A Word in Season: Telling Jesus (Matthew 14:12)

What is the worst thing that you can imagine happening to you? How would you respond? What would you do under such circumstances, whether it were a sudden crisis or a building sense of awfulness? What would you do?

What have you done when the worst things have happened to you? I don't know all that you've experienced, but I know some of the sorts of things that happen to God's people in this world. John the Baptist had disciples who loved him deeply and dearly.

They had heard from him the way of repentance unto life. They had been pointed by him to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, and their master had been taken from them and had been put in prison by Herod.

And though John had proved faithful in speaking to Herod of his wickedness and had remained alive for a time because of Herod's fear of him, the time came when the wicked wife of Herod, Herodias, her daughter came and danced before Herod, and he, enflamed with lust and pride, promised her whatever she wanted up to half his kingdom, and she demanded the head of John the Baptist on a plate.

And so Herod, trapped by his own wickedness, sent to the prison and had John beheaded. We read at the end of Matthew's Gospel in chapter 14 that his disciples came and took away the body and buried it.

What did they do? At that moment of deepest distress and sorrow, their hearts perhaps overwhelmed within them, the future perhaps which they had anticipated now dashed before their eyes, they went and told Jesus.

Now this may be a simple lesson to learn, but I think it is a good one. They went to no other place, they had no other recourse, they went no other route but to Jesus of Nazareth. And it's good for us to do the same thing under similar circumstances.

Here is one who, having our very nature, sympathizes with us entirely. Christ would have had a sympathy on a number of levels with those followers of John the Baptist. After all, John was his cousin according to the flesh.

There would have been a deep affection between them, both as cousins and then as the forerunner and Messiah. The fact that John had died in this way would be an indication at least of the way that the Messiah himself would also go.

And they went and told the Lord Jesus. It's notable that when Jesus heard that, he departed from there by boat to a deserted place by himself. He didn't shrug it off, he wasn't careless, he knew what this meant, he was able to enter into their experience on all those levels that we've just mentioned.

And so for us too, our head, our saviour, our redeemer, he knows the things through which we pass, he knows the deep waters we have to go through, he knows the fires which purify us, he is our advocate on high, he is the one who gives his spirit as comforter, he is the one through whom the blessings and the mercies of the Father come to us.

And so if you are in trouble, if you're in distress, if you are grieved, if your worst fears are being realised, if things you'd never even dreamed of fearing are being realised, if you don't know what to do, if you don't know to whom else you can turn, here is the one to whom you can always go.

It is God in the flesh. It is the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. It is the Christ, the saviour, the redeemer. It is the one who shares our nature and yet has a heart of divine compassion, who has all power and all mercy in order to minister to us in our hour of need.

It is one who has been through the things through which we also travel, who has drunk the cup which we sip to its very dregs, who has seen the darkness and the horror that only touches us and he has seen it in its fullness.

So what will we do when the distresses and the troubles and the horrors come upon us? Let us go and tell Jesus. It is the best, it is the first and sometimes indeed the only but always a proper response.