Second Sunday of Advent (Matt 3:1-12)

MATTHEW 3: 1-12 

(The Second Sunday of Advent)

I once saw a Rodin bronze of John the Baptist. He had a wildness about him, but I thought I also detected a disappointment, a pathos, an agonising. The bust focussed me on John, reminding me John’s purpose is to focus us on Jesus. John & then Jesus emerge from their wilderness experiences as the nation eventually does long before. True wilderness can be a powerful symbol of our inner-space, our inner geography. And it calls us, too, outside establishments and centres of power, as it calls John, then Jesus. John Dominic Crossan [Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Harper Collins 1994, p.43] suggests John calls people across Jordan and outside Israel, the ‘Promised Land’, so that when they turn to God and are baptised, they must cross back over again to return home and invade the Promised Land anew for God. By changed lives this time, rather than force of arms. Would our land benefit if we were to make some similar kind of ‘re-entrance’, a humbler one this time, wherever we live? Taking and sharing new spiritual insights that lead us to baptism, or, more likely, to grow into and let a baptism of long ago really happen to us! Change like this will threaten control systems, even church ones. Note it’s only LK who reports John's stress on the social & political outcomes of true religion [3: 10-14] that will cost us, too, if we challenge systems. 

Broadly, Pharisees are the pious and orthodox, and Sadducees those who run with the establishment. John lashes both. We're not made right with God by observance of minutiae, or piety. Bogging down on our ancestry.somethingorother won’t help us enter into the fulness of God's Rule of love. It’s being a child of God that counts.

Jesus take us way beyond the kind of God John’s imagery conjures up. Jesus leaves all that kind of stuff way behind. Hopefully we don’t sing 'Gentle Jesus meek and mild' anymore, but imagine, ‘Redneck Jesus, victims piled, slash and burn each wicked child'! Would anyone notice if we slipped it in?

Only LK - again - spells out what we're to turn to when we turn from being snakes, etc. [3:10+]. Turning from something without as a consequence turning to something is an invitation to a vacuum to possess us. Jesus himself warns against this, strongly [MT 12:43-45]. We need not so much to turn from something, as turn to Somebody!

As Spirit and Fire are One, so are  humility & genuine discipleship one. Chaff pretending to be wheat is shown up for what it is when Jesus can't make Bread of Life from it.