Saviour; that we are indwelt by the same Holy Spirit.

Then, we can recite our creed with assurance.  We can approach the throne of grace with confidence.  And we can come to the Lord’s table with thankfulness.

Because in Christ, we know who we are.