Luke 3:1-20
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4 as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
6
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
7 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 9 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
10 And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” 11 In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” 12 Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” 13 He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” 14 Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16 John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
18 So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. 19 But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, 20 added to them all by shutting up John in prison.
The Gospel of Luke records the entrance of John the Baptizer onto the scene as a forerunner to Jesus' public ministry (Luke 3:1-20). John's role is to prepare the people for "the One who is to come." John's aim is to bring moral change among his listeners, so that "paths would be straight, roads would be leveled, and rough ways be made smooth."
This road-work, so to speak, provides an entryway for the coming Messiah to enter the lives of the people (Lk. 3:3-6).
What are the paths, roads, and rough ways which needed to be given attention? They are within you and me, the ways we are crooked, too high or too low, and rough. We make ready the pathways within ourselves in order to make a way for the coming of the Messiah into our lives.
John knew that to receive something big, something that can change your life, you have to get ready. You have to make some space. You have to prepare yourself. For John, that space is created by moral change, by living a moral life.
John is right in some ways, you know. A growing, deepening spirituality does not drop upon us like pixie dust when we utter a few rehearsed words or respond to a religious salesperson's pitch. To give ourselves fully in living as God's people in the world, we have to make ourselves ready through practice and intention. We have to open ourselves to new ways of seeing and being in the world with God, self, others, and the world. We have to see ourselves honestly and ruthlessly name what we have seen of our interior.
But John's methodology for this preparation, for getting his listeners to moral living, is all guilt and fear. He calls the people who gathered around him, "a brood of vipers" (3:7) as if to shame the crowd into life-change. Then he warns of future punishments for those who don't get their acts together: "the ax is already laid at the root of the tree" (3:9).
He even says the Messiah will come to continue this work of division and separation (3:17), naming some good and worthy (the wheat), while others would be separated as bad and unworthy (the chaff).
Perhaps John leans too much into the Old Testament idea that to be holy means to be set apart from anything unclean or evil. Holiness separates you from that which is corrupt, the thinking went.
At any rate, John projects his own ascetic notions of morality onto the Messiah.
Moral living is a fine goal, but John seems to miss that persons almost never get to morality through shame and fear. Shame and fear act mostly as external motivators. They have no grounding center. They motivate through anxiety about some promised punishment . . . or through some imagined sense that I am a no-good human being. Both shame and fear may produce different behavior for a short-term, but almost never produce long-term, inner transformation. They simply do not have that power.
Jesus, the Messiah who was to come, refused to motivate by fear or shame. In fact, Jesus' path was just the opposite. He affirms in even the lowest of the low that they, too, are beloved sons and daughters of God. He encourages persons not to identify with their sinfulness, but to identify with the God-connection at the heart of who they are. Jesus continually invites persons to stop giving so much attention to the externals of religion, but to deal with the "inside of the cup."
Further, Jesus does not fulfill John's notion that the Messiah divides and separates. In fact, Jesus comes to do the opposite. He reconciles divisions, heals brokenness, mends separations, and brings back together that which has been torn apart. All of Jesus' life-work is about putting together people and relationships who have been broken apart.
The words that best describe Jesus are mercy . . . compassion . . . love . . . reconciling . . . liberating. He seems intent on bringing together, while rejecting separation and division both in the world and within the family of God's people.
John seems to have projected his own path onto Jesus. John made his understanding God's understanding, rather than making God's understanding his understanding.
It is a common mistake, a human mistake we all make, and sometimes find writ large in contemporary culture.
You don't have to look far to see how modern politics, religious life, and the entire social order are bent toward division and separation, pooling together the "alike" while shunning, ostracizing, and demonizing the "unlike." It happens in Christian denominations. It happens in political campaigns. It happens in government affairs at every level. We divide and separate, making enemies of those with other views, all while trying to rally support for our perspective.
This, my friends, is not the way of Jesus. And it is not the way those who truly want to follow Jesus.
Jesus does not endorse John's methodology of guilt and shame. He does not endorse life-change through fear of punishment or anxiety about the future. And he has no intention of separating or dividing, splitting nations, races, religious factions, and groups into the haves and the have-nots.
To broken humans who have been torn up by the world, Jesus brings mercy and compassion, helping all persons come back to a sense of who they are in God.
John got this fundamentally wrong about Jesus. Such basic, foundational spiritual work never happens by guilt and shame . . . nor by division and separation.
This work happens through love . . . mercy . . . compassion . . . reconciliation. And this is how Jesus still goes about his work in our world . . . denominational power plays, political rhetoric, and social divisions notwithstanding.
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