3rd Sunday in Advent
December 12, 2004
Matthew 11:2-11

^11:2When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples ³to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” ⁴Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: ⁵The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. ⁶Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.”

⁷As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: “What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? ⁸If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. ⁹Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. ¹⁰This is the one about whom it is written: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’ ¹¹I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (NIV).

Christmas or Chrismahanukwanzakah?

  Right now, billions of people around the world are preparing to celebrate Christmas. But they don’t all do it for the same reason. You and I know that Jesus is the “reason for the season.” Christmas is the celebration of his birth. But millions of people don’t know and don’t care about Jesus. If his birth is a good excuse for a holiday, then so be it! On the other hand, why not phase out the “Christ” part of the season and come up with different emphasis? Say “Season’s Greetings!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” The Jewish holiday Hanukah began last week and the new African heritage holiday of Kwanza begins the day after Christmas. I saw a web site where they combined them all and called it Chrismahanukwanzakah, a big, generic, inclusive holiday for everyone!

  I suppose that makes sense if there is nothing special about Jesus. So is there something special about Jesus, something that makes him qualitatively different from all other people? Is there a reason to maintain and celebrate the holy day of Christmas instead of Chrismahanukwanzakah?

  That question takes us right to the prison cell of John the Baptist. When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Most of you have seen pictures on the news of hostages in Iraq who subsequently have been beheaded. The media have shown video clips of them pleading for their lives. Can you even begin to fathom what it must feel like knowing that you will likely be beheaded? If nothing else, it would be a moment when you would think very seriously through your beliefs about judgment and life after death. John may not have known that Herod would cut off his head, but I think he knew that he would die in Herod’s prison. John had spent his life preparing people to follow Jesus. He proclaimed to all that Jesus was the Messiah who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and slay the wicked. But John wasn’t going to get to see the Messiah come into his power and glory. So he just wants to hear one more time from Jesus’ mouth that he was the promised saviour. He wants a word of assurance before his death.

  In God’s mercy, you and I are not sitting in a prison somewhere awaiting our execution. We likely don’t feel at this moment the same need as John for assurance that Jesus is the Christ. Yet in a way we face a test of faith much more insidious, much more dangerous than John. Rather than scare us with a sword, the devil is slowly anesthetising us so that we won’t feel the knife in our back. If he can turn Christmas into a generic holiday, a Chrismahanukwanzakah, we’ll stop thinking about Jesus the Christ. What we really need to do today is to join with John in asking that question, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Or to contextualize the question, “Do we need to celebrate Christmas or Chrismahanukwanzakah?

  Listen to Jesus’ answer to John. “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” Jesus does more than give a simple yes or no answer. He tells John’s messengers to look around and gather some data, some objective evidence for who he is. Yet they are not to look for just any data. They are to look for the things of which the Prophet Isaiah spoke concerning the end of time, of the Day of the Lord. Say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. (Isaiah 35:4-6).

  The point here is not so much that Jesus did miracles but that those miracles were the ones of which Isaiah spoke. Others like Moses, Elijah and Elisha also performed many extraordinary signs in their day. What Jesus is pointing out is not the number of his miracles but that his works are the ones Isaiah said would happen in the last days.

  In other words, Jesus appeals to the Scriptures to answer the question. John could know with confidence that Jesus was the Christ by seeing how he fulfilled the Scriptures. In fact, if you take your Bible some time and flip through the Gospels, you will be amazed at how Jesus over and over again quotes Scripture. He quoted Scripture to the devil during his temptation; he quoted Scripture to justify his actions and those of his disciples on the Sabbath; he quoted Scripture to explain why he spoke in parables, why divorce was wrong and why he chased the money changers out of the temple; he quoted Scripture to defend the resurrection and his divinity. Those are just a few examples. Here in our text today, he also explains who John is by quoting Scripture the prophet Malachi! John was a prophet. Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’

  What I’m getting at here is the importance that Jesus placed on the testimony of the Scriptures. John, in prison, received a comforting word of assurance that Jesus was the Messiah not on the testimony of the crowds, but on the testimony of Scripture. Again on the testimony of Scripture, Jesus assured the crowd not only that he was the Messiah but that John was the prophet to prepare his way.

