Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Isaiah 11. 1-10; Matthew 3.1-12
“The wolf shall live with the lamb… and a little child shall lead them.”
Vanuatu sand drawing, recognised by UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. © Philip Capper, 2 June 2006, used under CC-BY 2.0.
For the results of a school exam; for the results of a medical exam. For the interminable process of buying and selling a house to be completed. For the rhubarb to be ripe enough to pick. For the text message from you daughter telling you she’s safely home. Waiting is an unavoidable part of all of our lives.
Far off in the South Pacific, just over a thousand miles east of Australia, lies the island nation of Vanuatu, home to around 300,000 people. In the 1930s, the John Frum movement emerged on the islands, then known as the New Hebrides. It prophesied that an era of prosperity would soon arrive, thanks to American assistance, along with the removal of the European colonial rulers and the Christianity they promoted. Just a few years later, in 1942, the prophecies seemed to come true, when the New Hebrides became an enormous rear base area for America’s island-hopping war against Japan. Briefly, American troops outnumbered islanders, and gave them copious supplies of tents, clothing, and spam.
The John Frum movement, said to be a corruption of the phrase ‘John from America’, is the most famous of the Pacific islands’ cargo cults. After the war, followers of John Frum built symbolic landing strips to encourage American aeroplanes to return and bring them more ‘cargo’. While Vanuatu is nowadays an overwhelmingly Christian country, several hundred Ni-Vanuatu still await the return of John Frum after eighty years. When asked why, a village headman told a foreign journalist, “Eighty years? You Christians have been waiting for your Jesus to return for 2,000 years.”
Yes, after 2,000 years, we Christians are still waiting for Christ to return. We should make no apologies for that. We live at a time when it has become obvious that, as I often say, the power of human cleverness has exceeded the ability of human wisdom to restrain it. Oh, how I wish Jesus Christ would return quickly and sort out the mess we’ve made of things!
Beyond that, it seems to be the case that whether or not Christianity is true, there is something deep in human nature that longs for the world to be redeemed by a leader who will usher in a future that is better than anything people could create by mundane means. Just as we await the return of Christ and some of the Ni-Vanuatu await the return of John Frum, so some Muslims await the return of the Mahdi – and almost all Muslims await the return of Jesus Christ – while Buddhists await the Maitreya and Hindus await the Kalki Avatar. Many indigenous American, Polynesian, and African religions have a similar figure.
Across human cultures, there seems to be a deep yearning for a universal reign of peace, where the world’s troubles are ended; an era where not only can human beings live free from fear, but can become the people we sense we were made to be, without being made harsh and cynical by the sometimes brutal realities of life.
Maybe this is a widely shared delusion, a psychological defence mechanism against the absurdity of an existence that has no meaning. But it seems very odd that such a delusion should be so consistent across cultures. Even the godless political religions of the last couple of centuries aimed to build a future of perfect justice and universal peace. In practice they could end up building hell rather than paradise, from the guillotines of the Committee of Public Safety to the purges of the Cultural Revolution: but this perfect future is what they were aiming for. When Chairman Maotried to abolish money and private property, he wasn’t doing it for a laugh—he really believed he could create a future where the human capacity for greed would wither away.
So perhaps rather than being a shared delusion, this vision of a just ruler leading humanity to a perfect future is something in us that reflects our creator. All human beings, the Bible teaches, are made in the image and likeness of God. If this is true, then surely we all instinctively detect the greater being in whose stamp we were made; we all, deep within us and in ways too deep for words, yearn for the perfect creation for which we were truly made.
Google Maps tells me that from Jerusalem to the River Jordan, where John did his baptising, it’s around 38 kilometres, or 24 miles—a walk of 9 or 10 hours in each direction, some of it through barren desert terrain known to be frequented by bandits. Yet there was something about John that made people trek out to hear him. It wasn’t because he was conventionally attractive. As today’s Gospel describes him, he was a wild man—perhaps even a bit of a nutcase, living out in the back of beyond, eating insects, and warning of God’s wrath. But he was authentic, in great contrast the complacent and morally corrupt religious authorities in Jerusalem.
By this time, Jews had been waiting for a liberator for long centuries of occupation and oppression, and many started to wonder if John the Baptist was that saviour. But John said it wasn’t him—that he wasn’t even fit to tie sandals of the much greater figure people were actually waiting for.
Our first reading this morning, from Isaiah, was written about seven hundred years before John and Jesus, and is one that Jews long saw as foretelling this coming saviour. It proclaimed that a ruler would come who was very different from the usual status-obsessed tyrants. A ruler who would side with the poor and meek; who would strike the earth and kill the wicked, not with force, but with his words. This would not only usher in an era of universal peace for humans, but a time when the natural world would also be transformed, when the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the lion graze beside cattle; and all of this was to be led by a little child.
It’s not hard to see why the first Christians, trying to make sense of the bewildering events of Holy Week and even weirder encounters with the risen Christ that they had afterwards, came to see this Bible passage as prophesying Jesus Christ as the long-awaited saviour.
Advent is the season of holy waiting—for light to come into the world, in God’s good time. Christ will return, in God’s good time. Until then, we must be patient in trying to build God’s Kingdom in a world where it can only ever exist partially and temporarily.
This matters profoundly in the times we find ourselves. For we have a new godless religion that believes it can create a perfect future, not by transforming human nature but by making humans subservient to artificial intelligence. It is this vision that motivates Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Sam Altman and the many other Silicon Valley figures whose intellect has exceeded their wisdom, who risk becoming the next group of people who, in pursuing the fantasy that human beings can create heaven on earth for themselves, end up creating many hells.
Against that emerging reality, we must model different lives, of patience, of waiting for God to move, of trusting that God knows our needs better than we know them ourselves. We must trust that God has already opened the way for us to this transformed future of universal peace, for the figure that both the Prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist foretold was the Babe of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ, God made human, who in His own good time will establish His Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen.
Top image: US Navy Grumman F6F-3 Hellcats of Fighting Squadron 40 (VF-40) on the ground at Turtle Bay fighter strip on Espiritu Santo Island, Vanuatu, in February 1944.
