In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist was having a crisis of faith.
He believed that he was the herald of the Messiah, and he did everything that God called him to do. He believed that his cousin, Jesus was to be the Messiah…and then he began to wonder. He had worked hard. He had fasted and prayed and prepared the way. And now he was in prison.
So he sent messages to Jesus: “Are you the one?” John was saying, “If you are the Messiah, then where is the transformation of this world? I thought you came to bring freedom to captives – and here I am in prison. Is this what I get? I thought you were going to bring peace, and here we are still occupied by the Roman forces. Where is the unity, the life, the justice, the glory that the Messiah is to bring?”
Then Jesus sent back word and said, “I have planted some seeds. There are some desert flowers I want you to know about. There is a man who never could hear a sound, and now he hears. There was a blind man who never saw a tree, and now he sees the sunset in the sky. There was the paralytic who never stood up a day in his life, and now he can run. There is much more to do and it will take a long time…but, John, see these wild flowers. These are the beginnings of what I, the Messiah, have come to do.”
This is the kind of hope we have to have. We have to plant the hope. It is not a vague wish. It is real, because we look around us and we look at ourselves.
And we see real desert flowers.
