Luke 3:7-18, from Third Sunday of Advent.
John the Baptist’s message doesn’t sound much like the good news Luke says it is.
Right off the bat, John calls the crowds coming to hear him preach – and, by extension, us – a “brood of vipers” (3:7). In case you’re not up to speed on ancient Middle Eastern salutations, that’s not exactly a friendly one.
The apocalyptic scree continues. Who warned you, John taunts, to run from the destruction that is coming? And don’t think for a minute that your lofty, leafy family tree will keep you safe. It had better start sprouting some penitential fruit right away. The ax is out, sharp and ready, and the fire awaits every unproductive trunk, branch and stick.
And if you think I’m being tough on you, John says toward the end of the passage, just wait until the Messiah shows up. I’m dunking you in water. He will dunk you in Spirit and fire. He will sift you like freshly harvested grain, keeping the kernels and burning the chaff.
Yikes! Are there bells yet? Let’s have some jingly, happy bells. And pitch-perfect angels and gentle shepherds with their even gentler lambs and Mary and Joseph and that cute, chubby baby cooing in the manger. This John guy downright unnerving.
John’s audience apparently finds him unnerving, too. “What, then, should we do?” they wail, bracing, no doubt, for the superhuman acts of repentance they expect John to prescribe. Maybe they’ll have to give up everything, come live with him in the desert and spend the rest of their days wearing camel skin and eating bugs, like he does. Maybe it’s too late even for that.
But the repentance John demands is astonishingly low-bar. Got two coats? Share the one you don’t need with someone who is cold, John says. Got extra food? Give the surplus to someone who is hungry. Are you a tax collector? Start collecting fairly instead of ripping people off. Are you a soldier? Start using your power justly instead of bullying everybody all the time.
If such basic ethics weren’t already common practice among the people who flocked to the desert to hear John, it’s perhaps easy to see why he called them vipers. But I’ll bet that wasn’t the case. I’ll bet most of them were generous and fair and honest at least some of the time, pretty much the way you and I and most of the people around us are generous and fair and honest at least some of the time. John seems to be calling us not so much to do good but to get serious about doing good, to notice the times we don’t do good as much as we notice the times we do, and to get more consistent.
What’s perhaps even more startling is how pervasive John wants this renewed focus on right behavior to be. Tax collecting and soldiering weren’t considered noble vocations in John’s time. You would expect a goody-goody like John to demand that people abandon such jobs and find more wholesome ways to make a living. But John doesn’t seem to be calling for a world without tax collectors and soldiers. He seems to be calling for a world with ethical ones, a world in which God’s righteousness shines everywhere, even into the little corners darkened by deprivation and conflict.
And maybe that’s the good news, here. Maybe the good news is that the Messiah and his terrible winnowing fork aren’t coming after us as much as after the darkness that has enveloped and trapped us. We are vipers, yes. But he is coming to burn away our “viperness” and winnow out the goodness in us that it has corrupted.
Doesn’t that awaken at least a little hope in your heart, at least a tiny bit of longing for what could be once this Messiah finally shows up? Maybe you’ve suspected for some time that he and the transformation and renewal he offers are somewhere “out there,” somewhere holy and wonderful but far too far from the unholiness and mundaneness of your everyday life, somewhere so far away that it might as well not exist at all, considering your meager chances of ever getting there.
The good news of Christmas is that you don’t have to get there. If the Messiah is coming to soldiers and tax collectors in the desert, to shepherds in a darkened field, to a teenage girl’s womb and to a manger in Bethlehem, he is surely coming to you, too.
That’s bad news for your vipery nature. But it’s good news for you.
Next week: Fourth Sunday of Advent
