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When God Fails to Satisfy Our Idealistic Expectations

• “I just can’t believe the Bible is anything special when it is so filled with violence, outdated commands and factual inconsistencies.”
• “If God were real, good and really cared about us he’d stop all the suffering and fix the world”
• “If the Bible reveals God’s will why didn’t he outlaw slavery, punish sexism, and give us effective tools (like modern medicine and sanitation technology) to heal a hurting world?”
• “If there was really something behind the church and all of its rhetoric about being a light to the world it wouldn’t have such a checkered history of abuse of people and misuse of power.”

I hear statements like this regularly. They are given as justification for rejecting or abandoning Christianity or the church. They take the form of questions, observations and accusations that give rise to doubt even in the midst of the church. Sometimes they come to me as arguments against Christianity by skeptics and atheists. They are common in our world.

Imagining Blue Skies

Also common to our world is the imagination of a world that isn’t like our world.

• A world without pain, injustice, oppression and death
• A world where human beings create systems that produce good without downsides or un-intended consequences
• A world where people love each other and live together in peace
• People who when they see or hear the right thing follow through and do it

CS Lewis in Mere Christianity as well as others have pointed out that the presence of these hopes, and even expectations are in many ways irrational. All of us have only know this present world with death, brokenness, pain and rebellion. Why should we expect anything different?

Others have contested that it isn’t difficult for us to imagine the negation of things. It isn’t hard for us to imagine the opposite of our world, to wish and to hope for it. Think about the old song Big Rock Candy Mountain where we enjoy the unrealistic expectation of the opposite of what we experience.

It isn’t hard that we imagine this, but to expect it, and to do so repeatedly and enduringly in the face of everything we experience? If you look at the great revolutions in the 20th century, the American civil rights movement, the liberation of India from Britain, things that we imagine were game changes that should have unleashed incredible happiness and joy. Today we wonder what may have come of them. The triumph of Britain freeing India was followed by the painful partition of India into India and Pakistan, the retribution killings of hundreds of thousands and the largest migration in human history along on religious lines.

In the midst of our spectacular failures we point a finger at God and say “you’ve let us down! If you’re so great show us something pure, absolute, without compromise or untended consequence that is so totally other-worldy that we will afterwards never be the same!”

The Jesus We Never Met

Christians of course make the claim that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. Christians assert that in Jesus God came into the world, put on flesh and dwelt with us. This assertion comes into direct conflict with the blue sky, idealistic God we expect and complain has not appeared. The shape of our expectations are that this God would be universally welcomed by all. No one would object to this god. All would embrace him, imagine that his judgments were fair and good, his declarations and laws be right, and the outcomes of his work be universally praised and welcomed. If this is the god you expect then Jesus doesn’t fit the bill.

Jesus comes and while being embraced by some is rejected by enough people to eventually be killed by the rulers of his time and place. There was by no means a consensus about him nor were people, even his followers, always happy with what he had to say.

I find Americans commonly have little objection to Jesus, imagining him as some uber-tolerant, ultra-nice, maximally encouraging but under-powered godlet or guru. Most people who hold this view do very little reading in the New Testament about him because this is not at all the Jesus we meet in the Bible.

The Jesus we meet takes stands and sometimes sides, says harsh words to some, kind words to others, and is either so uncompromising or disagreeable that at various times people try to lynch him, others abandon him, and eventually the authorities kills him. The uber-nice Jesus most people imagine wouldn’t be hurt or killed by anyone because he would offend no one.

Today’s text of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist is Jesus’ coming out party. It is in a very unusual way one of the very few moments when in fact some of our heaven-rending expectations are fulfilled but the outcomes of that obvious theophany fail to fulfill our expectations of him and ourselves.

