Luke 3:10 – 18
Today’s gospel would be more
exciting if we could hear the passage just before what you heard. So
here goes. “John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by
him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming
wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to
say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell
you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.
The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does
not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Now I think it’s interesting that
right after John insults the crowd, questions their motives for being
baptized, tells them that being children of Abraham means nothing
before God, and tells them that if they don’t produce good fruit
they will be cast into the fire, the crowd instead of stoning him,
says, “What shall we do then?”
The people of Israel remembered the
age of the prophets. They were individuals who delivered messages
from God to the people of Israel. The book Deuteronomy gives
criteria for believing a prophet. First, if you used a method of
fortune telling, you weren’t a prophet. Second, if you advocated
in any way accommodation with other religions, you were a false
prophet. Third, what you said came from God had to be true –
sometimes the prophets would talk about things that were going to
happen in the near future; other times they would address the current
situation as caused by the failure of the people to obey God.
Fourth, a prophet had to live according to the law; sinners couldn’t
be prophets. And Fifth, prophets had to demonstrate that they did
not fear authority, and of course that got them into trouble now and
then. The way a prophet worked was by acting out God’s message and
then interpreting it. Remember the story of Ezekiel? God told
Ezekiel that his wife was going to die, and he was not to mourn.
When the people saw this, Ezekiel explained that God would not mourn
his people who had been taken into exile, because of their sins.
If the people accepted you as a
prophet, then they accepted your words as coming from God. The
Jewish people had not had a prophet in their midst since the time of
Malachi, about 400 years before Christ.
John had been acting out his prophetic
character. He had lived in the desert as had the Israelites who had
been wanderers for 40 years. He came out of the desert to the Jordan
river, where the Israelites had crossed into the promised land.
There he offered baptism as a sign that the baptized person was
returning to that relationship with God that had characterized those
ancestors; this commitment was repentance. So the people recognized
John as an authentic prophet, and when he called them snakes and
compared them to stones and told them they better shape up or they
would be cast into the fire, They hear the voice of God, and say,
“What shall we do, then?”
And that’s where we take up today’s
gospel. John could have told the crowds anything. Fight the Romans,
perhaps; pray more often and more seriously; give up everything and
go live in the desert. But God, speaking through John, gives simple
answers to the question. First, he tells the crowd, and the crowd
stands for everyone, to be generous. If you have an extra cloak,
give it to someone who has none; if you have extra food, give it to
someone who has none. There are very few of us who could not be more
generous than we are. The call to greater generosity is there all
the time, because as long as we live in a world where some people
have more than others, that is not the world God has in mind. God,
speaking through John, points to the world where everyone will have
enough. That’s how it will be in the kingdom to come.
Second, he addresses tax collectors.
They were about as low as you could get in Jewish society. To be a
tax collector, you would volunteer to pay the tax for your community;
then you were entitled to collect that sum, plus a commission, from
your friends and neighbors, with the help of a few soldiers, if
necessary. It was a great system for graft, and nobody trusted tax
collectors, but what could you do? John doesn’t tell the tax
collectors to quit their jobs and do something more honest. He says,
follow the rules, take only what you are entitled to. Remember,
that’s God talking. He’s telling us to be scrupulously honest in
our dealings with each other. The very nature of trade is that each
person goes into a transaction with the idea of getting more out of
it than they put in. If you’ve ever bought a car, you know that
creating this appearance is almost an art form. The salesman knows
you are a little interested, so the strategy is to convince you that
you are getting a bargain. But God is saying that that’s not the
way it will be in the kingdom. There dealings between people will be
based on equal value, all the time.
Finally God addresses soldiers. These
soldiers were lower even than tax collectors. Most were recruited
from nearby countries – they weren’t Romans, but they were
pagans. The Jews didn’t like them because they did the work of the
Romans and because they were pagans. The feeling was mutual. And
if you were a soldier it was easier to intimidate people to get them
to do what you wanted than to reason with them. And you could always
make a little extra money by saying “That’s a nice little shop
you have; too bad if something happened to it.” And God doesn’t
say, quit being a soldier. God says, be content with your pay, and
don’t use your power and position for selfish ends. In the
kingdom, no one will take advantage of another person.
God is telling us, through John, how
to begin bearing fruit; how to begin living in the kingdom for which
we pray every time we say the Our Father. And during Advent we
should be looking at our own lives. Can we be more generous? Are we
being totally honest in our dealings with each other? And do we ever
try to get someone to do something for us through intimidation or
because we are in a position of authority.
Remember, God is speaking through
John, and answering the question, “What shall we do to bear good
fruit?” And God gives very simple, straightforward answers. And
if we follow what God has told us through John, we will be bringing
on the Kingdom of Heaven.
