Embodying the Good News

It is a joy to gather with you in this sacred space, a space where all are welcome, and all are affirmed. This morning, we turn our attention to a powerful and profoundly human moment in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a passage that speaks to doubt, action, and the true meaning of God’s liberating presence in the world.

Our story finds John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, a powerful and well-known prophet in his own right, who spoke truth to power, imprisoned for standing up against a tyrannical political figure. John is keenly aware of the stakes. Roman prisons were not places for long sentences; they were places of execution. His very life is under threat.

And from the depths of his prison cell, John, the one who paved the way for Jesus, the one who recognized the Christ before others, sends his own disciples to Jesus with a heartbreakingly simple question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Think about the weight of that question. John is in a place of great uncertainty and fear. He’s looking for reassurance that his dangerous, truth-telling ministry was right, that this man, Jesus, will indeed usher in God’s radically just kingdom in the face of Roman violence.

It’s tempting to think this is just John’s personal doubt, but the Greek verb he uses is plural. John is not just asking for himself; he’s asking for all those waiting for liberation. His question acknowledges a profound truth: liberation is a process. It doesn’t always arrive in immediacy that we might hope for.

John’s disciples bring this urgent question to Jesus, and Jesus’s response is illuminating. He doesn’t offer a doctrinal statement or an ego-driven affirmation of his divine identity. He simply names his actions and their impact:

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus’s list is a recital of the actions of God’s kingdom, a kingdom of healing, restoration, and equity. But notice what is missing, what must have caused John’s heart to sink when he heard it. In Jesus’s litany of healing, there is no mention of the captives being set free.

For John, a prisoner who stood up for justice, the absence of this promised action from Isaiah 61 is deafening. There will be no reversal of fortunes for him, at least not in this life. His faithfulness and his suffering will not be immediately undone by a miracle.

And yet, after detailing the transformative work of justice and healing, Jesus sends one final, pivotal message back to John: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” or as some translations render it, “blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

Jesus is asking John, and us: Will you continue to follow this path of justice, knowing it might lead to personal suffering? Will you continue to preach a gospel of liberation, even when your own chains are not broken? Will you commit to a long view of faithfulness, a “bigger hope and trust oriented towards a different idea of time and fulfillment,” as Chelsey Harmon writes.

Let’s look closely at the last item on Jesus’s list: “the poor have good news brought to them.” The original Greek here is incredibly powerful. It literally says that the poor are gospelized.

This is not just about hearing good news; it’s about experiencing it. The vulnerable in society, including John in prison, don’t just receive words of comfort; they experience the good news as tangible actions lived out by the community of faith. The gospel is not a theory; it is a lived reality.

This is the very essence of progressive, living theology. We believe that salvation is not a one-time transaction but an ongoing process of liberation and transformation for all people and for the whole Earth. We understand that our call is to be the hands and feet of God, actively dismantling systems of oppression and building the beloved community right here, right now.

Jesus’s response to John is, therefore, a call to action for all of us.

John asks, “Are you the one?”

Today, Jesus turns that question back to us, his followers:

How do we embody the good news so the poor are “gospelized” in our community?

How can we challenge the societal injustices that keep people blind, lame, deaf, and captive?

We are called to become the tangible evidence of the kingdom of God. We are called to embody the good news, not just deliver or share it. We are called to empower our communities, our churches, our neighborhoods, our political spaces to do the same radical work of justice.

In his poem Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson writes:

 …Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

John the Baptist asked Jesus, “Are you the one?”

In the face of injustice, in the midst of uncertainty, let us commit to living a life that allows our actions to answer that question. Let us become the ones within our communities who are actively working to bring sight to the blind, healing to the hurting, and liberation to the captives. Let us strive, seek, find, and not yield. May we live in such a way that the world experiences God’s love and justice through us.

Amen.