John heard what Jesus was doing while he was in prison. From that place, he sent word with the question that remained: Are you the one who is coming, or should we look for another?
Jesus did not answer with an explanation. He said, Tell John what you see and hear: blind eyes are being opened, broken bodies are being lifted, the untouchable are being restored, the dead are being raised, and the poor—still poor—are hearing good news. And he added, Blessed are those who do not turn away from me because I am not what they expected.
When the messengers left, Jesus spoke to the crowd about John. What did you go out to see? Not someone easily shaken, not someone dressed for comfort. You went to see a prophet—and more than a prophet—the one sent ahead to prepare the way.
Among all who have been born, none has risen greater than John. Yet even the least who enters the kingdom he announced is drawn into something greater still.
John’s question is the only honest question left.
“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”
We have dressed this question up in stained glass. We have softened it with two thousand years of theology. We have turned it into a catechism answer everyone already knows. But strip it back. Hear it fresh. Hear it the way John asked it—from a prison cell, in chains, with death coming.
Is it you? Or should we look for someone else?
This is not a simple question. This is the question of a man who gave everything and got a cell in return. This is the question that rises from the horror. This is our question.
The World As It Actually Is
Let me tell you about the world.
Children are buried under rubble while their parents claw at concrete with bleeding hands. Men are strapped to gurneys and pumped full of poison while the state calls it justice. Women are sold, trafficked, used, discarded. The powerful grow more powerful. The poor get poorer. The war machines roll on. The bombs fall. The ice melts. The forests burn. A man walks into a school with a rifle. A government starves its own people. A corporation poisons a river and pays a fine that amounts to a rounding error.
This is the world. Not the world as we wish it were. Not the world of greeting cards and graduation speeches. The world as it is, right now.
And John’s question rises from the rubble: Is it you? Or should we look for someone else?
Let’s be honest. We have looked for others.
We have looked to politics…to the right leader, the right party, the right policy. We have believed that if we could just win this election, pass this law, appoint this judge, the horror would stop. And the horror did not stop.
We have looked to technology…to progress, to innovation, to the shining promise that we are evolving toward something better. And we built the drone and the gas chamber and the algorithm that decides who gets a loan and who gets a prison sentence.
We have looked to wealth…to the market, to growth, to the fantasy that prosperity would lift all boats. And the boats lifted while the bodies drowned beneath them.
We have looked to empire…to military might, to national greatness, to the old lie that peace comes through superior firepower. And the empires rose and the empires fell and the graves multiplied.
We have looked for another. We have looked everywhere. We have tried everything. And the world is still a slaughterhouse.
Or should we look for another? : The Disappointment of Jesus
So we come back to Jesus. And here is the scandal, the stumbling block, the thing we don’t want to say out loud… He is disappointing.
He didn’t stop the horror. He didn’t raise an army. He didn’t overthrow Rome or end slavery or prevent the Holocaust or keep the children safe in their classrooms. He showed up in a backwater province of a brutal empire, talked for about three years, healed some people, and got executed by the state. His movement scattered. His followers hid. The empire rolled on for another four centuries. And here we are, two thousand years later, with the same empires wearing different flags, the same violence wearing different uniforms, the same horror with upgraded technology.
Are you the one? Or should we look for another?
It is an honest question. It deserves an honest answer.
Jesus did not promise to stop the horror. Read the Gospels again. He promised that the poor would always be with us. He promised that his followers would be dragged before councils and beaten in synagogues. He promised that brother would betray brother, and parents would hand over their children to death. He promised a cross. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” This is not a rescue operation. This is not a fix. Jesus did not come to make the world safe. He came to enter the world as it actually is…brutal, bloody, broken…and to be broken with it. He did not promise to stop the horror. He promised to enter it.
And this is disappointing. Deeply, profoundly disappointing. Because we wanted a God who would fix it. Who would reach down with almighty power and make the horror stop. We wanted a God in control.
But what if that God…the God in control, the God with the master plan, the God who ordains and permits and allows…what if that God was never real? What if that God was just a projection of our desperate need for someone to be in charge of this chaos?
