This is certainly the week for thinking about John the
Baptiser – he’s the focus of readings all through this week. Today, I’d like to home in on one particular
facet of John’s character – a facet which speaks directly to us today…and it’s
this: John was a sceptic. After being thrown into prison, by King
Herod, John sent a message to Jesus asking ‘Are you the Messiah? Or are we to expect another?’. This is the same John who didn’t become one
of Jesus’ own disciples. After having so
enthusiastically announced Jesus’ coming, after formally recognising him by
pointing at Jesus and declaring ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ – John, weirdly, carried
on ploughing his own furrow…doing things his own way. Some of John’s own disciples left John, and
joined up with Jesus: but John himself, carried on angrily calling people to
repentance with dire warnings. He became
such an annoyance, to the likes of the King, (over the King’s incestuous
marriage) that he ended up locked up, and then beheaded.
Jesus, on the other hand, preferred the tactic of
Love. John was all about winnowing forks
and the baptism of fire. Jesus was all
about loving your neighbour. John lived
on the margins of society, shouting his warnings from the desert. Jesus entered into the day to day lives of
those he came to save. So, John, it seems,
was sceptical about Jesus.
Scepticism is all around us, isn’t it? We are – perhaps justifiably - sceptical
about the Government’s promises to ‘stop the boats’ or ‘rebuild the NHS’. We are sceptical even about the great
national organs of balance and truth that we’ve trusted for generations, like
the BBC or the great newspapers of our nation.
Scepticism doesn’t just pervade our national life
though. It also pervades our thinking
about God. Just like John the Baptiser,
we wonder whether Jesus’ claims to be God’s Son, indeed God himself, can really
be true. And, if we are not careful, our
scepticism can drive us to throw aside everything we believe, and on which we
have based our lives.
But scepticism is not, in itself, a bad thing. Scepticism is part of a process of
growth. It’s part of ‘putting away
childish things’ (as St Paul so memorably said – see 1 Cor.13). For a sceptical mind is ultimately a
questioning mind. It’s the kind of mind
which asks ‘where does this information come from? Is it trustworthy?’ Philosophers and theologians have a long name
for this kind of enquiring thought – they call it ‘epistemology’ – which
essentially asks the question ‘how do we know what we think we know?’. It’s a question that intelligent sceptics ask
about the Bible, for example. We are
taught, by some parts of the church, that the Bible is the inerrant word of
God. But is it? Really?
Or is it, rather, a collection of writings, by ancient ancestors, who
were wrestling with the reality of God, just as we do?
Sceptical thought should lead us to deeper thought,
and to greater understanding. When John
asked, via messengers, whether Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus said this to the
messengers: "Go your way, and tell
John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk,
the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the
gospel is preached". (Lk 7.22).
Notice how Jesus doesn’t get angry at John for his
sceptical, doubting question. Instead,
he answers the question with a powerful illustration. And invites John to arrive at a new
understanding. Sadly we don’t know what
the results of Jesus’ answer to John’s question were….not least because the
poor fellow literally lost his head a short time later. But we can see that expressions of doubt, and
scepticism, were not rejected by Jesus.
Instead, he confronted the sceptic head-on, and gave him new facts to consider. And this is how the healthy work of
scepticism should work for all religious people. We should never be afraid of doubt, because
doubt is part of the process of digging for truth. Scepticism, used wisely, is the shovel we use
to unearth the gold nuggets of real truth.
Of course, like any human characteristic, it’s
possible to take scepticism too far. At
the far end of religious scepticism, for example, we find the ultra-atheists,
like every preacher’s ‘boogie-man’, Richard Dawkins. I genuinely feel sorry for such atheists. They become SO sceptical of religions, and of
religious thought, that they lose all objectivity. They fail to understand the simple truth that
atheism is a faith position, too. To
state, categorically that God does not exist takes just as much faith as
stating that God is real. Both are faith
positions. Neither can be proved
objectively. Sadly, for the most
prominent atheists, scepticism is no longer a shovel with which to dig for
truth, but a bulldozer to cover over any view which is not his own.
When I was a child, I thought like a child. But now I am a man, I have put away childish
things. But even now, I still can only
see through a glass darkly…and therefore I need to embrace the grown-up,
adult-brained task of being sceptical about my faith, and about my own
political and world views. That’s the
adult thing to do. As the Christmas
story unfolds around us again, perhaps you might find yourself sceptical about
any number of things. Does it matter
whether Jesus was born of a virgin? What
is an angel, anyway? Why on earth would
the civil authorities tell people to go back to the town of their birth to be
counted in a census? Why was the
astrology of the Wise Men rewarded when the Bible commands us to ignore
astrology? These (and many more) are all good questions to ask.
And if you honestly seek answers to honest sceptical
questions, I promise you that those answers will lead you into a much more
profound, much more meaningful understanding of the truth. You too can unearth – with your sceptical
shovel - new understandings of the depth of the story about when God came to
town. A little town. Called
Bethlehem. Amen.
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