Soft robes and patient faith

Text:  James 5.7-10 and Matthew 11.2-11

In the name of the God who is patient with prophets and doubters alike.  Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist is in prison.  That matters.  We tend to picture him as permanently wild and indestructible — hair uncut, voice booming, locusts crunching obligingly between his teeth.  But here he is, locked away and silenced, hemmed in by bars and chains.  And from that place comes a question that feels almost shocking in its honesty:  “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

This is not the question of a cynic.  It is the question of a faithful person whose expectations have collided with reality.  John had proclaimed judgement.  He had spoken of axes at roots and fire in hands.  And now the one he pointed to is healing the sick, eating with sinners, and leaving Herod and the Romans very much alive and very much in charge.  The kingdom does not look how John expected.

Jesus’ reply is not a lecture.  It is a list.  The blind see.  The lame walk.  The lepers are cleansed.  The poor hear good news.  In other words:  look carefully.  The kingdom is not arriving with the drama you imagined, but it is arriving all the same.  And then Jesus turns to the crowd and offers that curious reflection about John himself.  First, he says, ‘John is not a reed shaken by the wind’ — he’s someone who sticks solidly to his beliefs.  And John is not someone dressed in soft robes.

Soft robes.  It’s an arresting phrase.  John, after all, is raw.  Uncomfortable.  Scruffy.  He lives on the margins, speaks inconvenient truths, and pays for it with his freedom, first, and then ultimately his life.  Soft robes belong elsewhere — in royal palaces, among those insulated from consequence, buffered from hunger, fear, and uncertainty.  In Jesus’ world, they belong to those who benefit from the system as it is.

It is not hard to draw a line from there to here.  We live in a world where a very small number of people wear metaphorical soft robes indeed — hoovering up wealth, land, influence, and resources, while others are told to tighten their belts, be patient, and wait their turn.  Did you hear President Trump, last week, advising people feeling the pinch of his tariffs to stop buying boxes of pencils, and more than a couple of dolls for their children? 

The gospel has never been particularly impressed by soft robes, or by those who wear them.  Not because comfort is evil in itself, but because insulation from reality so easily dulls compassion.  When you are wrapped in enough layers… of wealth… of security guards… of bullet‑proof windscreens… you can so easily forget how sharp the wind is for everyone else.

There’s something else we should not miss — something that I spoke about in more detail on Thursday, should you want to go deeper.  It’s this:  John is great, Jesus says — the greatest, even — and yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.  That is not a dismissal of John, but a redefinition of greatness.  John stands on the threshold, pointing forward.  Those who step into the kingdom — however haltingly, however imperfectly — participate in something John could only glimpse.

Which brings us to James.  “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”  James is writing to people who genuinely believed that Christ’s return was imminent.  Soon.  Any moment now.  History, as we know, had other ideas.  And that raises an awkward question we are sometimes tempted to dodge:  what do we do with the fact that Jesus did not return on the timetable the early Christians expected?

One option is embarrassment — quietly downplaying the urgency of those early hopes.  (“Let’s not draw too much attention to the naiveté of those early Christians… isn’t it sweet that they thought Jesus was coming back imminently!”).  Another reaction is denial — constantly resetting the clock and insisting the end is just around the corner.  How many times in the last 200 years have prophets claimed to know when Jesus will return?

James offers neither option.  Instead, he offers patience — not passive waiting, but active endurance.  James offers the patience of farmers:  farmers are those who know that growth cannot be forced, only tended.  James offers the patience of people who refuse to grumble against one another while the world remains unresolved.

So, the early Christians were wrong about the timing, but not about the posture.  They were wrong to think the story would be wrapped up quickly.  They were right to live as though it mattered now.  Faithful living was never meant to be a temporary holding pattern until escape.  Rather, it was always meant to be the shape of life itself.

John’s question from prison and James’ call to patience meet us exactly where we are.  We know more than they did — we know that history has continued, that injustice persists, that the kingdom has not arrived in fullness.  And yet we are asked the same question in reverse:  will we live as though God is still at work, even when outcomes disappoint us?

Jesus does not invite us into soft robes.  He invites us into attentiveness — to healing (wherever it happens), to good news (wherever it is spoken), to justice wherever it stirs.  He blesses those who are not scandalised by a kingdom that arrives quietly, stubbornly, and without regard for our preferred schedules.

So we wait — not with folded arms, but with open eyes.  We wait by refusing to grumble, by standing alongside the hurting and the marginal rather than retreating into comfort, by trusting that patient faithfulness is not wasted time.  John waited in prison.  Farmers wait for rain.  We wait in a world that is unfinished.  And blessed are those, says Jesus, who do not take offence at that.  Amen.