Matthew 3:1-12
You brood of vipers!
It’s not every day you hear a greeting like that, but if you did, I wonder how
many of you would flock to hear the preacher who belted out those words, the
next week. In our gospel text, John the Baptist indeed blurted out those words,
directed at the Pharisees and Sadducees. He was one of those preachers - the
kind who doesn’t mince words. He told it like it was, or at least, like he saw
it.
Perhaps John went to
the preaching school with the motto, “comfort the afflicted; afflict the
comfortable.” I’m told that this is
what all good preachers do. And I
confess that all too often I feel unequal
to the challenge.
You see, it’s tempting to make the Gospel
good news of grace into a one-dimensional message of comfort and reassurance. We
all need comfort and reassurance, and when we look at our lives, at the world
around us, it seems we need buckets of it.
When we acknowledge the depth of our own
brokenness, when we witness the heinous things human beings say and do to one
another, we want a word of comfort.
As we absorb our losses and pain, we need
the comfort and consolation that comes from God. Comforting the afflicted I can do, and I have the good news of
the gospel on my side.
But afflict
the comfortable? That, I confess I
struggle with.
But when John the Baptist burst onto the
scene of 1st century Palestine, he didn’t have my problem. While
pointing to the one who is coming, he indeed afflicted the comfortable;
He challenged those who depended on their own
righteousness more than they depended on God. The Pharisees fell into that
category. They felt they were specially endowed and privileged by virtue of
their ancestry. They followed the
Laws of Moses, they claimed the
patriarch Abraham as their ancestor, and therefore they claimed righteousness as their own.
The problem is, while they claimed to follow
the law, they failed to bear the fruit worthy
of repentance. In other words, they talked the talk but often failed to walk
the walk. They neglected the relational part of the life of the faithful; to
live with love, mercy, and compassion for the poor at the core of their being.
All too frequently they ignored the plight of
the widow, the orphan and the stranger, they persecuted the foreigner, and the
immigrant and they assumed their own importance. They turned a blind eye and
became indifferent to the needs of those around them, and in Matthew’s gospel
these are the one we consider the least, the last, the lost, the little and the
lifeless. They forgot about addressing the injustice around them and caring for
those who were disadvantaged and vulnerable. Instead, they stewed in the juices
of their own well-being.
Then along came John the Baptist, and he preached a call for repentance out there
in the wilderness; and this repentance involves a reorienting of one’s heart, way
of thinking, and action. Real repentance, the kind of which John spoke and
Jesus taught, brings us in line with godly living, and godly living bears fruit
for the kingdom of God. This kind of
repentance and attention to the circumstances of those around you, matters
deeply to God.
Repentance in this
gospel is about such godly living. We get a glimpse of what that might look
like when we consider the characteristics of those Jesus calls “blessed” in the
Sermon on the Mount which follows soon after this passage in the Gospel of
Matthew.
The Sermon on the Mount describes how God
blesses the poor, the humble, those who mourn, those who thirst for justice,
those who are meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted
for righteousness sake. Indeed, not only are they – all those - the blessed ones, according to Jesus, but throughout
this Gospel they are the ones with whom Jesus hangs out. This is the good news
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ, the least are raised up, because
their lives, their welfare, and their personhood matter.
As John stands in the wilderness, he preaches
the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and he bids those who
have come out to hear this news to prepare themselves, to prepare their hearts,
to receive the one who bears this kingdom to the world. John points to the good
news. He points to the one who will deliver and embody kingdom life, Jesus, Our
Savior.
It is for this reason that in pieces of art,
John the Baptist is almost always painted pointing to Jesus. When Lukas Cranach
the Elder painted Martin Luther, he substituted Luther in that pose, with
Luther in the pulpit, pointing to Christ on the cross in the tradition of John
the Baptist. Pointing toward Jesus, John the Baptist shines the light on the
one God sends into the world to redeem it, the one who comes into the world to
afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
As we come to the manger, we must remember
the cross. For it is on the cross that God demonstrates for us how much it
matters that Jesus came for the sake of the least in the kingdom.
