By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Matthew 3: 1-12
Today's Gospel continues with the Advent theme of watching, waiting, and listening for the call. Today it's John the Baptist who tells us what's to come and what we are waiting for.
Many of John's listeners in today's Gospel probably thought that John was talking about himself when he said, “This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.'"” First century Palestine was full of self-proclaimed Messiahs, and I suspect many of them spoke of themselves in the third person telling (or warning) of the deeds they would do. Many of John’s listeners yearned for a Messiah that would come in a form they'd recognize: that warrior spoken of by ancient prophets and the Psalmist to save them from the Romans or a temple reformer to get rid of corrupt priests and other perverters of the word of God.
Of course, people yearning for that kind of messiah would not be wanting John the Baptist to be their Messiah. He is not that kind of warrior who can save them from the Romans or reform the Temple, although the later part of today’s Gospel, with John addressing Pharisees and Sadducees shows that he does have some appetite for confronting religious officials. People who came to the wilderness to see John the Baptist might have been hoping for a Messiah, but what they saw hearkened back to an earlier age. Even before he gave his message, just by his clothes and diet, John the Baptist would be familiar in his role as a prophet, out of the line of Isaiah or Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, or Micah.
His message would be right at home coming out of the mouths of those prophets. It’s important to remember that most Biblical prophets are not foretelling the far away future. On the contrary, God sends prophets to the people to remind them of the covenant, to call them back to right and righteous living in their time. Some prophets to do this by painting a picture of what could happen if people do this, the glorious world that is waiting if we would just move to God’s vision of the world. Some prophets do this by warning about what happens when people don’t set themselves right with God, who is just, loving, and powerful.
With his language of axes and winnowing and unquenchable fire, John the Baptist is clearly in the latter camp of prophets. And it works on some level. Consider verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. 6 Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” Geographically, this means that everyone came to see John, city dwellers, people who lived in the desert, and everyone in between—John the Baptist wasn’t just a local phenomenon.
And unlike Old Testament prophets who might have to make a perilous journey to bring God’s message to God’s people, in today’s Gospel, John is on the margins, in the wilderness, and the center comes to him, just as wise men came to the baby Jesus just a chapter earlier in Matthew. And John’s influence is clearly more than the center of civilization. In this short passage, the whole of Judaism comes to him: everyone from religious elite to the common folks.
If John had been a different kind of person, he could have claimed enormous power for himself. Clearly, he’s charismatic. After several thousand years of baptisms, we might forget that John was doing a new thing. While ancient people would have taken part in ritual baths for purification after certain events, like pregnancy or other body processes that involved fluids, the idea of baptism for purification from spiritual impurity seems to be new, introduced by John the Baptist. And people go along with this idea and go into a river—ritual baths, by contrast, were human-created structures, a much tamer, safer experience than what John offers.
Once purified, John the Baptist preaches that the people are ready to meet their Messiah, the one prophesied in today’s Old Testament texts, the bloom that comes from the stump of Jesse. These kinds of prophecies prepare people to expect a warrior Messiah, and John’s language suggests that he, too, would welcome the arrival of this kind of savior, a Savior who would, to use the words of the prophet Isaiah from today’s reading, “strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.”
This kind of language is part of why people expect the Messiah to be a warrior type. This kind of language doesn’t prepare us to be on the lookout for a baby in a manger or a healer moving from place to place.
In next week’s Gospel, we’ll discover that John the Baptist isn’t quite sure that Jesus is the Messiah. He asks the question asked by many through the ages: “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for?”
In this Advent time of watching and waiting, it’s a good question for us, too. What are we hoping for? What are we yearning for? Although we might wish that others would be winnowed and thrown in the fire, we know we don’t want that for ourselves.
John reminds us that God has always wanted for us to be sprouts that grow up to bear good fruit. It’s a powerful image, one that’s not unique to John the Baptist. Indeed, it’s an image that Jesus will use, and it’s one that we’ve returned to as a congregation. What are the fruits of faithfulness?
John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness, and at first look, he seems to be a prophtet rooted in the Old Testament tradition of prophecy, of calling people to repent from past transgressions and to remember their roots of faithfulness. But John is also pointing to a new direction, with his baptizing in the river Jordan, the river associated with the promised land of old, and the new world that the Messiah will usher in.
Let us take some Advent time to consider the Messiah we are longing to meet, the God who longs to meet us where we are. Is it the baby that looks so harmless, lying in a feeding trough? Do we long for someone fierce like John the Baptist, someone who pulls no punches and tells it like it is? Are we hoping for that gardener that will prune back all the dead wood? Can we separate the charismatic imposters from the true Messiah? John the Baptist warns us to be alert even as we yearn.
Many of us in this congregation are coming to the end of a very hard year, a wilderness time of our lives. Indeed, if we look at events around the planet in the past few years, it’s not hard to see this decade as a wilderness time for the world. Today’s Gospel gives us a new way to frame this wilderness time, as an opportunity to get on the right path. And if we’ve been in this wilderness place for so long that we feel immobile, our Buddhist friends would remind us that the easiest way to get on the right path is to step out to whatever part of that path is closest.
John the Baptist reminds us of the potential of this desert space. For those of us who feel hollowed out, let us remember the vision offered in today’s Gospel—wilderness as a place of preparation, yes, but also of promise. We have not been forgotten. God has not gone off to greener galaxies. Out of a wasteland of locusts and wild honey, new hope arises. Let us prepare the path of our lives and make the way straight. Our redemption is at hand.
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