Right to Your Door
December 14, 2025 • 3 Advent • Year B
Isaiah 35:1-10 • James 5:7-10 • Matthew 11:2-11
In 2004, a friend of mine pulled a red, square-shaped envelope from her apartment mail slot. She said the envelope had a DVD inside. This company called Netflix was sending DVD’s right to your door. You watched the movie, sent it back, and waited for the next one.
My first thought was, “That will never work.” People probably wouldn’t send the discs back. The DVDs would get scratched half the time. There was no way Netflix would last.
Obviously, I’d make a terrible venture capitalist. I didn’t just fail to foresee how movie rental by mail could really work. It was even further beyond my powers of comprehension that movie rental by mail was just one experimental step toward something even more amazing: streaming content directly into your home.
My imagination’s limits were clear even before I underestimated Netflix. Back when kids had nothing to watch but TV shows that were thirty years old, I was watching an episode of The Jetsons—an animated show from the 1960s about a family who lived in the future. The mom, Jane Jetson, had to throw on some makeup just to take a phone call, because people called each other on screens. I remember thinking, “I’m glad that’ll never happen in real life.”
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In the season of Advent, we hear a lot from the prophets as a way to prepare our hearts and clear a path for the kingdom made present by Jesus. Ordinary people like me might lack vision, but prophets can do better. Biblical prophets don’t have foresight so much as insight. Prophets can see beyond historical circumstances, social conventions, and dominant assumptions, to envision other possibilities. Prophets can also critically assess the landscape and predict where our destructive ways might take us.
Last week, we heard from the prophet John the Baptist. His prophetic message was a call to repentance, because the fiery and avenging judge of this world would come any minute now. Like many prophets before him, John the Baptist ended up on the king’s bad side. In today’s gospel, John is in prison. He wants to know whether the wait for justice would be over soon, so he sends his disciples to ask Jesus whether he’s the one—the Messiah who will restore God’s kingdom and set the world right.
Today, we hear a “good news” prophecy from Isaiah. Isaiah envisions a barren landscape blossoming with flowers and sustaining life again. Isaiah imagines a road so wide and safe that no one who travels it will be harmed or lost. Isaiah describes people living to the fullest of their abilities—seeing, hearing, speaking, and jumping, when they couldn’t before. For the earliest audiences of this prophecy, it would portend the safe and joyful return of the Israelites to their homes after their exile in Babylon.
But in the time of Jesus, Isaiah’s vision of joyful return seems to have been reduced to a checklist. People in Jesus’s day had started reading biblical poetry “messianically”—as clues for who the next Messiah, or ruler, would be.
When the disciples of John the Baptist ask Jesus whether he’s the Messiah, it sounds at first like Jesus takes this checklist approach. He rattles off criteria partly drawn from the prophet Isaiah: “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.” Some things on this list are found in Isaiah—the restoration of sight and physical movement, and the good news brought to the poor. But other things on Jesus’s list exceed the expectations that people had for the Messiah, like cleansing lepers and raising the dead.
Jesus invites John’s disciples into a new way of thinking about prophecy. Instead of reading prophecy as a predictive checklist, Jesus invites them to see and hear beyond their expectations. Jesus also gives John’s disciples the freedom to infer whether Jesus is the Messiah or not. He doesn’t spell it out for them.
And Jesus doesn’t ask them to proclaim that he’s Messiah. He just asks them to go and tell what they’ve heard and seen. By affirming the disciples’ own abilities to hear and to see, Jesus helps restore the symbolic significance of these senses in Isaiah’s prophecies. Throughout the prophetic book of Isaiah, physical and sensory abilities signify willingness to repent, openness to change, and the capacity to rejoice. Some Scripture-readers in the time of Jesus seem to have hardened those symbols into a checklist of what powers the Messiah would have. But the signs of the kingdom we really should seek are repentance, change, and joy—and our own ability to perceive them.
Jesus’s response to the disciples of John the Baptist also challenges them not to test whether prophecies have been fulfilled, but to become prophetic messengers themselves. When Jesus tells the disciples of John the Baptist to “Go and tell” what they’ve heard and seen, the Greek word for “tell” has the same root as the word for “angel.” In biblical texts, the lines between prophet and angel are sometimes blurred. Both are “messengers.” The lines between “prophet” and “Messiah” can be blurred too, like when Jesus identifies himself with Isaiah’s own mission as one “anointed . . . to bring good news to the poor . . . and recovery of sight to the blind” (Lk 4:18).
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Instead of properly defining the categories of “prophet” or “angel” or “Messiah,” Jesus blurs and opens and broadly distributes their duties. And instead of reinforcing a rivalry between followers of John the Baptist and followers of Jesus, Jesus himself invites broad participation in the healing, transformative, liberating, and joyful work of God.
The encounter between Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist in today’s gospel might reflect an ongoing rivalry between the followers of Jesus and the followers of John the Baptist. Early Christians apparently wanted to coopt the movement launched by John the Baptist, bringing these zealots into their own fold. (It’s a little like Netflix’s recent bid to take over Warner Brothers.) And so, Matthew’s gospel highlights Jesus inviting these disciples into the prophetic, angelic, and messianic work of bringing the kingdom near.
In the same way, Jesus invites not just the committed, but the curious, to approach him. Instead of offering us the right answers, he draws us closer to have our deepest senses filled, and to leave a little more open to change and receptive to joy.
In the blurred lines between prophets and angels in the kingdom of God, so many of us can deliver the kingdom right to someone’s door. Maybe even stream it directly into our hearts.
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh