Cathedral Sermons
3rd Sunday in Advent, 13 December 2009
Readings: Isaiah 35; Luke 1:57-66
John the Baptist is the character that figures most prominently in the Advent narratives. John’s is the ministry that most clearly prepares the way for that of Christ. John is the one who stirs things up and creates a heightened sense of expectation about the coming of Christ at a time in Jewish faith when those expectations were already very great.
Remember that the situation of Judaism was of having been under the rule of foreign powers for many centuries – Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and now Rome. A people that had always had future hope as a significant element of their faith began to long more fervently for the time when God would come to reign on earth and establish peace. It was a hope that manifested itself in a variety of ways.
There were those who withdrew from normal societal life and set up religious communities in the belief that they were living in the last times. The Qumran community is the most well known of these, being the place where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered by archaeologists last century.
The Pharisees centred around the Law, which they considered to be the means by which God’s reign was already present. By confessing allegiance to one God and by living in strict obedience to the Torah, a person could live now under the reign of God.
The Zealots were the political radicals who believed that they should hasten the coming of God’s kingdom by the use of the sword. They saw any cooperation with a foreign power as a betrayal of faith and national identity. They believed that by igniting revolution and throwing off the burden of Rome’s sovereignty, God would be established once more as their rightful king. They stood within a long line of such activists, with the Maccabean period in the second century before Christ offering the most violent and tragic example of such thought.
While many of these groups were progressive renewal movements within Judaism, the Sadducees worked hard to maintain the status quo, more than anything else because they had within their ranks the aristocratic class and thus those Jews who exercised power in society on behalf of Rome. They stressed cooperation with Rome, and saw the idea of the reign of God as an ideal which would come about by way of process rather than by radical change or intervention.
So aside from the Sadducees, all of these groups looked forward to a time when the reign of the God of Israel would take effect. And it would be the intervention of God through the Messiah that would instigate this. The Messiah would be some kind of super-human deliverer who as God’s representative would restore the Jewish nation and end foreign domination. It is into this social-religious-political context of first century Palestine that John the Baptist enters, and begins to proclaim the nearness of such a reign which he calls God’s kingdom, and calls people to repentance so that they might be prepared for the coming of God’s reign.
No prophet had been recognised in Israel since the close of the Hebrew Scriptures. No longer was God’s voice heard through a human voice to disclose divine purposes, to interpret the times, to call for repentance in the face of divine judgement, or to give assurance of the hope if deliverance. Instead it was the more legal interpretation of the Law that provided the Jewish people with God’s guidance. But suddenly to this people who were yearning for something more, a new prophet emerges in John the Baptist, bearing all the marks of the prophets of old – his clothing and diet, his message, his single-minded commitment to his ministry. No wonder people flocked to him, and that many thought John himself may be the promised Messiah.
John though is very clear that his ministry is one of preparation, of preparing the way for God, with his most well known words being those he quotes from Isaiah in that regard. His baptism for repentance is one of water, but the one who will follow him will baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. This latter baptism is clearly meant to be understood metaphorically, and to indicate John’s understanding of the role of the Messiah. On the one hand the Messiah will be the dispenser of the Spirit, the life-giving power of God, the basic element in effecting the transformation of the present age into the age of peace and justice, the hallmarks of God’s reign. On the other hand, the Messiah will bring the purifying element of fire, a symbol of the crisis of judgement that is to come, and the basis for John’s urgent call for repentance.
When we hear the word repentance, we are mostly inclined to think of particular instances of sin that we should acknowledge, and express sorrow for, and try not to do again. The word has a far more radical and fundamental idea about it than that. Its root is in the idea of turning around to face the other way, and in the religion of Israel it was often about turning from false gods in order to return to Israel’s God. The English word conversion is probably a better one to use for the repentance which John calls for is about a radical change of mind and heart. He has no interest in nationalistic or legal-religious ideas, but is calling for a moral-religious turning to God. And he is not short of ideas as to how people should apply that to their living, through the use of their power towards others in either physical or political or financial ways.
It is Jesus that John recognises as the Messiah, and the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry is the sign for John that he must now fade from view for his task is done. I wonder about whether John was either disappointed by Jesus’ ministry or uncertain as to whether he had identified the Messiah correctly. For later when he is in prison, he sends messengers to Jesus to ask whether he is in fact the one. Perhaps John had expected a more cataclysmic arrival. Where was the baptism of the Spirit and of fire? Why was the reign of God not so obviously establishing itself on earth? And Jesus sends the reply that the messianic prophecies were indeed being fulfilled. And we read tonight from the very passage in Isaiah that Jesus quoted at that time: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the poor have good news brought to them, the dead are raised.
But it seems to me that we live with a little of the spirit of uncertainty and even disappointment that was John’s. For each year as Christmas approaches we keep this season of Advent and we give expression to the longing and the wondering of God’s people as to when God’s reign will finally be established on earth, and the justice and peace of God promised and hoped for by prophets through the millennia will become a reality.
We who are the people of Jesus, bearers of the Spirit dispensed by Jesus and thus participants in the messianic age, nevertheless have about us still something of the ministry of John the Baptist both to hear ourselves and to proclaim in turn. Our lives continue to need that kind of conversion as we seek to be transformed by the Spirit of Jesus and be made more fully in the image of Christ and thus effective agents of God’s reign on earth. We need constantly to hear the ways in which we must still have the courage to change in the way that we apply power in our relationships with others, so that the peace and justice of God flow from us.
We must also have the courage to be people who call for change in others and in the structures of the world, our communities and our church. The reign of God will not be made manifest in some spiritual way beyond us, but in very tangible ways in this world which is God’s and among its people whom God loves.
That remains our task. Our Advent hope is our life’s work.