Michael Mitchell
12/13/2025
Year A, 3rd Sunday of Advent
Matthew 11: 2-11 NRSV
With Isaiah 35: 1-10 NRSV
In our Scripture reading today, Matthew recounts a moment when John the Baptist, now in prison by Herod, sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” We are told John has heard the stories about what Jesus is doing, and he wants to know, are you truly the one? John appears to be in doubt.
Doubt is uncertainty. It’s an awareness, and sometimes an uncomfortable feeling, that we are not sure about something, and when applied to faith, it’s an awareness that our beliefs are shaky and we are uncertain. Doubt can generate anxiety and fear in us and lead us to question our faith and our relationship with God. Or a stressful or crisis event in our lives can generate fear and anxiety which in turn causes us to doubt ourselves or doubt God. Suffering a death close to us, or loosing a job, or facing a problem we cannot solve, or even experiencing something painful in a church, can create fear and anxiety, or emotional hurt so great that it creates doubt about faith or about God.
John the Baptist is in one such moment. Doubt is the result. Interesting that John is a relative of Jesus. John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, and when Jesus came to him for this baptism, John tried to talk Jesus out of it. John knew in that moment that Jesus was so much greater than he that he thought Jesus should baptize him. And when John did baptize Jesus, Matthew says a voice from Heaven for everyone to hear says, “This is my Beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Mtt. 3:13-17). John heard this voice. But now in distress, John has lost his certainty; He has doubt.
Now John is not the only person in the Gospels who has experienced doubt. The Apostle Thomas had doubts about the authenticity of reports that Jesus was appearing in resurrected form, until he saw Jesus himself (that’s in the Gospel of John, John 20).
So, what are we to do about doubt? Ignore it? Cover our thoughts up? Thomas Keeting, in his work on Centering Prayer, says that if you try to ignore or stop a thought from happening in our minds, the thought only gets larger and more troublesome. Psychology would back him up on that.
I think that doubt is an opportunity, an open window through which to discover something new about ourselves and about God. We start with, “I don’t know” or “I have doubts.” That becomes an opportunity to learn, and to grow in faith.
That’s what John did in our scripture today. He sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “are you the one?” Now John may have been expecting Jesus to raise a new army and use it to free Isreal from Roman occupation. That was the general Jewish expectation. Jesus was doing something very different
But I think more is happening to John than a mistaken notion about the Messiah. John is in prison; his life is in doubt. John is full of fear and anxiety, and it shakes his faith. He is in doubt. He reaches out for information. Through the door of doubt, he seeks to understand Jesus.
Jesus responds, not with a direct answer, but with a description of what is happening: “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.” When John’s disciples bring that message to John, he will hear it with full knowledge of the same thing said by Isaiah Eight Centuries ago about Jesus’s coming, which we read this morning in Isaiah 35. Doubt is the open door through which John hears Jesus, aligning his ministry with Isaiah. Doubt is the door through which John learns a new way to visualize the coming of the Kingdom of God, not in violence, but in love, acceptance, forgiveness, and restoration of people’s health and relationships, and most importantly, strengthening our relationship with God. After the resurrection of Jesus, doubt is the open door through which Thomas experiences the resurrected Jesus.
God evidently does not experience our doubt as a problem or a sin, or some mistake. Jesus calls John the greatest of human beings ever born even in doubt. Doubt is an avenue through which God can reach us. He repairs our minds and our Souls, strengthens us during difficult times, and provides us with companions on the way to Faith. As God heals our minds and Souls, we learn how to love each other in our families and in our churches while God repairs us and we bear our doubts and fears for a while. We are fellow travelers to support and help each other.
An interesting aside about Isaiah’s prophesy we read this morning. He said the coming of God would make a great highway for people to travel to God as God’s people: “no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.” I find that comforting, as I can get lost just going across town. But seriously, Isaiah assures us that God makes plans to guide us even when we are unsure.
Today the Joy candle was lighted; we are in the Advent Season of Expectation!! We are waiting for Jesus to arrive. We are waiting for God to come. We bring our doubts, our struggles, our fears, our problems, our anxieties into the presence of God. Doubt is okay; we may learn of new ways that God loves us. Problems are okay; God is walking with us through them. So we bring our Joys and Thanksgivings, our anxieties and fears and battered faith, the problems we can’t fix to God during this season. Even when problems are present, God says, “everything is going to be okay.” God says, “everything is going to be okay.”
Amen….So be It