Last week, John the Baptist burst into our Advent season with his usual bold and fearless proclamation of the Word. He shocks and upsets those coming out to see what he is doing, “You brood of vipers!” He says, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Not exactly your welcoming Sunday morning sermon, but it was a powerful challenge to the status quo, a demand for repentance and contrition in the hearts of God’s people. He is especially challenging to the religious leaders. He offers them a dire warning saying, “Even now, the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” John was a guy who did not pull his punches. He was not afraid to make a stand and proclaim the truth, no matter what the cost. And the price, it turns out, would be pretty high.

John’s call for repentance was not limited to the seekers coming to the Jordan River to be baptized. He was calling for the whole nation to turn and believe the Good News. This meant John would call out not only the everyday citizens and the religious leaders but also the political leaders for their faults. He even confronts King Herod for his incestuous relationship and depraved behavior, unfit for a leader of Israel. So, at the very time Jesus and His work began to gain momentum, John finds himself in prison. He is imprisoned because he would not back down. John would proclaim the truth, no matter the cost. This is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. And this bold preacher now finds himself in chains. It is a place he would never leave with his head still intact.

We have all heard of “Doubting Thomas” and his challenge of the resurrection at the end of John’s Gospel (the demand to see the hole in our Lord’s hands and the wound in His side), but in Luke’s Gospel, we are given a picture of a doubting John the Baptist. We are told this bold and courageous preacher sends word from his prison cell for his disciples to find Jesus and ask Him, “Are you the One who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Is this the long-awaited Messiah? Is this the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, or was he wrong? Perhaps he was overzealous. Maybe he misnamed the Lamb of God. I imagine things are not playing out as John once thought they would. In that prison cell, John is in dire need of a word of hope, a word of assurance, a word of proclamation that this, too, is part of the Kingdom of God. John the great preacher needs a preacher. He sends off two disciples, hoping they might bring him Good News.

In the early fifth century, Saint Augustine wrote one of his most important works, “The City of God.” It presents human history as a conflict between what he calls the Earthly City and the City of God. The main distinction between these two cities was the object of man’s love. Man’s love of himself shapes the Earthly City, while in the City of God, man is turned outward to love our Father and one another. Around a thousand years after this, Martin Luther championed Augustine’s distinction, and we might even say popularized it for his day, saying, “Scripture describes man as so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.” Man, says Luther, is curved in upon himself. That is the natural state of man. It is our default position. This image of humanity is helpful not only to understand the predicament of a doubting John the Baptist but also to understand our own doubts.

Picture John in prison. What was he lacking? What was kept from him? He had his faith, his sense of purpose, and his goals. We are told elsewhere that he even regularly conversed with Herod, offering him guidance and correction. His disciples can even tend to his needs in some limited capacity. What he does not have and cannot receive there in prison is the work and words of the Lamb of God. He had prepared the way of the Lord, but now he was alone in prison, cut off from the things Jesus was doing, separated from all that was going on. In that cell, John’s only move is to curve back inward. He had curved in, away from the despair and suffering of his situation, into the truth he held in his own heart, away from the brutalities of this world. But that can only last for so long. It only upholds us for a limited time before we long for that external Word, before the well dries up, and we need that preaching from the outside. Turned in on ourselves, we slowly succumb to our own love and our own selfishness, and with it comes doubts concerning the gifts and promises of God.

The Word and Sacraments of our God always turn us away from ourselves toward our Father in Heaven. It is the gifts of our gracious Lord which pull our gaze away from our own bellies and open us to the love and care of one another. But the prisons of our lives are real and many. It could be the wounds that come from failures of compassion; when you are wounded by those who were supposed to help and defend you. Instinctually, you pull back, and in an attempt to protect yourself, you curve ever more inward, unwilling to trust, to open up. It could be the myriad of brutalities which come from an age bound up in sin: Health issues, depression, anxiety. Nothing seems to help. Nothing seems to overcome the trials and suffering of life, so you default to what you know, to that inward curve. Everyone screams at you how the answer is within; the path is to go deeper to get to the root of it all. But there is no end, no hope within ourselves.

Jesus says to John’s messengers, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by Me.” Go and tell John. Go and preach to him. Tell him what the Word is doing. Let his prison no longer be a place cut off from the Word, a place where he can easily curve back inwards. In a world of broken promises, a world of hurts and disappointment, a time of shame and regret, there is a Word that comes from outside of you, outside of your selfish love. It opens you up, turns you outward, faces you toward the promises of God, and shows you the cross of your salvation. The Word proclaimed into your curved-in prison is the proclamation that you are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. You are forgiven all your sins. You are justified before the Throne of God in the death and resurrection of Christ.

The coming of the Son of God into human history is the Word from the outside that turns us away from ourselves. This Word carries us from the Earthly City to the City of God. Jesus asks His disciples about John and his work, saying, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” Did you go to see an unmoved reed standing against the wind or an elegantly dressed prince of royal parentage? Did you go to see a prophet? Yes, but John was more than a prophet. He was the culmination of prophetic witness pointing at last to the Word made flesh, the Lamb of God, the Savior of all mankind. In fact, says our Lord, “Among those born of women, none is greater than John.”

And then Jesus adds something shocking and powerful. He follows this by saying, “Yet the one who is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.” To be captivated by the Word, turned out away from ourselves, and called into the Kingdom of God is to be greater than the greatest man ever born. Real greatness is not defined by earthly accomplishment but by receiving the Kingdom that comes in Christ alone. It is a kingdom preached into your ears, a kingdom washed over your heads, a kingdom that you take and eat. It is an eternal kingdom of promise and hope, where forgiveness and love abound. This Kingdom comes to you now, setting you free from your own prison and delivering you through the gates of Paradise.