Or should we look for another? : The Answer from the Horror
Now listen to what Jesus tells John’s disciples to report: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news preached to them.”
This is not a program for fixing the world. This is a field report from inside the wreckage. Jesus is not standing outside the horror directing traffic. He is in it. Touching it. Touching the blind eyes and the withered limbs and the rotting flesh of the leper that no one else would go near. The world is still full of blindness…and Jesus is touching blind eyes. The world is still full of death…and Jesus is raising the dead. The world is still crushing the poor…and Jesus is preaching good news to them, right there, in the middle of their poverty, which has not been fixed, which may never be fixed, but which is no longer godforsaken.
This is the answer: not that the horror stops, but that the horror is no longer empty. God is in it. Love is in it.
Should we look for another? Another what? Another god who will intervene from outside, reach down with a mighty hand and set everything right? That god has not shown up. That god, if he exists, has been silent through every genocide, every execution, every crying child, every mass grave. We can wait for that god. We have been waiting. The horror continues.
Or we can reckon with this one…the God who did not stay outside but came in. The God who became a peasant in an occupied country. The God who touched the untouchables and ate with the despised and got arrested and beaten and killed by the state. The God who entered the horror and did not escape it.
This is the God who is love. Not love as power. Not love as control. But love as presence…fragile, vulnerable, breakable presence. Love that shows up. Love that stays. Love that bleeds.
Is this enough? Is this the one? I don’t know how to answer that for you. I only know that I have looked for another, and there is no other. The alternatives have all been tried. The empires have all risen and fallen. The revolutions have all betrayed their promises. There is only this: a God who enters. There is only this: love.
The Presence in the Chamber
I have been in execution chambers. I have watched the state kill men while corrections officers checked their watches and witnesses stared through glass. I have seen what the horror looks like when it wears a uniform and follows a protocol and calls itself law.
And I have seen something else.
I have seen Christ in that room. Not stopping the execution…the execution happened. Not rescuing the man on the gurney…the man died. But present. In the room. In the horror. Entering it with us. There is a moment in every execution when the man looks at me and I look at him and we both know what is about to happen. And in that moment, there is a presence that I cannot explain and will not try to defend philosophically. Call it what you want. I call it Jesus. I call it love. Not Jesus the fixer. Not Jesus the rescuer. Jesus the one who is there. Jesus who enters the chamber because he has been in chambers before…has been the one on the table before…and will not let any of us die alone. Love who will not let any of us die alone.
Is this the one? Or should we look for another?
There is no other who enters. There is no other who loves like this.
The Offense
“And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”
Jesus knows this is not the answer we wanted. We wanted a God who would stop it. Who would intervene. Who would make it make sense. We wanted rescue, and what we got was presence. We wanted an end to the horror, and what we got was a companion inside it. We wanted power, and what we got was love.
This is offensive. It is offensive to every parent who has buried a child. It is offensive to every prisoner who has been executed by the state. It is offensive to every village bombed, every refugee drowned, every woman raped, every man lynched.
You could have stopped it. Why didn’t you stop it?
I don’t have an answer to that question. But I have a glimpse of one.
What if God is not the unmoved mover, sitting outside of time, watching the horror unfold according to some plan we cannot see? What if God is not the puppet master who could pull the strings differently but chooses not to? What if there is no script? What if there is no blueprint? What if the future is genuinely open…unwritten, undetermined, unknown even to God…because that is the only way love can be real?
What if God is, instead, the One who journeys? The One who is with us in the unfolding…not directing it from above but moving through it alongside us, feeling every wound, grieving every loss, bearing the weight of every horror not as a distant observer but as a fellow traveler? This is the God of the open road, the God whose heart breaks in real time, the God who weeps at the grave of Lazarus not because it is part of the plan but because death is not what God wanted and it hurts God too.
This is not a God who allows the horror. This is a God who suffers it. This is not a God who permits the execution. This is a God who is executed. This is not a God with a secret reason for the child’s death. This is a God who holds the child and weeps and rages and refuses to let death have the last word…but who cannot, will not, override the freedom that makes love possible, even when that freedom produces monsters.
