Matthew 3:1 - 32
Every year on the second
Sunday of Advent we go out into the wilderness to meet John the
Baptist, with his camel’s hair coat and peculiar diet of locusts
and honey.. John somehow attracts large crowds. I wonder if he
could do that today? We’d probably rather stay at home and watch
television than go out into the desert and listen to someone
threatening fire and brimstone. John would either be all alone or
maybe put in jail for disturbing the peace.
But we are invited to go
out into the wilderness. To prepare the way of the Lord involves
stepping back from our usual preoccupations. That’s part of what
repentance means. The greek word, metanoia, means something like
“get out of your mind”, which in turn meant to look at things a
different way.
The people flocked to
John and his baptism because they knew he was a prophet. Back in the
era of the prophets -- people like Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea
-- Prophets called attention to themselves by the clothes they wore
and what they ate. They would perform prophetic actions, then
explain what they meant. You remember how Ezekiel dug through the
wall of the town and left during the night to symbolize how the
Jewish people would be taken from Jerusalem? And of course John was
doing a prophetic action -- baptizing. It’s said that he chose a
spot on the river where Joshua had done the same thing Moses did when
they escaped from Egypt, when he separated the waters to lead the
people into the promised land. To be baptized by John was to
recommit yourself to the people God had called for himself.
The old prophets had two
kinds of messages: If you do something God wants you to do, God
will see that something good will happen; and if you don’t do
something that God wants, he will punish you. John’s message was a
little different. God had already done something -- the kingdom of
heaven is at hand -- and you could either get on board or get out of
the way, but there was no in-between. Joining the kingdom meant two
things: first, to repent, to take notice of where you are and where
you are heading, and what you need to do to correct the course of
your life; and second, to produce good fruit. We can't just repent,
we have to show evidence of repentance.
It’s pretty clear that
John has no use for the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He calls them a
“brood of vipers”. To our ears it doesn’t sound so bad,
probably because we don’t use the words “brood” and “viper”
much., but to them it sounded more like “bastard children of
snakes”. I wonder why he singled them out? After all, they
weren’t all bad, and they had come out apparently hoping to be
baptized as well. But everyone knew that the Pharisees spent a huge
amount of time taking the law of Moses as a starting point and making
all kinds of rules as to how to obey the law. If Moses said you
could not boil a baby goat it its mother’s milk, the Pharisees
figured that you couldn’t use the same dishes for meat and dairy
products. If you were not supposed to work on the Sabbath, was
taking a stroll around the neighborhood work? As it turns out, it
depends on how long the stroll was. The Pharisees could tell you.
And John saw this as a perversion; the law was good, but as Jesus
would say later, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath”. The law pointed to something else; it was not meant to
take the place of charity, of true devotion. There is some Pharisee
in all of us, probably more now than fifty years ago. The whole
culture of wokeness says that if you hold an opinion different from
the woke people, you are not worth talking to, you will be in front
of a firing squad if we ever get power. The opinion you hold is more
important than you as a person. Or consider those who have decided
that the Pope isn’t Catholic anymore. If you go to the website of
Church Militant, you can see disagreement as reason for
excommunication; lack of charity masquerading as true religion.
And the Sadducees. These
were people that did not believe in an afterlife; but they also did
not believe much in following the laws of Moses; in fact, many
adopted Roman customs and most of the puppet rulers like Herod were
Sadducees. And the Sadducees live today -- Christians who see no
problem with same sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, or using
medicine and surgery to change a child from one sex to another. We
Sadduccees speak with the late Governor of New York Mario Como, who
famously said, “I’m personally against abortion but I have no
right to impose my morality on other people”
During advent we need to
ask, where is the Pharisee and Sadducee in each of us? How can we,
with God’s help, practice true religion?
