Luke 3:1-6, from Second Sunday of Advent.
They were seven men powerful enough to define their places and their time: Annas and Caiaphas, high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem; Pilate, Herod, Philip and Traconitis, regional governors; and Tiberius Caesar, emperor over them all.
And yet the word of God came to John, a nobody living literally nowhere, a strange wild man of the desert who ate bugs and honey and wore not only the skin of a camel but probably also the look and smell of one.
We should not assume that the word of God did not come as well to the seven superstars whose names open the chapter. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it had many times prior. But we can safely assume that if it did, or if it had, none of them had heeded it. Perhaps they hadn’t even heard it. Power, or rather the illusion of power, has a way of deafening its holders to the word of God. The word that came to John was a call to confess sin and repent of it. Changing course is typically the last thing powerful people want to do.
And so the word of God came to John and not, or at least not effectively, to anyone who counted for anything by the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t. And the word that came to John told him – and compelled him to tell everyone else – that the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t are out of whack and about to be dismantled.
The Lord is coming, John proclaims. The real one, not these pretend ones in their opulent palace halls and temple chambers. In an empire that demanded absolute loyalty to an emperor regarded as a god, there was no way to hear such a proclamation as anything but treasonous, as a call to open rebellion. Prepare, John says. Make this true Lord’s paths straight. And it’s unclear whether these are paths leading from him to us or from us to him. Maybe they are both. But they are paths for invasion, regardless of which way they run.
“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God,” John says.
What a threat that must have sounded like to those who relied on fertile valleys for sustenance and on rugged mountains and hills for defense and on crooked ways for profit. And what sense did saving all flesh make when the whole empire operated on the assumption that some flesh mattered more than other flesh, that there were rulers and merchants and workers and slaves, and that they mattered in precisely that order.
In short, just who did this invading Lord think he was?
Having read the end of the story, we know that the powers of John’s time didn’t go down without a fight. They lopped off John’s head and nailed his Lord to a cross. They killed the Lord’s followers and outlawed the Lord’s words. But today they are dust and their kingdoms are rubble, replaced by new rulers and new kingdoms that will also one day become dust and rubble.
But John’s Lord lives. The true Lord. Our Lord. And if we are to live at all past the dust and rubble of our mortal lives, we must live in him.
Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.
Next week: Third Sunday of Advent