Meet the Prophet: Narrow Nationalism and Strident-Moral Orthodoxy

Expectations, of course, are often made up of the pain and hardships we have known. Again, look at the references in Big Rock Candy Mountain. The song is about a hobo’s paradise. If you don’t know the elements of the early 20th century American depression Hobo you won’t understand. It will also include things like “cigarette trees” and “streams of alcohol” might make modern audiences feel a bit troubled.

If most American Christians read the Old Testament at all they do so selectively

• They read the Bible stories that they learned as children
• They look for inspirational stories or passages from the prophets or Psalms that say nice things that encourage us
• We look for passages with moral teachings to critique someone else’s immoral behavior

The great prophets of the Old Testament like Jeremiah and Isaiah not only critiqued the practices of the kings and contemporaries in Israel but also painted pictures of a great day when Israel would be exalted above her enemies and purified of the sins and sinners in her midst.

When we meet John the Baptist we recognize him in this tradition. He’s outspoken, uncompromising, dynamic, and will not be ignored.

People came from Jerusalem and Judea to hear him and to be baptized by him.

Baptism

While most religious practice some kind of ceremonial washing the Jews used baptism as part of the initiation process for people converting into their religion. John’s baptism is interesting because it is clear he was baptizing people who were already Jews. It is said his was a “baptism of repentance”.

John embodied the prophetic expectation and message of the Old Testament prophets. He with his baptism was declaring an end to the status quo. Simply being a Jew, he declared, would be insufficient to avoid the coming judgment of God against both the failure of the Jews and the sin of the Gentiles. God was coming and when he came he would separate true Israel purging it of its immoral and godless elements and then exalting it at the expense of the nations that were oppressing her. His baptism, was then the sign of what could be imagined as a new standard for Israel. It was a sign that even Jews were making a break with their wobbly past and now seriously devoting themselves to God and preparing themselves for God’s winnowing fire that would consume the chaff among Israel and the nations around her.

Jesus Wants to be Baptized

If you understand John’s baptism you can understand why he initially rejected Jesus’ request for Baptism. John recognizes Jesus’ coming as the coming of that divine purification and winnowing. Jesus, John asserted, was already part of the new reality that was coming upon Israel. It was not Jesus how needed to be baptized.

Why then, of course, DID Jesus want to be baptized?

Jesus’ Baptism and his Revelation

It is clear that Jesus wants something to happen.

Last week we talked about what it means that Jesus fulfills prophesy. Jesus’ baptism, and what is about to happen locates him within the story of Israel. His identity is revealed through that story.

As with the story of the Magi and Jesus’ flight to Egypt in the gospel of Matthew we are not at a loss with connections to the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures.

• The Father, the water and the dove connect Jesus’ baptism to the Genesis creation story of God bringing created order and goodness out of chaos.
• The dove and water connect Jesus’ baptism to God’s recreation of the world after the Noah flood.
• The baptism in the Jordan connects us to Israel’s entrance into the land of rest through the parting of the Jordan river.
• Baptism is a trial by water, an ordeal in which the innocence of one is vindicated by their ceremonial deliverance from death. Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace and Daniel’s Lion’s den are ordeals by which God revealed his servants to a pagan and skeptical world.

It is at this moment when God, through the baptism, decides to reveal himself in a very public, clear way.

Why at Baptism?

Baptism will come to be the central marker for the early church of inclusion in the people of God.

• The Apostle Paul will talk about us being united with Christ in his death through baptism (Romans 6).
• Baptism is the dying of the old self and the rising of the new
• Baptism marked the passage of the people of God out of the land of bondage into God’s space in the wilderness through the Red Sea.

What we have, then in Jesus’ baptism is the revelation not only of the identity of Jesus but also the manner in which he will save. Jesus is revealed not in an abstract way, not even by doing miracles that draw attention to his power, but rather by his ordeal and death.

Jesus must be baptized not because he needs to repent, but because his revelation is in fact not through the kind of power that everyone expected, the power that drowns ones enemies, but by his willingness to be drowned on our behalf and yet in the end vindicated. Jesus in his baptism foreshadows the cross, what will be the moment of ultimate revelation of God’s love for us and commitment to us.

