Hope Deferred

“‘Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting, or should we keep looking for someone else?’” (Matthew 11:3 and Luke 7:20 NLT).

“‘What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created’” (2 Peter 3:4 NLT).

Recorded in both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is an incident in which disciples of John the Baptizer are sent to Jesus to ask him bluntly if he is in fact the promised Messiah.

In Jewish tradition, the “Messiah” (meaning “anointed one”) was commonly envisioned as a divinely chosen agent whom God would someday send to liberate the people of Israel from foreign oppression, establish God’s kingdom on earth, and thus rule not just Israel but the whole world with justice and righteousness. Through the Messiah, the world would then become a place of peace and flourishing as God originally intended in creation.

Earlier in these Gospels, John is portrayed as proclaiming a message of repentance to the people of Israel in preparation for the imminent coming of God’s kingdom and Messiah. It is made clear that John recognizes Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

At this point in the story, John has been imprisoned. While we do not know what, exactly, he may have been thinking, we can easily imagine that he either began to have real doubts about Jesus or was attempting to tacitly goad him to get on with his messianic mission. Or perhaps it was a little bit of both. In any case, in his estimation Jesus wasn’t measuring up to what the Messiah was supposed to do.

Jesus responded to John’s question this way: “the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor” (Matthew 11:5 and Luke 7:22 NLT). The point Jesus makes was that the very things he was in fact doing should be proof enough of his identity. After all, the miraculous phenomenon he performed and message he proclaimed were all signs of restoration according to the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 29:18–19; 35:5–6; 26:19; 61:1; see also Luke 4:16–21).

In other words, according to Jesus, what John expected the Messiah to do was indeed happening, albeit not in the way that John thought it would (see Matthew 3:1–12 and Luke 3:1–17). As far as anyone like John could tell, the Roman Empire was not being deposed, the unfaithful were not being judged, and the world wasn’t experiencing a dramatic renewal.

Turning to the book of 2 Peter, we find an extended warning concerning false teachers who have infiltrated the church. Among their false teachings is a claim that the promised return of Jesus to complete his messianic mission has proven itself to be untrue. After all, the world has been carrying on in much the same way since the dawn of time. Why should we expect anything this radically world-altering to occur now?

Peter’s response is that there is a good reason why God has chosen to wait, namely, so that more people would have the opportunity to repent and participate in his kingdom before the final judgment commences (2 Peter 3:8–9).

What the story of John the Baptizer and portrait of the false teachers in 2 Peter have in common is that they similarly reflect the matter of unfulfilled expectations. For John, there is, on the one hand, things the Messiah is supposed to do, but, on the other, it doesn’t really seem Jesus is doing them. John’s question betrays his discomfort with the apparent disconnect between his preconceptions and the reality set before him. For 2 Peter’s false teachers, Jesus’ return to complete the things that his first coming didn’t accomplish hasn’t yet happened and so it likely never will.

It might be argued that ardently clinging to beliefs that do not seemingly materialize serves nothing more than a means to ease the disorienting experience of cognitive dissonance, in which one becomes conflicted in his or her thoughts, like John or perhaps those listening to the false teachers mentioned in 2 Peter. So, in this light, are Christians merely playing the fool for maintaining hope in the realization of God’s purposes for the world?

No. Why, you ask? Because Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

If Jesus was resurrected from the dead, the details of his earthly ministry are not, then, simply fanciful reinterpretations of what the Messiah was expected to do. Rather, they can be rightly understood as a foretaste of a sure future that could only be secured by the Messiah’s prior suffering and death (see Isaiah 52:13–53:12). If Jesus was resurrected from the dead, we may be grateful that God has already acted to initiate the world’s redemption that will occur at the climax of human history (see 1 Corinthians 15:12–28). Ultimately, If Jesus was resurrected from the dead, everything else that God has promised to do is only a matter of time (see 1 Corinthians 15:50–58).

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25 NRSV).