Matt. 3:1-12, from Second Sunday of Advent)
Listening to John the Baptist’s fiery wilderness sermon in the third chapter of Matthew, it’s easy to get the idea that the coming Messiah will be a butt-kicker of the first order.
“The ax is already at the root of the trees,” John warns, having just reviled the Pharisees and Sadducees as a “brood of vipers” slithering away from the coming wrath. “Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
This is the Messiah you want if you consider yourself wheat and your enemies chaff. It’s the Messiah you dread if you suspect things might be less clear cut. Neither perspective seems to have much in common with the all-is-calm, all-is-bright sentimentality we’re supposed to be feeling this time of year.
So how, in this season of peace and joy, can we Christians make peace with, and find joy in, this troubling Advent reading?
Given John’s attack on the Pharisees and Sadducees, we understandably tend to frame the judgment John foretells as being about deciding whether each one of us is wheat to be preserved or chaff to be burned. For all I know, that’s precisely what John thought it was about. Not long after this scene, John, locked up in prison by Herod, found his soon-to-be-severed head filling with understandable doubts about how his cousin Jesus was playing the role of Messiah.
“Are you the one who is to come,” John sends his disciples to ask Jesus in Matthew 11:1-6, “or should we expect someone else?” By that point in Matthew’s story, Jesus had preached about loving one’s enemies, had commended the faith of a Roman centurion, had spent time in the pagan areas on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and had recruited a tax collector – Matthew himself – as a disciple. Perhaps John thought Jesus was having more trouble than a proper Messiah should have distinguishing between wheat and chaff.
But whatever John thought or didn’t think, it’s clear that Jesus didn’t turn out to be much of an excluder. In page after page of the Gospels, Jesus takes flak for hanging out with the wrong crowd. As Garry Wills writes, whether Jesus is dealing with tax collectors or sketchy women or demon-possessed men or the ritually unclear or pagans and enemies, “He walks through social barriers and taboos as if they were cobwebs. People and practices other men were required to shun he embraces with an equanimity that infuriates the proper and observant in his culture.” Jesus reserves his harshest criticisms, in fact, are for the Pharisees and others who insist on seeing people in wheat-and-chaff terms.
So maybe all this chopping down and winnowing and burning imagery isn’t at all about destroying evil people and preserving good ones but rather about destroying evil itself so that all people may become the free and good people God made them to be. If this fearsome, divine wrath has come to strike for us rather than at us, well, that really is news a wild man might shout about in the desert, or a heavenly angel might sing about in the skies over Bethlehem.
Prepare yourself, though. Having the world as you know it upended, even if for the better, tends to be traumatic. The repentance John urges on the crowds that come to hear him, if it’s the same repentance I’ve had my own experiences with, isn’t a whole lot of fun. Any gift worth receiving comes with a built-in cost of having to admit that you needed it. You might even have to throw out the old, broken down version of it to make room for the new, vastly improved one. That’s what this season of Advent is about. These days in the run-up to Christmas are for taking a hard, honest look at all the reasons we and the rest of the world so desperately need a Messiah. They’re also for throwing away every belief, habit, distraction, grudge or other thing that his arrival renders obsolete. When the new arrives, the old must go, and we can be surprisingly, irrationally, even passionately attached to the old.
But this Messiah knows that about us – knew it before he came to us, in fact. And yet he came to us anyway. If you want a butt-kicking god, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Finding one isn’t hard at all. Just make money your god, or pleasure or pride or security or any of the other idols people routinely bow down to instead of yielding it all to the true God – the one who wants only to love us.