Whom Does God Address?

One of the strangest thing about the whole baptism scene isn’t even the strangeness of God speaking or Jesus being baptized, it is who God addresses. God says “YOU are my beloved son. With YOU I am well pleased.”

Why did God address Jesus in this? Did Jesus need to know this? Did Jesus NOT know this before?

The self consciousness of Jesus’ identity is always a subject of interesting speculation but we aren’t told much. The fact that God decides to say this to Jesus in public is also instructive. He says it to Jesus for us to overhear. Jesus needs to know it, be reminded of it, or being reinforced by it, and we need to hear the Father doing it. Why?

It is interesting that the voice speaks AFTER Jesus comes out of the water. What the Father says and when He says it reinforces the time of uncertainty, doubt, and testing before and during the ordeal. It is, in a sense, a parallel to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. It is AFTER Jesus’ resurrection that his identity, vindication and authority are most clear. The Father through the Holy Spirit gives the Son the message before the longer ordeal of his ministry and eventually his death for the trials to come. You’ll note that in all of the gospels the temptations of Jesus by the devil follow the baptism.

Where and How is Jesus Then Revealed? 

We began our conversation by looking at our expectations of a blue sky God,

• the one who speaks and everyone agrees,
• the one whose decisions and actions are univerally loved and applauded

If we imagine that the world works this way we’d imagine that the revelation of Jesus by the voice of God and the dove would cause everyone who witnessed it to

• stop sinning and sin no more
• immediately be fully devoted followers of Jesus
• always be faithful never doubting, laying down their lives for him
• follow him to Galilee, back to Jerusalem and to the cross

This didn’t happen. John himself would be wobbly and have doubts about Jesus that he’d express from prison (Matthew 11). The hard liner who railed against the wobbly get wobbly himself? Shouldn’t this remind us of all the church hardliners who themselves were hypocrites?

None of this should surprise us. This is who we are and how we are.

Jesus Revealed by the Ordeal

Jesus, however, is revealed to be who he is by the ordeal he must endure.

• His vindication is NOT that he speaks and everyone agrees with him
• His vindication is NOT that everyone agrees that what he says and does is good
• His vindication is NOT that everyone falls in love with him and is perfectly loyal to him

None of this is the way of Jesus’ revelation.

The way of Jesus’ revelation is that he endures the suffering, the doubt, the pain and even the eventual abandonment by God which will come on the cross when he declares “my God my God why have you forsaken me?!”

Church in the Midst of the Ordeal

In terms of our location in the story we in some ways continue in the ordeal. We should assume that it is in fact IN the ordeal that Christ’s presence with us is revealed.

What do you do when you undergo trials of many kinds? Do you imagine that God has abandoned you?

What do you think when God’s revelation through you as you imagine it is rejected by others. Did you think that somehow everyone would simply buy it? Why would you think this? They didn’t buy Jesus.

What are your expectations of God’s presence in your life? Did you imagine that doing something religious like being baptized or welcoming Jesus into your heart of going to church would suddenly make you universally loved and bring you to that big rock candy mountain?

Jesus is revealed often less by his successes and more by his commitment to be faithful in the midst of suffering. It is after the ordeal of baptism that he emerges and receives his vindication and affirmation. We hear him affirmed and we await our own affirmation.

Does the lack of universal affirmation bother you? Does the lack of blue sky fulfillment cause you to doubt?

Faith is walking through the water, through the fire. Faith is everything Jesus says it is.

• It is giving without the expectation of it being returned
• It is loving without expectations of your love being requited
• It is forgiving and having the forgiveness go unacknowledged

God knows. God sees. God will vindicate. God will reward.

See Jesus at his baptism and see the story that will unfold in him and in you revealed in miniature, in ceremony before it is played out the long way in suffering through history into resurrection and glory.