The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus and the Jewish Story – Real Hope, Not Just Wishful Thinking:  Mt.11:2 – 5

^11:2 Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?’ ⁴ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Go and report to John what you hear and see: ⁵ the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.’

In June of 2012, I went to Uganda with students from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship groups from various campuses in New England.  One thing we did was serve a slum area of Kampala, the capital, called Mulago.  I was shocked by the huts made out of mud and thatch, the green rivers of sewage, the children playing near all the garbage, and the dense population of the slums.  How thick and intractable the poverty seemed! 

One of the U.S. students on this trip said that she had come to Uganda prepared to talk about the skeptic’s question:  Does suffering cast a long shadow of doubt on the possibility of there being a good God?  Instead, she found that people in Uganda didn’t ask that question.  She met not one.  They looked to a good God as the basis for hope and change.  This highlights something that commonly comes up. 

Why is it that ‘the poor and the oppressed’ often have deep faith and hope in a good God, whereas the affluent Westerner who hardly suffers in life looks upon the poverty of ‘the poor and the oppressed’ and concludes that there is no God? 

The skeptic argues that people in suffering are not in their right mind, and look to an irrational hope for relief.  They would read Matthew 11:2 – 5, the prophecy of Isaiah or the longing of John the Baptist, and feel doubtful; isn’t it a wishful fantasy to want a messianic hero to change the world? 

On the other hand, the believer argues that without a good God, human dignity would have no foundation, human suffering would have neither moral significance nor urgency, and hope would have no rational basis.  Whose perspective is more authoritative?  Whose perspective should be given more weight? 

The believer’s argument is not proof, but merely a demonstration of logic.  It shows that the ‘problem of human suffering’ arises within a theistic framework, and primarily a Christian framework, and not outside of it.  ‘Proof’ for Christian belief is something we’d have to find in the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection.  But on that foundation, the believer’s argument is a valid one.  The skeptic’s argument, however, is not based on any demonstrable fact, but a psychological accusation in the tradition of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.  The skeptic uses the hermeneutic of suspicion to cast doubt on the mind of anyone who is suffering:  Suffering people are less likely to reason properly about the existence of God, and irrationally hope in a good God to save them.  So suffering people cannot be trusted to adequately reason through this question; it is only people who are not suffering (i.e. especially those who enjoy western style luxuries) who can be trusted to think straight. 

But what if the person who enjoys western style luxuries is the one who is not thinking straight?  Perhaps a subtle form of arrogance has crept into their thinking that is difficult to acknowledge?  For the skeptic’s accusation is not only a psychological sneer, it is demonstrably not factually true.  Prior to ancient Israel, no people group that we know of hoped for a good God to save them from their suffering.  Ancient Israel experienced particular moments of deliverance from a God who claimed to be good, and this laid an epistemological foundation for people to wonder at whether this God might be the one true God who is truly good and will defeat evil in the world.  This unusual God left historical and literary evidence about His purpose and character, like the scroll of Isaiah the prophet, which Jesus refers to in the passage above. 

Thus, before ancient Israel and the formation of the Hebrew Bible, it was simply not logically open (or emotionally possible) to any human being to hope that a good God would deliver us from our suffering and be victorious over evil.  What reason would anyone have to hope that evil would one day be defeated?  That is why Hindu or Buddhist or Jainist theories of escape from this physical world to some soul-heaven were much more common.  The ancient Greeks along with the Hindus believed that the world would stay the same and the best you could do was be reincarnated into a higher life form or higher human caste with less suffering, and maybe – in Hinduism – escape into the nirvana of non-being.  The biblical tradition was utterly unusual for its insistence on a victory of good over evil played out in this physical world.  The expectation for this was held in place by powerful actions done by this God in history, demonstrating His goodness and His ability to fulfill His remarkable good promises. 

Even now, why would suffering people even hope for more than a personal, private escape?  Why would people hope that this world would be restored, transfigured, and changed?  Only people who have been exposed to a new type of hope would imagine it:  a hope that embraces not only the oppressed but the oppressor, not only the poor but the rich, not only one’s own people but one’s enemies.  But that hope – the hope found in Jesus – is so radical so as to demand a solid reason for believing it.  It is not just hope conjured out of thin air.  If a final resurrection is the hope, then such a claim can only be anchored in place by a preliminary resurrection in real history – that of Jesus of Nazareth – observed, handled, touched, and transformative.