Late Yale Divinity School preaching professor
William Muehl told this story to illustrate what Christ bringing this kingdom
into being means:
“One December afternoon…a group of parents
stood in the lobby of a nursery school waiting to claim their children after
the last pre-Christmas class session. As the youngsters ran from their lockers,
each one carried in his hands the “surprise,” the brightly wrapped package on
which he had been working diligently for weeks. One small boy, trying to run,
put on his coat, and wave to his parents, all at the same time, slipped and
fell. The “surprise” flew from his grasp, landed on the floor and broke with an
obvious ceramic crash.
The child…began to cry inconsolably. His
father, trying to minimize the incident and comfort the boy, patted his head
and murmured, “Now, that’s all right son. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t
matter at all.”
But the boy’s mother, somewhat wiser in such
situations, swept the boy into her arms and said, “Oh, but it does matter. It
matters a great deal.” And she wept with her son.”[1]
In Jesus,
God becomes the one who, rather than patting us on our head to console us,
joins us in our suffering, as did that mother,
because the pain in this world, our pain, does matter – it matters a
great deal.
Our lives
do matter to God. Christ’s coming does matter. How we prepare for him does
matter. Repentance, that is, opening our hearts, making adjustments to our
lives, bringing our lives into communion with God’s purposes in God’s kingdom
come, does matter.
John’s cry of repentance is the call to turn away from our
indifference to engage, at a life-changing level. The coming kingdom reorders our relationships and priorities.
John’s words are words a challenge to us all. Do we care enough to change our
lives and the world in which we live?
Do
we love enough to get angry about the suffering and plight of other human
beings and to declare that broken dreams and broken lives do matter, they
matter very much? Are our hearts aligned with God’s enough to declare that this
is true for every child of God, even if we’ve never met them?God
cares.
That’s why divine wrath, axes, and fire are good news. God loves enough
to get angry. The good news is that God is not indifferent. God is not
indifferent to creation, nor to the evil and suffering in this world. God is
not indifferent to God’s people. God is not indifferent to your life or my
life.
God’s concern and love for creation are
the source of God’s anger. Anger is not the opposite of love. Indifference is
the opposite of love. The last thing we need is more indifference. The last
thing we need is to hear from another that our very existence doesn’t matter.
And God forbid that we should ever say or act as if another’s very existence is
of no consequence to us.
So, that’s
what we’re about this season of Advent. Our
Advent worship, Advent hymns, Advent expectations, and Advent comforts bring us
the reminder that John the Baptist makes so clear. We need to prepare. Our
Advent activities, prayers and behaviors point to Christ’s coming. They help us
focus. They bring about a different emphasis to our lives. They help us open
our hearts and prepare room not only for the Christ child to enter in, but for
the comfort of all God’s people.
Comfort
the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. Prepare for the one who comes, the one
who will make all things new, who will bring about newly formed hearts, who will
call us to new understandings to reorient ourselves, to turn from our former
ways to change our attitude and perceptions.
Repentance
is about God’s desire to realign us to accord with Christ’s life. Repentance is
about God’s power to transform us into Christ’s image, and it is a
transformation worth preparing for.
And so, John’s wilderness sermon
points beyond him and toward God and what God is doing. John the Baptist points
to Jesus. Advent points to Jesus’ coming. The texts point to the reality that
Jesus is bringing a changed way of living, thinking, understanding, operating.
How do we, in our lives today, do the same? How do
our lives point to God and what God, in love for humankind and all of creation,
is doing? How does it make a difference?
Whatever our message, our lives, our witness
might be, it must point to Jesus. We do not point to the church, but to the
gospel. We do not point to what we are doing but to what God is able to do
through and despite us.
Our lives must point ever and always to
Jesus. Today, as we lit the second candle of the Advent wreath, we sang, “Christ
be our light, Shine in our hearts, shine through the darkness….Make us your
own, your holy people, light for the world to see….Christ be our light!” May it
be so, that in true repentance, our lives might reflect the light and love of
God in Christ Jesus, not only in this holy season, but throughout our year and
our lives.
Amen.
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