When God is Late
John had done everything right.
He had preached what God gave him to preach. He had stepped aside when Jesus arrived. He had lived with conviction and courage. He had spoken truth to power. He had prepared the way.
And now he sits in prison.
Alone. Forgotten.
The air stale, the hours long.
And Jesus—Jesus is out there doing… what exactly?
Hosting meals with sinners.
Telling cryptic stories.
Healing, yes—but slowly. Quietly.
No axe. No fire. No upheaval. No judgment.
Just… stories.
So John sends messengers with a question he probably never thought he’d ask:
“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”
This is not a theological inquiry.
It’s a gut-punched, barely-whispered plea from a man who did everything right and is now wondering if the whole thing is unraveling.
And maybe you know that place.
Maybe you’ve watched the story veer off script.
Maybe you’ve prayed faithfully, desperately, and been met with silence.
Maybe you’re in your own kind of prison: grief, a diagnosis, a betrayal, uncertainty—and wondering what went wrong.
Wondering if you misunderstood the plot.
Wondering if Jesus is really who you thought he was.
There is no shame in that.
Even prophets can lose their bearings when the kingdom doesn’t come the way they hoped.
Even the faithful can feel like fools when mercy shows up in place of fire.
Jesus doesn’t send back a rescue.
He sends back a report:
The blind see. The lame walk. The unclean are made whole. The dead are raised. The poor hear good news.
That’s it.
Just the slow, quiet, Isaiah-shaped signs of a kingdom arriving in the wrong order.
Healing before judgment. Mercy before the end.
It’s not what John expected.
And, if we’re honest, not always what we want either.
When the pain is sharp, we want a God who acts fast.
When everything is unraveling, we want thunder, not a whisper.
We don’t want mystery. We want resolution. Now.
But what we get is this strange answer:
Yes, the kingdom is coming.
No, it won’t look like you thought.
Yes, I am the one.
And no, I’m not on your timeline.
Then Jesus says the one thing that cuts deeper than all the rest:
“Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”
Because the kingdom will scandalize you.
It will be too slow, too merciful, too quiet for the pain you carry, the injustice you see, the fury you feel.
You’ll be tempted to walk away: to decide that God’s delay means God’s absence, that his patience means he’s forgotten you.
But blessed is the one who doesn’t.
Who stays in the confusion.
Who doubts, grieves, questions… and still holds on.
John couldn’t see it yet.
But even prophets need to be evangelized.
John had preached one face of the kingdom: the winnowing fork, the fire, the judgment that makes all things right.
And he wasn’t wrong.
But Jesus came to show him the other face:
The mercy that comes first.
The healing that begins at the edges.
The quiet good news before the storm.
And maybe that’s what we need to hear too.
Because we’re not so different from John.
We still live in the ache of delay.
Between promise and fulfillment.
Between what we begged God to do and what God actually seems to be doing.
And Jesus doesn’t rush us out of that place.
He meets us there.
He doesn’t explain.
He just points to mercy still unfolding:
A silence that isn’t empty.
A wound beginning to heal.
A friend who keeps showing up.
A morning you didn’t think you’d see.
And then he gives us himself.
This Messiah is not slow because he’s absent.
He’s slow because he is merciful.
The same patience that frustrated John is the patience still holding the door open for us.
No, it doesn’t make the pain go away.
It doesn’t explain the waiting.
It doesn’t fix the story.
But it does mean this:
The God who “calls into existence the things that do not exist"—
is still doing it.
Still healing.
Still restoring.
Still speaking good news to those who have none left.
Still making a way out of no way.
There will be a day when every tear is wiped away.
A day when death is swallowed up.
A day when all things are made new.
And you can lean the whole weight of your hope on that promise—
even now,
even here,
even in the dark.
Because the God who is merciful enough to wait,
faithful enough to come,
and strong enough to stay:
that God will make right what has gone wrong.
The Messiah you’re waiting for is already here.
And he is still coming.12
These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached:
In Wicked, Elphaba finally names a brutal discovery: every attempt to do good has only made her more punishable. “No good deed goes unpunished” isn’t a vow of evil so much as the language of someone whose faithfulness has failed to protect her. John the Baptist inhabits that same space. He preached what he was given to preach, prepared the way, and ended up in prison. His question to Jesus—“Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”—comes from that same collision between expectation and reality, where doing everything right does not lead where it was supposed to lead.
In The Matrix, Neo’s awakening is not immediately empowering but disorienting. His body is weak. His eyes ache from light they’ve never seen. The real world feels harsher than the beautiful lie he left behind. The truth sets us free, but freedom doesn’t always feel like freedom at first.
Psychologists call this prediction error: the gap between what we expect something to feel like and what it actually is. Scripture knows this pattern well. Israel, freed from slavery, begs to return to Egypt the moment the wilderness gets hard. John the Baptist, faithful and imprisoned, sends messengers to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come?”
We see it in ordinary life too: you finally end the relationship you knew wasn’t good for you, and instead of relief, you feel heartbroken. The right choice initially feels like the wrong one.
This is the scandal of God’s timing: even when he is making a way, it can feel like he’s making us wait. Even when he is saving, it can feel like he’s silent. The kingdom comes, but not in the order we expected. And that gap between expectation and reality can make even the faithful wonder if they got it wrong.