Hey everyone and welcome to our final foundations podcast this week. It’s been awesome to journey with you over the past few days.

Our passage today is Matthew 11: 1-19. We are going to focus on verses 2-3: When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

REFLECTION:

What do we do when things don’t quite turn out the way we expect them to? That’s what I’d love for us to think about today.

To be human is to experience that. Sometimes it’s a small thing like you miss the bus, or technology doesn’t work – this is something that quite often happens with me. Maybe a lesson you are teaching doesn’t go as planned. That conversation you had with that person didn’t reach the conclusion you wanted it to.

Sometimes it can be pretty major stuff like our circumstances suddenly change – we get sick, we can’t do our job as we would like. People can disappoint us, they can let us down – perhaps that may be the hardest one of all?

How we deal with disappointment has a knock on impact for how we live our lives.

I heard something in a podcast recently which got me thinking about all of this. Disappointments aren’t chosen – we can’t do anything about them. They just kind of happen to us. It’s in how we respond to disappointment that we have a choice.

In today’s passage we read about John the Baptist – someone living with perhaps disappointment. This was a man who from before he was born had been anointed by God to go before Jesus, to prepare the way for the Messiah. To call people to a baptism of repentance in preparation for God’s chosen one to usher in the new Messianic age, to over throw the Romans and to set his people free.

And yet he finds himself imprisoned because he challenged Herod – the Roman ruler over this area at that time – about his promiscuous and unsavoury behaviour. This can’t have been how John expected it to go?

And inside his jail cell, he hears stories of Jesus – the one for whom he has gone ahead of. Except they aren’t the stories he was expecting to hear. John probably would have been expecting Jesus to be some kind of powerful military leader organising a revolt – no sign of that at this point in the Gospel accounts. He might have expected Jesus to be this ascetic or mystic in the desert – too holy to be around normal people. Jesus was, as we read later on in the passage hanging around with bad people – the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sinners. Added to all of this the fact that Jesus didn’t fast in line with what the very religious people of the time were doing, even some of John’s disciples – as we read on Monday – meant this must have left John feeling very confused. Maybe even disappointed in who Jesus was….

We see that in verse 3 John asked some of his disciples to go and straight up ask Jesus, ‘Are you the Messiah? Or should we expect somebody else?’ Ouch!

And of course Jesus’ response is to report back to John what has been happening… that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf can hear and the dead are raised. John would have heard this and he would have known. This is what was prophesised by Isaiah. The year of the Lord’s favour. God’s kingdom was at hand. The king was here.

Jesus paints for John the bigger picture. That God’s got a plan. It’s just that it’s not quite what John expected it to be.

Here’s the thing….all of us can point to those moments when we discover that life isn’t quite as we had expected it to be. To say we are in one of those moments right now is a bit of an understatement.

So how do we deal with that? How do we respond? What’s the answer?

It sounds obvious but I think it’s to know Jesus. To come close to Him. Like John we might feel a bit trapped right now – like we can’t see how this is all goi...