What did you expect?

Jesus and John the Baptist. First cousins, united in mission, purpose, and calling. One was the forerunner. One was the One. In the end, John fell headless into eternity. Jesus hung, died, and woke. In our college gathering, we've been looking at John the Baptist: Barbarian. Shamelessly pilfered from Erwin McManus, it's the clearest picture of what my heart beats for me... and for this amazing group of potential radicals that gather on Monday evenings.

One particular story I love, and am disturbed by. John asks Jesus, "Are you the One?" Jesus response is, "you go tell John all that you see here. Also tell him that those who don't lose faith because of what I do will be blessed." Translated: I'm not coming to get you John. This is your path, and you must walk it. Of course from outside of history, knowing that Jesus was on a death march of His own makes it a bit easier almost to read some understanding, maybe even pity in Jesus' voice. At the very least, a knowing familial sadness that things aren't working out like John wanted them to.

Then Jesus turns around to the masses and does something beautiful. In a rhetorically stunning teaching/barrage of questions, Jesus eulogizes John with pride (good pride), compassion, excitement, and clarification of exactly who and what John is and was. "Among tohse born of women, there has not arisen anyone greater than John. Not Moses or David or Isaiah or Jeremiah. Just John.

But Jesus frames the conversation with the question... "What did you go out to the desert to see?"

That' s the question I think we all have to come to with Jesus. What, exactly, did we go running after. I think I knew when I started. My "experience" was dramatic and, in my context, Road to Damascus-ish. In the moment of my beginning, Jesus made no other promise or claim except that He was the Way. It was enough.

Along the way, though, I picked up on things and added things to the point where I can get disappointed with this Rescuer. I'm like the people of "this generation"

"It is like children sitting in the market places, who call out ot hte other children and say,

'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we sang a dirge and you did not mourn...'"

Jesus doesn't dance. He won't be deterred from what He's doing. He only gives me the option of following and being a part. The question of what I went out to see is worth sitting with for awhile. If I get that question wrong, the implications are far reaching. The reality is that the revolution of grace marches on. In my quiet nights, when I remember well, I know what I went out to see. It's only in the cloudy moments of disillusionment, when Jesus doesn't dance for me that I lose my perspective.

I love that I follow a man who isn't swayed by my whimpers and moans. I love that I follow a man who doesn't let me stay too long in my pissing and moaning, but continually calls me forward. With an amount of grace that I can't begin to imagine... He calls me forward.

What did you expect?