Thoughts for the Day

Luke 7:18 John’s disciples told him all about these things [the progress of Jesus’s ministry]. Calling two of them, he sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

In this chapter, Luke devotes another 19 verses to John the Baptist and his ministry, and we read again of Jesus’s endorsement of John as “more than a prophet” and as great as anyone born of women.  Yet it begins with John’s doubt.  He was at the baptism, he saw, he heard, knew then that Jesus was the one who was to come.  Nevertheless, Jesus’s ministry is not going quite as John expected.  John had declared, “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  But John wasn’t getting reports of threshing floors being cleared or of burning and unquenchable fire!  He had devoted his life to this mission and was in prison for his uncompromising message.  And now he fears he may have been mistaken and endorsed the wrong man.  How terrible for him.  Jesus graciously changes the perspective of those who come to check.  He doesn’t try to talk them round, but tells them the right things to highlight to John, things they can corroborate, things that demonstrate prophecies being fulfilled: blind seeing, lame walking, lepers cured, deaf hearing, dead raised and good news preached to the poor.  In his final statement, “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me,” Jesus encourages John not to judge him [Jesus] by the limits of his own expectations.  Wise words for us all!