  So our question about Jesus brings us to another. Are the Scriptures reliable? Do we have the real words of Isaiah and Malachi about the Saviour to come? With respect to the Gospels, do we have the real words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? When we celebrate Jesus’ virgin birth in Bethlehem, the moment when the eternal word became flesh and dwelt among us, is that what really happened? If it isn’t, then Chrismahanukwanzakah makes more sense than Christmas after all!

  Since everything we are about to celebrate on December 25th depends on the truth of the Scriptures it should come as no surprise that critics love to attack the reliability of the Scriptures. Sceptics question the existence of angels like Gabriel, Jesus’ virgin birth, his divinity, even that there ever was a Jesus. But if there is a reliable historical witness to all of that, such scepticism becomes much less a matter of doubt than of rebellion. So the unbeliever wants to discredit the reliability of the Bible. He wants to show that it’s old and full of errors so that you can’t possibly take it seriously. And that undermines not only Christmas, but the whole of the Christian faith.

  So we ask, is there any scientific evidence for the reliability of the Scriptures? Oh yes, far more than for any other ancient literature! For example, until about 60 years ago, our oldest copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, dated to just before 1000 A.D. That’s pretty far removed from the time of Jesus. Naturally one wonders whether a copy 1000 years after Jesus is reliable. However, in 1947 a Bedouin shepherd boy discovered what has become know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is a collection of some 40,000 fragments of about 500 different books. Among those books are Hebrew texts of every book of the Old Testament except Esther. Not all of those books are complete copies, but there are complete copies of Isaiah that date to about 100 B.C., over 100 years before Jesus!

  A renowned scholar notes that, “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier then the oldest dated manuscript previously known (980 AD), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more then 95% of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. They do not affect the message of revelation in the slightest.” (Gleason Archer, Survey of the Old Testament. http://www.truthnet.org/Christianity/Apologetics/hasthebiblechanged8/).

  So is the Old Testament reliable? Yes! We have now the same Scriptures which Jesus used and quoted!

  The Greek New Testament is also very well preserved. Right now, there are more than 5300 manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts of the New Testament. A very few of them date from to the second century, that is, only about 100 years after Jesus and the Apostles, but very many from the 3rd and 4th centuries. Compare that to other ancient Greek texts like the History of Herodotus. Herodotus was a Greek historian from the 5th century B.C. There are only 8 copies of his work written about 900 A.D., 1300 years after the fact! “Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals.” (McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, p. 47-48). Compared to that, our New Testament is incomparably more reliable!

  The many Greek manuscripts do have tens of thousands of variations. But careful study shows that the overwhelming majority are due to copying mistakes, like when two words sound the same, or variant spellings of the same word, like between Canadian and American English, or a later scribe trying to correct the grammar! The result is that a modern Greek New Testament is about 98% pure.

  There are many other facts and figures we could add to these but the point should be clear. We have a reliable Bible! Now that doesn’t prove that God spoke to Moses or that Jesus was the son of God. But it does prove that the Church didn’t make up stories about them. It proves that we know what the Prophets said, what Jesus said and what the Apostles said. So we can be sure that Jesus said to John, “Yes, I am the one who was coming!” We can be sure that Jesus said that John the Baptist was a prophet. We can be sure that Matthew said that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died was buried and rose again Easter morning. There is no lab test that will prove that those things really did happen that way, but we are very sure that’s what was said.

  Our Christian Faith is not a blind faith. It rests on historically verifiable data. It is not an act of ignorance or fantasy to celebrate Jesus’ virgin birth on December 25th. We are sure of the facts! On the contrary, it is an act of ignorance or rebellion to shun Jesus and celebrate Chrismahanukwanzakah or some other artificial nonsense. Don’t let the devil and the world confuse and anesthetise you with its ignorant babble. A reliable Bible assures us that Jesus is the Christ. So celebrate Christmas!