When Despair Feels Easier Than Hope: A Meditation on John the Baptist's Crisis

I started last Sunday's sermon by asking people to share their guilty pleasures. You know, those things we do that we're slightly embarrassed to admit but that bring us real joy. Making goofy faces at babies in grocery stores when their parents aren't looking. Ordering a large deep-dish pizza and binge-watching an entire TV season. Driving around aimlessly for hours just listening to music. But then I threw in a curveball: despair.

Despair can be a guilty pleasure. And I think many of us know exactly what I mean by that.

The Seductive Simplicity of Giving Up

One of my favorite authors, John Green, writes in The Anthropocene Reviewed about what he calls "the temptation of despair." He describes it as offering "a horrifying kind of consistency. Everything is terrible. Nothing matters. Why bother?"

There's something almost comforting about that simplicity, isn't there? It requires no nuance, no wrestling, no hope. As we enter the colder, darker months—in December 2024, in Washington, D.C., of all places—that simplicity can feel awfully seductive.

Let me name what many of us are going through: federal troops continue to patrol our streets. Our police department has been federalized against our will. Homeless neighbors are being removed from encampments with nowhere to go. Our city's budget has been slashed by a billion dollars. All of this justified by claims of a crime emergency when our crime rates are actually at 30-year lows. And then you zoom out. There's the climate. There are rights being stripped away. There's the constant churn of cruelty presented as policy.

Despair whispers: This is how it is. This is how it will always be. Nothing you do matters. And honestly? Sometimes that whisper feels easier to believe than hope.

When Your Messiah Disappoints You

This is exactly where we meet John the Baptist in Matthew 11. And I need you to understand just how desperate his situation is. John isn't in some minimum-security county lockup. He's in Herod Antipas' fortress prison. This Herod's family has ruled through brutality and fear for decades. His father was the one who slaughtered children under two in Bethlehem, trying to kill the infant Jesus. Now Herod Antipas has come into power, and he's thrown John into prison for preaching against Herod's policies, his marriages, his lifestyle.

If you know the rest of John's story, you know he's not getting out. Herod will eventually have John beheaded at a banquet to satisfy a grudge. John is pretty well aware of this possibility.

And from that cell, he's hearing reports of what Jesus has been up to.

So John sends his disciples with a question that sounds pretty desperate to me: "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" (Matthew 11:3)

Now here's what you have to understand: John has very specific ideas about what the Messiah would do. Earlier in Matthew's Gospel, we get to hear John preach about the coming Messiah. He says: "Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire... His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:10, 12).

An ax. A winnowing fork. Fire. Separation. Judgment. John expected the Messiah to come in and clean house. Cut down the corrupt. Separate the righteous from the wicked. Burn away the oppressors. Establish God's kingdom through dramatic, visible, unmistakable action.

Instead? Jesus shows up and starts eating with tax collectors. Healing Roman soldiers' servants. Hanging out with prostitutes and sinners. Making friends with the religiously suspect and the economically exploited—and the exploiters.

Where's the fire? Where's the judgment? Where's the revolution? "Are you really the one?" John asks. "Did I get this wrong?" This is what hope sounds like when it's running empty. It's that trembling question of someone who has given everything—his whole life, his freedom, soon his life itself—for a vision that doesn't seem to be materializing the way he expected.

How many of us know that feeling?

Look at What's Actually Happening

Jesus's response is crucial for us. He doesn't get defensive. He doesn't say John should know better. He doesn't offer theological reassurance or spiritual bypassing or make promises about the future. Instead, Jesus says: "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" (Matthew 11:4-5).

This isn't a random list. Every single one of those echoes the prophet Isaiah's vision of what the world would look like when God's reign breaks in. Jesus is saying: Don't ask me to prove I'm the Messiah by your criteria. Look at what's actually happening and ask yourself, does this match what God has promised?

And notice what's not on Jesus's list. There's no mention of destroying enemies. No mention of political liberation. No mention—and this had to sting for John—of releasing prisoners. No mention of overthrowing Herod. No fire. No judgment.

The kingdom is breaking in, but not the way John expected. Then comes this stunning verse: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (Matthew 11:6). Another way to translate that: Blessed are those who don't stumble over me. Blessed are those who don't let their disappointment in how I'm doing things cause them to fall away. Because here's the brutal truth from John's perspective: The empire is still intact. Herod still reigns. Rome still reigns. John is not going to be released from prison. And Jesus knows this.