This is what it means to say God is love. Not that God has love, or that God gives love, but that God is love…and love cannot control. Love can only enter. Love can only stay. Love can only suffer with and refuse to abandon.
The Gospel does not explain the suffering. It reveals a God who refuses to be anywhere else but in the midst of it…journeying, aching, longing for the redemption that is not yet but is still coming. It reveals love…not love as we wished it would be, but love as it actually is. And love is presence. And presence is enough.
The Only Honest Faith
So here is the question, and you must answer it for yourself: Is it enough? Or should we look for another?
Is it enough to have a God who does not stop the horror but enters it? Is it enough to have a presence in the darkness when what you wanted was for the darkness to end? Is love enough…this disappointing, non-fixing, suffering-with-us love?
I cannot answer for you. I can only tell you that I have tried the alternatives. I have looked for another. I have put my hope in politics and progress and every shining promise that this time, finally, we would fix it. We didn’t. We won’t. The horror is not going away.
And the only faith I have left is this: there is One who enters. There is One who goes into the cell and the chamber and the grave. There is One who will not let us suffer alone, even though he will not—cannot—keep us from suffering. There is love. And love is the presence. And the presence is enough. Not because it fixes anything. Not because it makes the horror make sense. But because love—real love, love that shows up, love that stays, love that enters the darkness and does not leave—is the only thing that has ever been enough. It is the only thing that has ever mattered. It is the only thing that remains when everything else has failed.
Is this the one? I don’t know what else to call him. I don’t know what else to call love.
We are left with a choice. We can reject this Jesus…this disappointing, non-rescuing, entering-but-not-fixing Jesus…and keep looking for another. We can wait for the God who controls, the God who intervenes, the God who has a plan. Or we can accept that there is no such God. That the only God there is, is love. And love does not control. Love enters. Love stays. Love suffers. Love hopes.
And in the meantime, there is this: a God who is with us in it. Not above it. Not beyond it. Not watching it from a safe distance. In it. In the cell with John. In the execution chamber with the condemned. In the rubble with the child. In the horror, wherever the horror is, as close as breath, as present as a heartbeat. There is love. And love is enough. Not because it stops the horror…it doesn’t. But because in the end, love is the only thing that was ever worth having. Love is the only thing that death cannot kill. Love is the only thing that remains.
Blessed are those who do not stumble over this.
The Work That Remains
And if this is the one…if Jesus is the one who enters…if love is the presence and the presence is enough…then we know what we must do. We must enter. We must love.
We must go where the horror is. We must sit in the cells and stand in the chambers and wade into the wreckage. We must touch the ones no one else will touch and preach good news to the poor who are still poor and be present with the dying who are still going to die. We cannot stop the horror. We are not gods. We are not even very good humans most of the time. But we can enter it. We can refuse to look away. We can show up. We can love.
This is what it means to follow the one who entered. Not to fix the world but to be in it, fully, all the way, holding nothing back. The blind are still blind until someone touches them. The poor still have no good news until someone preaches it. The dying are still alone until someone enters the room. Until someone loves them. We are the body of the one who enters. We are the hands and feet of love. So we enter. So we love.
The Question That Answers Itself
“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”
After two thousand years, after every empire and every revolution and every failed promise of progress, after every genocide and every execution and every child’s grave…the question answers itself. There is no other. There is no god who has entered like this one. There is no hope that has endured like this one. There is no presence in the horror except this presence. There is no love like this love.
Is he disappointing? Often, he is the most disappointing God imaginable. He does not stop the horror. He does not fix the world. He does not answer our prayers the way we want them answered. He is not the God we sometimes wish for. But he is the God who is love. The God who wishes for us.
And love…this vulnerable, suffering, entering, staying love…is the only God there is. The only God worth believing in. The only God who has ever shown up.
Is it enough? Or should we look for another? Love is what we have. It is who we have. And when I stand in the execution chamber and watch the state kill another human being, when I hold the hand of a dying man and watch the light leave his eyes, when I face the horror that never stops and never makes sense…Love is there. And it is enough.
Are you the one? Or should we look for another?
There is no other. You are the one. You are love. And love is enough.
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