Go and Tell John the Things Which You Hear and See

Pastor Ray had just returned from three weeks away, including a mission trip to Guatemala with Hope of Life International, and he used the morning to report on what the team saw and did there before tying it to a passage in Matthew. The message moved from the objective facts of the trip to a word for anyone sitting in the room who is struggling with faith. John the Baptist in prison became the lens for all of it.

What was said

Eight people from First B Jackson joined a team of 106 from across the US and Canada in Zacapa, Guatemala. The team raised more than $225,000, which funded a new diagnostic laboratory at St. Luke's Hospital on the Hope of Life campus and the first clean water well in a nearby hill community. Beyond the money, the team painted the elderly home, built a house for a family of eleven, ran medical clinics at five locations serving roughly 200 people per day, distributed more than 300 pairs of eyeglasses, washed the feet of close to 500 people and gave them shoes, and ran vacation Bible school averaging 60 to 70 kids a day. Two people accepted Christ on the team, and seven were baptized.

The point of going through all of that, Pastor Ray said, was not to show off what the team accomplished. He was telling the congregation the things they heard and saw, the same words Jesus used when he sent John's disciples back to John in prison. The parallel was intentional.

Matthew 11 opens with John the Baptist in prison sending two disciples to ask Jesus directly: are you the one, or do we look for another? Pastor Ray paused on who is asking that question. This is not a skeptic on the street. This is the man who baptized Jesus, who heard the Father's voice from heaven, who had been filled with the Holy Spirit since before he was born. If John could sit in a prison cell and genuinely struggle with whether any of it was real, then struggling with faith is not a sign that someone has lost it.

Jesus did not rebuke John. He told the disciples to go back and report what they were seeing: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. That list from Matthew maps directly onto Isaiah, the same scroll Jesus read in his first sermon in Nazareth when he said the scripture was fulfilled in their hearing. He was saying to John, mid-ministry, this is exactly what I said I came to do, and it is happening.

Pastor Ray then laid the Guatemala trip over that same list, item by item. People who came into the medical clinic holding onto someone else left wearing glasses and could see. A ninety-seven-pound woman who carried water up a steep hillside on her head every day got ibuprofen she had never had before and could walk without pain. A man had a pebble removed from one ear and could hear. A father named Ken, who came on the trip reluctantly for his son's sake and had checked the box for non-existent faith on the application form, accepted Christ and was baptized in Guatemala.

There was one thing missing from Jesus's reply to John, and Pastor Ray did not let it go unnoticed. Jesus did not include the line about proclaiming liberty to the captives. John was a captive. Jesus knew John was not getting out of jail, and he knew John would likely die for what he had stood for. That was not an accident or an oversight. Jesus sent John the evidence he needed without making a promise he was not going to keep in the way John might have hoped. And immediately after John's disciples walked away, Jesus turned to the crowd and said no one born of women was greater than John. The man in doubt in prison was the man Jesus honored most publicly. He did not break the bruised reed, Pastor Ray said, and he does not do that.