Repent!

Texts:  Malachi 3. 1-4; Philippians 1. 3-11; Luke 3. 1-6

In this second week of Advent, we turn our gaze to the career of John the Baptist, one of the more intriguing figures in the gospel, one whom Luke describes as the forerunner of Christ, the one who announces his coming.  But who, exactly, was John the Baptist?  Where did he come from, and why did he end up preaching in the desert region east of Jerusalem?  You would be aware that I grew up a Baptist.  My family attended a Baptist church.  And so when I first started hearing the stories of John the Baptist, I assumed he was named that way because he was the first Baptist Christian, the one who started our denomination.  Of course, it wasn’t long before I realized my mistake.  I soon learned that John was called ‘the Baptist’ because he baptised his converts in the Jordan river, washing away their sins in a dramatic sign of repentance.  I also discovered that John was a very fiery preacher, one who didn’t mince his words in calling people to abandon their lax attitudes to religion.  John believed that the kingdom of God was coming very soon, and that people ought to repent of their wrongdoing in order to be ready for that day. 

When I was growing up, John the Baptist came to represent for me something like the ideal revivalist preacher, a person who was ultimately concerned with the state of each individual soul, and wanted to save that soul from the fires of hell.  Of course, the way we read the Scriptures is invariably influenced by the kind of church we are part of, and the kind of spirituality which is valued there.  My church was essentially revivalist.  It had inherited its theology and its spirituality, its way of believing and practicing the faith, from the frontier evangelists of 18^th century America.  These were preachers who believed that Christianity was about saving souls from hell, and that the way to save souls from hell was to get them to repent of their drinking, swearing and fornicating and believe in Jesus, who would forgive them of all their sins and set them on the path to clean living and churchgoing.  It was only very much later, at university, that I began to see that John the Baptist was probably not THAT kind of revivalist preacher, that John’s understanding of salvation and saving souls was perhaps a little more nuanced.

To show you what I mean, I’d like to return to our text in Luke’s gospel, chapter 3.  There you find that Luke is very careful to give us a context for the appearing of the Baptist in the desert.  And it is important to note both what he tells us and what he does not tell us.  He tells us nothing about the private lives of those coming to hear his preaching.  We hear nothing about the private sins that would have been high on the agenda of 18^th century revivalist preachers:  booze, fornication and bad language. What Luke does tell us about, however, is politics and social ethics.  He tells us about who is in power at the time, and who their political allies happen to be.  Because, for Luke, the Baptist is a preacher whose primary concern is not the private sins of individuals but the public sins of a people and a nation.  This means that the Baptist is much more like Martin Luther King Jr. than Billy Graham, if you get my drift.  He gets himself mixed up with politics.

You see, at the time when the Baptist appeared things were not at all well in Israel.  Judea and Galilee were small vassal states within the great empire of Rome.  Tiberias was the emperor, and each province of his empire was overseen by a local governor or procurator.  The procurator of Judea was Pontius Pilate, and he was garrisoned at the aptly named Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast.  Pilate was a cruel man who routinely and summarily put people to death.  He was not noted for looking too deeply into the facts of a case, preferring to make an example of pretty much any Jew who seemed to him to represent a rebellious spirit.  And the procurator’s power was absolute within his territory.  He could order a massacre, and none of the locals could do anything about it, least of all the Jewish kings or high priests, all of whom were only tolerated by Rome’s good grace.  The kings of trans-Jordan and Galilee, the Herods, had absolutely no power apart from Rome.  Though Jewish, and descended from the aristocratic leaders of the past, the Herods were puppets for Rome, collaborators in the repression of the Jewish population at large.  Even the high priests at the temple in Jerusalem, traditionally the key advisors to kings and wielders of political power in their own right, were largely compromised in this highly charged setting.  In order to preserve the legitimacy of their temple worship, the priests were also forced to play Rome’s game, to participate in repressing any person or movement which sought to question Rome’s authority in any way.

So when the Baptist appears in the desert to preach, we find that his preaching has a resolutely political edge. ‘In the wilderness’, we are told, ‘the word of the Lord came to John, son of Zechariah, and he went into the whole region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.  And what kinds of sins did John have in his sights?  We find out as we read further in our text.  John is interested not in fornication or drinking, but in questions of social justice.  Under the economic conditions encouraged by Rome, some were growing rich but most were extremely poor.  The rich ones were usually collaborating with Rome in some way.  And so John commands those who have more to share what they have with those who have little, even down to clothes and food.  He commands the tax collectors to take no more than Rome asks them too, to stop ripping people off to line their own pockets.  So too with the soldiers who served in Roman garrisons.  ‘Stop using your power to extort money from people’ he tells them, ‘or you will be in big trouble when the kingdom of God arrives’.

The ‘kingdom of God’ featured very highly in John’s preaching, and Luke sees John as the forerunner, the messenger who announces that the kingdom of God will arrive very soon.  He quotes Isaiah chapter 40 to make his point:

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled

and every mountain shall be levelled.

The crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

When that sermon was first preached in Babylon, during the exile of the Jews in the 6^th century BCE, the prophet imagined a great highway being built from Babylon to Jerusalem, with the Lord returning to his holy city in a fiery chariot to save his people.  But in the hands of Luke, the sermon takes on a more specific meaning.  For Luke, the kingdom of God preached by John is going to level out the scandalous inequalities in Jewish society.  The tall mountains, those who have grown rich on oppression and collaboration, will be knocked down.  And those who dwell in the valleys of death’s shadow will be raised to the sunlight once more.  For Luke, and apparently for John himself, the coming kingdom of God is a kingdom of which will bring both despair and salvation.  Despair for the rulers and collaborators, but salvation for all who are victims and trust in the Lord.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because I believe that the kingdom of God began to arrive in the person of Jesus Christ, whom John announced.  In him we see the compassion of God for the poor and the victims.  In him we see God’s judgement on the rich and the oppressors.  In Christ we see a God who sides with the victims against the overwhelming power of their enemies, and promises that their reign of terror will come to an end.  Can you see how relevant that message is for our own world, a world which is ravaged by greed, and the misuse of power?  Ours is a world in which people are tortured and killed for questioning their governments or senior business operators, a world in which the poor become even more poor day by day, because they must service their interest repayments before they can build their schools and hospitals.  If this Advent season means anything at all, it means that there is hope for these people. There is HOPE.   Because Christ has come in the flesh, because Christ became a victim himself, and because Christ rose from death to overcome the worst that people could do to him, there IS hope for all who struggle under the yoke of our inhumanity towards one another.

This gives us, perhaps, quite another spin on Christmas from the one many of us were raised on.  The Christmas of the revivalist preachers was about the salvation of the individual from their individual vices.  But I’m here to point out that God’s plans are much bigger than that.  They include the salvation of all who suffer for political and social reasons as well.  And I’m proud to be part of a church which continues to preach in that tradition, the tradition of political preaching which found its patron saint in John the Baptist.

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Advent in 2000 at Devonport Uniting Church.