Matthew 3:1-12
We meet John the Baptizer in the season when we are awaiting the birth of the infant, and that can make our timelines a bit fuzzy. John is both the harbinger of the Messiah and his contemporary. The adult John is not already preaching while the unborn Jesus still grows in his mother’s womb. Our Gospel story today takes place in a world in which Jesus is already moving, grown into young adulthood just like his prophetic cousin. As John is shouting Repent, Jesus is already making his way toward the riverbank. John is called to make way, prepare the path, to carve out space for the living Word to be seen and heard and known. Jesus is the way, the shepherd preparing to guide the flock onto the right path, to see and hear and know God’s people and be in relationship with them. These two sides of the same coin are coexisting in the same broken world, seeing the same needs and building the same kingdom.
John’s ministry begins in the wilds, where every morsel of food must be foraged and every resource embraced. His life in the wilderness is a life of urgency and survival, a mirror of the urgency with which he preaches repentance and baptizes people by the hundreds. John lives out his ministry like it is a life-or-death matter, and the people who come to him are drawn to that fiery immediacy.
John is not a church planter, building structures and hierarchies to support a worshipping community in a particular time and place. John is not a teacher, traveling from town to town giving lectures in the synagogues and town centers. John is a prophet, a preacher, a messenger. The good news he brings is the kind of news that requires people to leave their hometowns to hear it fully, to step out of their element and into the wilds with John. People come from far and wide, from the holy city of Jerusalem and the whole region of Judea as well as the settlements up and down the Jordan River. People of all stripes and stations- soldiers and synagogue leaders and multiple Jewish sects and farmers and lawyers, women and men and their children with them- all pilgrims to the banks of the Jordan leaning in to hear John over the flowing water and the crowds. Many of them kneel, hundreds or possibly thousands, in the riverbed and confess their sins before being washed over with water. Most of them would return to their homes, their stations and their families. Many may have forgotten the prophet’s voice that had felt so urgent in the wilderness but faded into memory when they return to the rhythms and demands of life. Some may have gone out of curiosity, returning with a tale to tell but not much in the way of changes of heart to show for it. We know that some left angry, and ultimately John’s life would be taken by the powerful who feared the new world that John predicted.
But some heard John cry out “The kingdom of Heaven has come near” and they believed him. Some stayed in the wilderness, on the riverside, and listened again and again to the cries of the prophet and the swell of the confessing crowd. Some followed John, and became his disciples, his friends. The lone man in camel hair and leather kept talking, kept insisting that someone greater was coming. That when he showed up, John would encourage his own disciples to go, follow after him. Many eventually would, when they met Jesus. They knew what to look for, because John the Baptizer had prepared them, gave them eyes to see and ears to hear salvation when he came.
This is what John does for us still, to this very day. This is what we do together, in spending time with Scripture, in individual prayer and in communal worship. We prepare the way of the Lord, both within our own hearts and within our world. John tells us in no uncertain terms, unflinchingly and with no interest in excuses, to start with repentance. The repentance John calls for IS the preparation of Advent, the preparation for the coming of the Christ child and the return of the Lord on the Last Day. Repentance is not the same as an apology, nor is it the emotional response of shame. Repentance is a returning, turning our upside down lives right-side-up again. John hears the confessions of any and all who come to the Jordan, and he washes them all. But that is not the end of repentance, but the beginning. For repentance to be true, it is both confession and action.
The special word John has for the many Pharisees and the Sadducees who come to the water is a word we as the church must pay close attention to. As the religious lay leaders of their day, John looks to them and rightfully calls them out. Those with the privileges of education, of lifelong belonging in the faith community, of leadership must be prepared to answer for how we choose to wield those privileges. John sees these people who are used to deference and decorum, and calls them in. He delivers a warning that they cannot rest on their laurels. Their heritage will not save them. Their social rules and customs will not save them. Their membership status and their giving habits will not save them. John preaches with life-or-death urgency because lives are quite literally on the line. John calls the religious people a brood of vipers because every moment that we are not bearing good fruit, people are suffering. Our planet is suffering. We are suffering. The complacency of the faithful is as dangerous as any other sin, and John has no patience for it. Not in the wilderness, not with the kingdom of God so very near. Repent, he begs. Bear fruit worthy of your repentance. The kingdom of God has come near, and John is shaking every tree. Wake up! He tells us. Get ready! Open your eyes and attune your ears. Hurry, or else you might miss it.
Repentance is the active choice to turn back toward God, to allow God’s mercy to unbind us from the pain we have chosen in the past and to see it replaced with relief and joy. To bear fruit worthy of repentance is to live like the kingdom of God has come near- to choose the righteousness of God over the convenience of sin. We see a tree that bears only good fruit when we look in the direction John is always pointing- at the life and ministry of Jesus. Fruits of vulnerability and humility. Communities which center the marginalized and forgotten of the world, voices that amplify the voiceless and hands that touch those deemed untouchable. John is calling us to be active participants in the kind of world Jesus makes possible, the kind of kingdom that has no end. It starts with repentance. Prepare the way.
Mother A Writes 