Today’s Gospel reading is fascinating. If we understand what is being said, it is devastating, addressing some of the deepest questions of life and faith. Let’s open our hearts and listen closely.John’s QuestionIt begins with John the Baptist in prison, hearing about the deeds of Christ. He sends a question through his disciples, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”Pause for a moment and remember last week’s sermon on Matthew 3: John’s passionate invitation to prepare the way of the Lord, his stinging rebuke of the Pharisees, his terrifying prediction that the one to come would yield his winnowing fork, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire. Things seem to have changed. What is going on?Interpreters differ but I like to think that we are seeing a very human side of John – a human side that, to be honest, I recognise through my own experience of life and ministry. Life is filled with mountaintop experiences. Times when we seemed to be filled with the wind of the Holy Spirit. Times when it seems that we understand somehow what life is all about and what we are supposed to do.But then there is the other side: when all of that just seems to slip away. Sometimes it’s just because we’ve woken up on the wrong side of bed. Life seems miserable. God seems distant.And there are, of course, much worse things – the kind of things that John was facing: imprisonment and death. And life is filled with these things too: we stand around the coffins of our loved ones and say our goodbyes; we receive the call from the doctor that tells us the news is not good; the divorce papers come through the door. There are many such things in life. They change us forever. And they may not heal in this world. They may not be redeemable at all. We have to live with them.I believe that John was having one of these dark nights in prison: having once been so powerful in word and deed, now beset with a doubt or, at least a question: Was I right? Have I given my life for the right thing? Did I place my trust in the right person? Or have I made a mistake?Friends, this question reveals to us the human response to a life lived in faith. It is normal to wrestle with doubt and difficulty. In this passage, Jesus tells us that nobody greater has been born among us than John and even he doubted and was beset by challenge and trial.It is part of the life of faith in this world that we must do so too.Jesus’ ResponseLet’s look at Jesus’ response, which is quite stunning: “…the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them”.Jesus is here referencing two prophecies from the book of Isaiah, passages that were taken to describe the Messiah, the coming one and deliverer of Israel of whom John the Baptist spoke.One prophecy is Isaiah 35, our Old Testament reading this morning, which is a vision of an entirely renewed and recreated universe in which the old enemies of sin, suffering and death are done away with forever: “Behold your God will come…He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy”.The other prophecy is Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of the vengeance of our God”.Jesus’ answer would have been straightforward if that was all there was to it. He would have been saying quite clearly, “Yes, I am the Messiah. I am the coming one who was foretold in the prophet Isaiah”. But that is not the way John would have heard these words.This is because Jesus deliberately left out part of the prophecy from Isaiah 35 and 61. He mentioned the blind receiving their sight, lepers being cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised, and good news being preached to the poor. But he stopped there. He didn’t mention liberty for the captives or the opening of the prison to those who are in chains. Nor indeed did he mention the year of the Lord’s favour or the day of the vengeance or our God. Imagine how John would have heard these words. They described what the Messiah would do, indeed what he was doing: healing, restoring, preaching the kingdom, raising the dead – miracles and proclamations. But no liberty for captives, no opening of the prison. No vengeance upon the occupying Romans who had put him there. Jesus was sending a message to John to be interpreted something like this:“Yes, I am the Messiah. And I am proving it through healing, raising the dead and proclaiming the Kingdom. But the Kingdom of God is coming in my time and in my way. And for you, John, you must follow in the way that I will walk. You must suffer and die, as I must suffer and die. There will be no liberty for you, nor any opening of the prison.”“Blessed is the one who is not offended by me…”And this is why Jesus ends his saying with the words, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me”. It is a message to John: Don’t allow yourself to be offended by this. The word for “offended” can also be translated to mean tripped up or scandalised. In other words: you must keep faith with me through this trial. You will find true spiritual blessedness if you do.Friends, let’s stop here and consider what is being said to us. One of the things that we can draw from it is that Jesus did not come to deliver everyone from the suffering that we face in this life. If he wanted to do that, he could have done it. He certainly would have done it for the one he described as the greatest person to be born of a woman, John the Baptist. But he didn’t. And in this world, he saves none of us completely from suffering and he does not save us from death. He did not bring heaven to earth totally in his first coming. He did not end all injustice. He did not take away all diseases. He did not make wars cease. He left John in prison. And he leaves us in this world with all of our pain. We watch those around us grow frail and die. We see the healthy become sick. We stand over the graves of our parents and sometimes even our own children.But “blessed is the one who is not offended by me”. Blessed is the one who does not hold up his hands and walk away. Blessed is the one who, with faith in God, accepts this earthly state of affairs.Many people walked away from Jesus in the time of his earthly life because they could not – or would not – accept the things that he said or did. This text is a challenge to us not to do the same: he could prevent you or your loved ones from dying. He does not do so. Do you accept this? Are you willing to accept this without being scandalised by it? Such texts as this also help us to be prepared for suffering when it comes: Christian faith is no insulation from the normal pains we encounter in this world. When we suffer, no strange, unusual or unexpected thing is happening to us. This is just life. Death is a part of life. And it is a life that Jesus allowed to go on in this way.Death and Rebirth – The Pattern of the UniverseAnd yet, how are we to understand this? Why did Jesus not bring an end to all suffering, all sickness, all war, all death when he came? He could have done so. Why didn’t he?Jesus could have simply come to this earth, ended all disease, death, suffering and sin forever by a single word. And yet, instead of doing that, he healed some people and raised a limited number from the dead. But the main and central work with which his ministry climaxed was his death on the cross followed, of course, by the glorious rebirth of the resurrection. The New Testament even speaks of his being made obedient and perfect through what he suffered, as though Jesus himself was made complete in some way through these experiences.As difficult as it sounds, the answer to the question must be that our suffering is producing something in us and through us that is greater that is more important and outweighs even the present experience of pain and grief. Indeed, the Apostle Paul speaks in exactly this way in Romans chapter 8: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us”. And in 2 Corinthians 4: “This light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison”.What do these passages tell us? They reveal to us something of the secret of the universe, something that we already know in a sense. We see it in so many ways: it is through the labour of the farmer or the gardener that the crops or the flowers grow; it is through the hard work of the athlete, that his muscles are made strong and his body enhanced; it is through the diligent and patient study of the scholar that his mind is made knowledge and supple; it is through the suffering of childbirth that new life is born into the world. It is death, always, death to comfort, death to self, death to inactivity and sloth, death to one’s own immediate desires, death to a life free from pain and struggle that leads to something new, that leads to life.And all of this points to one of the greatest truths of all: that our suffering in this world, when united to Christ, will lead to a life so glorious and wonderful that we cannot possibly imagine it now. All of those pictures of death and rebirth that we see in this world are but a mere foreshadowing of that great life, that great joy which is inevitably coming.The writer to the Hebrews tells us to look to Jesus, ‘who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross’ (Hebrews 12:2). And so there is the link between this day – Gaudete Sunday, a day of rejoicing – and our suffering. If we will unite our suffering to Chr