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19. ὁ Ἰωάννης. The Baptist was now in prison (Mat 11:2-6), but was not precluded from intercourse with his friends.
πρὸς τὸν κύριον. The reading of B and some other uncials. St Luke and St John use this title frequently to describe Jesus. The other two Synoptists do not; perhaps because to Jewish ears ὁ Κύριος was the recognised synonym of Jehovah.
σὺ εἶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος, ἢ ἂλλον προσδοκῶμεν; ‘Art thou the coming [Messiah], or are we to expect another?’ “The Coming (One)” is a technical Hebrew term for the Messiah (Habba). The title occurs in Luk 13:35, Luk 19:38; Joh 1:15; Joh 3:31; Rev 1:8, and is derived from Mal 3:1. This brief, remarkable message is identical with that in St Matthew, except that St Luke uses ἄλλον (‘another’), and St Matthew ἔτερον (‘a second,’ or ‘different one’). Probably, however, there is no significance in this variation, since the accurate classical meaning of ἔτερος was partly obliterated. Probably too the messengers spoke in Aramaic. “The Coming” is clearer in St Matthew, because he has just told us that John heard in prison the works of “the Christ,” i.e. of the Messiah. Those who are shocked with the notion that the faith of the Baptist should even for a moment have wavered, suppose that (1) St John merely meant to suggest that surely the time had now come for the Messiah to reveal himself as the Messiah, and that his question was one rather of ‘increasing impatience’ than of ‘secret unbelief;’ or (2) that the message was sent solely to reassure John’s own disciples; or (3) that, as St Matthew here uses the phrase ‘the works of the Messiah’ and not “of Jesus,” the Baptist only meant to ask ‘Art thou the same person as the Jesus to whom I bore testimony?’ These suppositions are excluded, not only by the tenor of the narrative but directly by Luk 7:23 (Mat 11:6). Scripture never presents the saints as ideally faultless, and therefore with holy truthfulness never conceals any sign of their imperfection or weakness. Nothing is more natural than that the Great Baptist—to whom had been granted but a partial revelation—should have felt deep anguish at the calm and noiseless advance of a Kingdom for which, in his theocratic and Messianic hopes, he had imagined a very different proclamation. Doubtless too his faith like that of Elijah (1Ki 19:4), of Job in his trials (Job 3:1), and of Jeremiah in prison (Jer 20:7), might be for a moment drowned by the tragic briefness, and disastrous eclipse of his own career; and he might hope to alleviate by this message the anguish which he felt when he contrasted the joyous brightness of our Lord’s Galilean ministry with the unalleviated gloom of his own fortress-prison among the black rocks at Makor. ‘If Jesus be indeed the promised Messiah,’ he may have thought, ‘why am I, His Forerunner, suffered to languish undelivered,—the victim of a wicked tyrant?’ The Baptist was but one of those many glorious saints whose careers God, in His mysterious Providence, has suffered to end in disaster and eclipse that He may shew us how small is the importance which we must attach to the judgment of men, or the rewards of earth. “We fools accounted his life madness, and his end to be without honour: how is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!” Wis 5:20. We may be quite sure that “in the fiery furnace God walked with His servant so that his spirit was not harmed, and having thus annealed his nature to the utmost that this earth can do, He took him hastily away and placed him among the glorified in Heaven.” Irving.