Winners and Loosers
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The poster child for Advent as a season of preparation is of course John the Baptist. John is the patron saint of the intentional Advent season. He stands at the beginning of every advent season and cries out to us: “there are big changes ahead, for some people the one who is coming will be Good News and for others it will be God’s way of setting what is wrong right.” John has as much personally at stake in the life and ministry of Jesus as anyone outside Jesus family. John willingly gives up
John the Baptist was a black or white figure, and that’s what makes him feel so different. He’s just a bit too radical, too fanatical for our taste today. We prefer a softer Jesus, a more pastoral advent, a quiet Christmas season, a judgment free zone. Its a bit troubling for us when we see Jesus get worked up and throw out the money changers in the temple, we love the story of the shepherds in the birth narratives of Jesus, but we flinch when we’re reminded about Herod and the infants of Bethlehem. John reminds us that there are winners and losers when Jesus arrives: which will we be?
We first meet John before Jesus comes on the scene as a public figure. John is a prophetic figure, someone with a word from God that people needed to hear:
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
John was baptising people in the Jordan river, on the eastern bank most likely, in the southerns part of the country. That is significant because that would have been the way that the Children of Abraham entered the Promised Land at the end of the Exodus, across the Jordan river, east to west. John gathering people there suggests that he is inviting them to enter again into a new promised land, a new conquest was at hand. He wasn’t just another voice in the religious landscape, he was announcing a new country, a new conquest, a new king. John sees himself in a really specific light
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.’ ”
Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.
Matthew’s description suggests that John understood himself as a second Elijah, another prophet in the wilderness, a wild man, hairy and eating the most primitive of diets.
They answered him, “A hairy man, with a leather belt around his waist.” He said, “It is Elijah the Tishbite.”
In the Old Testament, there was a sequence that had developed. Elijah the prophet would return, then God’s Annointed, the Messiah, would come and rule of God on Earth would start.
Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.
I mentioned earlier that John was baptizing in the Jordan river, east bank, Judea. That would be the same place that Elijah left the nation, crossed from Israel into the wilderness just before God took him away in a chariot of fire. John wasn’t a nuanced figure, he was a prophet cut right out of the Old Testament, wild and powerful.
John’s message is simple: change what your doing (repent) because God is about to change everything (God’s rule on earth is about to take place). How people respond to this call to change because everything else is about to change is the central issue of John the Baptist’s life. That was always the central message of God’s prophets. In the book of Isaiah, there is a constant cycle going on: things are messed up, they will get worse before they get better, but God will step in and set things right. That final stepping in and setting right is what called the people of God to change and to live differently. In Isaiah 11 in the middle of some really difficult times for Israel, the prophet reminds them that eventually God would step in and change everything. Isaiah’s question, John’s question, the question that advent puts in front of us every year is whether we will head their voice?
There are only two ways we can respond when we hear a message like John’s, like Isaiah’s, like Jesus.
Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Here was this influx of people coming from the west, from Judea, from Jerusalem out to this place and gathering to hear John’s message. There coming seems to have been a self-feeding thing. John didn’t (apparently) make occasional forays into the city, he didn’t send his disciples west into Judea and Jerusalem to call people to come to him. Word of mouth seems to have driven a simple gathering, people came to hear John’s invitation to a new crossing, a new nation, a new promise. Some (most?) responded to John’s admonition to change by confessing, submitting, changing. They joined John in the waters of the Jordan and they crossed the water with him, becoming new settlers, entering a new country, looking for a new king.
In the pastoral images of Christmas and Advent, its easy to overlook or ignore God’s message to change our ways, to look and acknowledge the brokenness of our world and our complicity in that brokenness. But, if we do not acknowledge our need for change, to repent, to change, to become something new, we will never experience that pastoral peace which we so profoundly desire.
Isaiah was quite clear to ancient Israel: God was coming to set right that which was broken, and they were what was broken.
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,
who write oppressive statutes,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be your spoil,
and that you may make the orphans your prey!
This wasn’t a word they wanted to hear in eight century Israel: people oppressed by statues, the needy robbed of Justice, the poor stripped of what was rightfully their under the Law, the widows and the orphans plundered. The coming of the promised one in Isaiah is nothing short of the setting right that which was broken:
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
The coming of God’s promise, Advent, is the opportunity to experience God’s wholeness, God’s fulness, God’s peace but only if we understand that God’s coming demands that we change our ways, that we reorient ourselves, that we leave behind what we are and become a new people under new leadership entering a new land. When we confess and when we confess, then we enter into what God is doing.
But John the Baptist reminds us that not only are there winners when God’s kingdom arrives, when God’s promise breaks in, but there are also loosers:
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.
A great number of people came from Jerusalem and Judea and made themselves subject to John’s baptism. The confessed, they submitted, the left part of something new; But, John tells us, there were others who can to examine John’s baptism. These folks wanted to argue about John’s methodology, the propriety of baptism in that time and place, John’s credentialing (or lack thereof). They wanted to come for the spectacle of the crowd in the wilderness, the wildness of John and the roughness of the desert. They didn’t see themselves in any way as subject to John’s baptism; no, John’s baptism was subject to their expert examination.
John captures them well, a batch of snakes, rats fleeing a sinking ship. No real interest in what God was doing in their world; interested only in themselves and their self-interests. Their act condemned them, and their only hope for the future lay in a profound change that impacted how they lived day to day. Not seeing themselves as subject to the righteous standard of God, but believing that they are the standard by which everything will be measured.
It seems to me that the distinction between being a follower of Jesus and being part of a religion is right in this area of winning or loosing. The Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist and Jesus all bring us the same message: change what your doing, become part of God’s new exodus, God’s new people. Repent....turn around ....start again. Religion is different, it is the perspective from which everything else is examined, the lens through which we view everything. Religion takes us too close to that first community of Pharisees and Sadducees for comfort.