Self-Doubts

Luke 7:18-20

You're going "like sixty" and good things are happening -- or at least things are happening, whether they are good or not. You have an ultimate aim in life and you are bound and determined to get there. Then all of a sudden, the world stops spinning and you find your universe falling apart, all the stable things in your life flying off in all directions. Your personal gravitational force has quit functioning. What before you assumed you could hang on to for stability no longer avails itself. You are free-floating, drifting off in a sea of useless flotsam.

That's how John, the one we know as the Baptizer, must have felt. He's doing exactly what he believes God has called him to do -- preach repentance to prince and pauper alike and baptize all willing to repent. Then one day he preaches repentance to the king, happens to be a semi-king named Herod. Tells Herod that he was wrong to take his brother's wife and wrong to do a whole bunch of other things. And for that he lands in prison.

Luke puts it in a classic way. "Herod added this to all the other evil things he had done: He locked John up in prison." (3:20)

So there John sits with nothing to do but think on his mess of a situation. As he sorts it all out, he realizes that his primary purpose in life was to be the forerunner, the announcer of the Messiah. That's what the angel said to his parents before he was born. That's why he lived in the desert all those years and put up with all that he encountered in life, including this wrongful prison sentence. Why, he was even a teetotaler, all because that's what the angel said he needed to do. He gave up a normal life as a young man to fulfill his God-given mission in life. And hadn't he passed the spotlight on to his cousin, Jesus, because he had discerned that Jesus was the Messiah, the one for whom he was to prepare the way? He, John, must step back so that Jesus could step forward into the limelight.

If that is indeed the case, that his role has been simply to prepare the way for the Lord, then all this -- even prison -- is worth it. But left with only his own thoughts to keep him company, John begins to wonder.

One day some of his own disciples manage to get in to see him and they share all that Jesus has been doing - the teachings, the crowds, the miracles. So John sends two of these friends of his to ask Jesus, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?"

John just wants to make sure. Of all his responsibilities, by far the most significant was to announce to the world that the Messiah had come. Whatever else happens -- whether he is freed, languishes in prison, or is killed -- as long as he has achieved this most important responsibility, then his life has been worth everything he has been through or is going to go through.

There is only one person who can give him the answer: Jesus himself. He trusts Jesus -- one, because deep down inside he still believes Jesus is the Messiah, and, two, because Jesus is, after all, his cousin. And if by some chance, Jesus is not the Messiah, as John had thought, his cousin will surely not let him down.

Self-doubts are very much a part of every life. And they are particularly to be expected when life turns sour, when the unexpected arises, when our dreams morph into nightmares. Left to our own devises with no external clarification, these internal wrestlings can turn into painful, deadening depression.

What dispels self-doubt is a sense that what we have been or are going through has some higher purpose, especially if that higher purpose is connected with some mission we have already had in life or something new to which we can aspire. John senses that the only person who can clarify these inner wranglings is Jesus himself. Even if the answer he gets is the worst-case scenario (as in, John was totally wrong about Jesus), an awful answer is better than no answer at all.

So John turns to the only one he knows who can answer his own doubts and the only one he knows who will be honest with him, no matter how hard the truth is: Jesus. Even in this darkest hour, John reaches deep inside and finds a whisper of faith to hang on to - and in that whisper, hope is born anew.