When the Messiah Goes Dark

What with all the manger scenes here at church, one right here before our very eyes, it seems silly to say that we don’t know what’s going on. Yet, our gospel lesson today has the evangelist, John the Baptist, proclaiming to an anxious, edgy crowd, “Among you is standing he whom you don’t know.” John’s listeners are stressed out enough after hearing him preach of a coming messiah. Now, he rattles them even more by saying that the messiah has already come, and if you reach our hand out, you might just touch him. In fact, the messiah, the one who is so great that next to him John feels like something lower than a slave, that one may be checking you out right now and you not know it.

The crowd hearing John thought they knew everything about the messiah. He would come with the kingdom, the power and the glory surrounding him to terrify Israel’s enemies and to make the Jewish nation great again. Is there anything we don’t know about the Messiah? We don’t know “jack” according to John the Baptist. He paints an awesome and terrifying picture of the Messiah, and then he makes this awesome and terrifying Messiah go dark. He makes the Messiah hide in plain sight. Like a seed growing secretly. Like yeast fermenting in bread. Or like a sinister Fifth column. Like a sleeper cell of terrorists. Like a spy that blends in. Like an obscure multi-millionaire. Awesome but hidden.

If you are someone who does not like dealing with threats in the dark and who believes that the more you know, the more you control, a dark Messiah freaks you out. Scared that you will be ambushed without warning by one standing next to you who has the power to reduce you to nothing. Scared that the Messiah will sneak up on you. Is it you? Is it you? None of educated elite, none of the experts, who came to question John could point him out. He did not fit their pattern of the kingdom, the power and the glory.

How do you cope with a hidden Messiah? We chase away the dark with light, tinsel, trimmings, glitter and glam. We make the Messiah do our bidding by turning him into a personification of something that glorifies our egos, like an ideology of white supremacy.

But the Messiah goes dark in order not to be what we want. We have no alternative but to look into the crowd with fear and trembling, and let the Messiah-man reveal himself to us.

The Messiah is one of the masses, blending in the crowd. When God turns God’s self into humanity God chooses to be an ordinary person, an ordinary guy. From now on, all the big things you can say about God, like kingdom, power and glory, will come to us through the love of a human being. God so loves the world that he comes as a human to live with us.

[You cannot pick Jesus out of a line-up. You cannot pick him out in a gaggle of refugees straggling along. And yet, all things were made by him. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is confessed to be the Son of God, but only at the moment when he dies as a criminal. Even when God stands him up as the New Man resurrected on Easter, he is mistaken for the hired garden help.]

Look, you could not pick Jesus out of a Cowboys crowd when it comes to being ordinary. The man you do not know is a nobody. But God opens our eyes to see that this nobody is awesome; his life has the power to raise us up. He is the noble nobody. God loves us enough to transform what it means to be human down to the depths of it. He is the refuse that is regal. He is the flotsam that is famous. He is triumphant trash. He is victorious vermin.

The radical message of Christmas is that it is out of the deep and the dark places of humanity that God emerges in Jesus the Messiah. And if you ever travel the dirt roads of the deep and dark places, I assure you there is someone who has gotten there before you and now is trudging along with you. He has a face like yours but it is the face of God. And if you have a child or a friend or a loved one who is out there, somewhere in a deep and dark place, I can assure you that they are spotted and loved by the Messiah who is in the dark with them. You can have a measure of joy this Christmas, knowing that your loved one is in his hands.

This man in the crowd is available for everyone because he gives himself utterly away. Do you have the slightest twinge of attraction to him? If your answer is Yes, then be of good cheer. With him you are no longer a nobody. You no longer live a hum-drum life. You live with energy that comes from bonding to this Messiah-man. Baptism makes you stuck with him, makes you want what he wants, like the basics of food, shelter, education, peace-making and climate-health. Baptism makes the Messiah-man become the New Man in your life. He spurs you to take a second, hard look at your values, and I am certain that he will make you out of step with what passes for the kingdom, the power and the glory in our polarized, pompous nation.

The blessing of Christmas is to give us a Jesus that is ordinary. He sees our tears. Our crying makes him shed human tears, but those tears fall on the face of God. He joins his voice with ours. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When our voices blend together, he gives us a new courage to make us rise up to meet the moment. The union of our crying voices gives birth to new stamina, perseverance, grit, and determination.

It is the best blessing God could give us that Jesus is ordinary. He has ears to hear our shouts of joy and happiness. When we are happy and rejoice, he is happy with us, but his face that breaks out in smiles and laughter is the face of God. He embraces our hopes and joys and intensifies them into the laughter of God. The laughter of God is another way of talking about God’s glory. When Jesus’ face erupts with our laughter, then God is glorified. When God is glorified, the dark places of life are filled with light, hope, plenty, security, and peace. Let us, imperfect as we are, create joy and hope that banishes darkness and makes human laughter ring through the halls of heaven.