And he still says: Look at what's happening. Can you see it?

The Slow Work of Repair

This connects directly to our reading from Isaiah 43: "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19)

That word perceive is so important. God isn't asking, "Do you see spectacular miracles?" God is asking, "Can you see what's actually happening? Or are you so locked into your expectations that you can't recognize my work when it's right in front of you?"

John Green has another line I always come back to: "Destruction is often fast, loud, and dramatic. Reparative work tends to be slow and quiet and unspectacular."

A service can close in a matter of weeks. Rights can get stripped away with the stroke of a pen. Troops can occupy a city overnight. An executive order can upend thousands of lives in an instant. A prophet can be executed at a party.

But the work of restoration? There's a food pantry that runs week after week. A drop-in center for homeless youth. Showing up for a protest training even when you're exhausted. A benevolence fund quietly paying someone's electric bill. Mutual aid networks getting people where they need to go. Marching at Pride even when it feels futile. Checking in on your neighbor. Organizing and caring and refusing to let fear have the last word.

This is what hope looks like when it's running empty: small, faithful, unspectacular acts of repair that no one is going to write headlines about. But it still matters.

This is exactly what Jesus is pointing to when he tells John's disciples what to report back. He's not listing spectacular victories or dramatic reversals. He's listing quiet transformations, person by person, body by body, life by life. People see. People walk. The poor hear good news.

And for Jesus, those weren't metaphors. They were actual people whose lives were actually changing. Not because an army marched in. Not because a regime fell. But because God's kingdom works like yeast in dough. Like seeds scattered. Like light slowly dawning.

Hope That Trembles Is Still Hope

After John's disciples leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and says this about John: "Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist" (Matthew 11:11).

Jesus says this about a man who, from a prison cell, just sent a message questioning whether Jesus was really the Messiah. Even in John's doubt, Jesus says John is still the greatest. Even questioning. Even running out of hope. Even asking "are you sure you're the one?" from a dark place.

Jesus does not see John's crisis of hope as disqualifying. He sees it as part of what makes John faithful.

The pastoral word I need you to hear is this: Hope that trembles is still hope.

You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to be certain. You don't have to manufacture optimism or pretend things are fine when they're not. You can bring your exhausted, trembling, barely-there hope to God and say: "I don't know if I can keep doing this. Are you really at work here? Does any of this matter?"

Those questions don't make you unfaithful. They make you human. They make you honest. And according to Jesus, they don't disqualify you from being great.

Planting Seeds We'll Never See Bloom

So what is the good news here?

The good news is that hope is not grounded in outcomes or visible success. Hope is rooted in perception—in learning to see where God is actually at work, even when it doesn't match our expectations, even when the big changes we long for haven't arrived yet.

I have a mentor who's a yoga practitioner. He told me about a substitute teacher who kept saying during practice: "Do not lust for results." Her point was: keep showing up, keep practicing, keep the movement. Don't lust for results, because it's actually in the lusting for results that you will hurt yourself, injure yourself, break yourself, and get the opposite of what you intend.

In a results-based culture where everything is metriced out the wazoo, living a faith that gives up seeing the finish line but keeps running the race is incredibly difficult, countercultural, and counterintuitive.

But you don't have to live to see liberation to participate in the work of freedom.

Liberation theologian and poet Rubem Alves wrote:

"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks... It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual... But the two, suffering and hope, must live with each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair, but hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see."

John didn't see the harvest. Moses didn't. Jesus didn't. Paul didn't. Every prophet and apostle died before seeing the fullness of God's kingdom.

But would we say that their hope didn't matter? That their witness didn't matter? Of course it did.

Your Invitation This Week

So here's my invitation to you: This week, be a seed. Do one small act of repair. Show up to one meeting. Make one phone call. Pay one electric bill. Check on one neighbor. Cast one seed of hope into the wind and trust that God will make something grow—even if you never see it bloom.

God is at work. Not in Empire's loud, spectacular way, but in the quiet, persistent resurrection way.

And you—trembling, doubting, running out of hope—you are part of that work.