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Today’s Gospel reading is fascinating. If we understand what is being said, it is devastating, addressing some of the deepest questions of life and faith. Let’s open our hearts and listen closely.John’s QuestionIt begins with John the Baptist in prison, hearing about the deeds of Christ. He sends a question through his disciples, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”Pause for a moment and remember last week’s sermon on Matthew 3: John’s passionate invitation to prepare the way of the Lord, his stinging rebuke of the Pharisees, his terrifying prediction that the one to come would yield his winnowing fork, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire. Things seem to have changed. What is going on?Interpreters differ but I like to think that we are seeing a very human side of John – a human side that, to be honest, I recognise through my own experience of life and ministry. Life is filled with mountaintop experiences. Times when we seemed to be filled with the wind of the Holy Spirit. Times when it seems that we understand somehow what life is all about and what we are supposed to do.But then there is the other side: when all of that just seems to slip away. Sometimes it’s just because we’ve woken up on the wrong side of bed. Life seems miserable. God seems distant.And there are, of course, much worse things – the kind of things that John was facing: imprisonment and death. And life is filled with these things too: we stand around the coffins of our loved ones and say our goodbyes; we receive the call from the doctor that tells us the news is not good; the divorce papers come through the door. There are many such things in life. They change us forever. And they may not heal in this world. They may not be redeemable at all. We have to live with them.I believe that John was having one of these dark nights in prison: having once been so powerful in word and deed, now beset with a doubt or, at least a question: Was I right? Have I given my life for the right thing? Did I place my trust in the right person? Or have I made a mistake?Friends, this question reveals to us the human response to a life lived in faith. It is normal to wrestle with doubt and difficulty. In this passage, Jesus tells us that nobody greater has been born among us than John and even he doubted and was beset by challenge and trial.It is part of the life of faith in this world that we must do so too.Jesus’ ResponseLet’s look at Jesus’ response, which is quite stunning: “…the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them”.Jesus is here referencing two prophecies from the book of Isaiah, passages that were taken to describe the Messiah, the coming one and deliverer of Israel of whom John the Baptist spoke.One prophecy is Isaiah 35, our Old Testament reading this morning, which is a vision of an entirely renewed and recreated universe in which the old enemies of sin, suffering and death are done away with forever: “Behold your God will come…He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy”.The other prophecy is Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of the vengeance of our God”.Jesus’ answer would have been straightforward if that was all there was to it. He would have been saying quite clearly, “Yes, I am the Messiah. I am the coming one who was foretold in the prophet Isaiah”. But that is not the way John would have heard these words.This is because Jesus deliberately left out part of the prophecy f