Sermons

Sunday 8th December 2013, Advent 2, morning

Matthew 3:1-12

by Revd Chris Palmer

“John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.”

We might think John was just an extreme eccentric. In our less-understanding moments we might think someone like this had some kind of mental health problem. We’d almost certainly have stayed away from him.

And his message seems no more attractive then his appearance. Everyone wants to be flattered and John simply tells people to repent – in other words, he accuses them of wrong doing. And the poor Pharisees and Sadducees who’ve gone to be baptised! Note that: these are the people who’ve actually gone to hear the message and have accepted it - and they get, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?’ I think I might have had a ‘why bother?’ attitude if it were me.

John is alien, different, troubling, offensive, difficult, unattractive, easy to ignore. He doesn’t conform to polite society, but he’s not some think of beatnik or bohemian either – such stereotypes are insufficient for the challenge he presents.

Of course there are important references in the way he’s described, drawn mainly from Israel’s past story. His clothing refers to the way the prophet Elijah dressed, another troubling character who spoke God’s word from the margins. The wilderness reminds us of the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness from slavery in Egypt. The Jordan river north of the Dead Sea where John was baptising was where the Israelites first crossed the Jordan as the entered the promised land. And then Matthew explicitly quotes from the book of Isaiah, ‘prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight...’ – looking for a new Exodus in which the glory of God is restored to Israel.

John the Baptist didn’t have a monopoly on Old Testament allusions. Up the road in Jerusalem was an enormous temple built by King Herod the Great. Herod had an Old Testament precedent in mind when he built it, because it was David’s son, Solomon, who built the first temple to show that he was the true King. And King Herod wanted to establish his spurious claim to the throne of Israel by doing the same thing. Almost everyone knew he was a big fraud.

The problem, by contrast, with John the Baptist is that he was too real. And as T S Eliot said, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’. If Herod was laughable – though also terrifying because he was a brute – it was impossible to know how to respond to John. There was just nothing humorous about him; but the alternative of taking him seriously made such a radical claim on one’s life that it was frightening.

So people hedged their bets. John could see it in the Pharisees' and Sadducees' faces. They wanted to identify with his call to renew Israel, and they wanted to stand on the inheritance of their ancestry. John was having none of it. ‘Do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”, for I tell you, God is able from these stone to raise up children to Abraham.’

In other words to respond to the message of John the Baptist, means cutting all those ties, loosing ourselves from reliance on the identity we create from our family, nationality, ancestry, work, position, and so on. As long as we cling to these things, we are keeping God out. Only when we acknowledge the deadness of our own offering will we see God at work. ‘God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.’

Such an alien message leaves us feeling impotent, unable to discover any direction, any way to walk, any gift to bring that can be worthwhile. If God declares even the religious heritage he’s given us as a cause of worthless pride and can start again from the stones, then why bother?

In a sense these are all excellent Advent questions. Advent is not a pretty season of growing excitement about Nativity plays and Christmas trees and Santa Claus and presents. Advent is the time when God plunges us into darkness, disorientates us, asks us to respond to him in what is alien, offensive, and unattractive. And it is precisely our capacity to stay with and live with this, with what is difficult and troubling, and not run away, that makes us ready to greet Christ. It is our openness to hear words of reproach and judgement, without becoming self-defensive or embittered or ready to see everyone else’s faults except our own, that makes us ready to follow Christ.

Because – and this is the crucial point – John the Baptist – and Jesus – only appear strange, unfamiliar, and offensive because really we are strange, unfamiliar, and offensive. In reality prophets like John the Baptist give us as clear a window onto God and true humanity as there can be. Jesus is truly God and truly human: he displays to us what we most truly are. It’s not that John and Jesus are alien and offensive. We have become alien and offensive to God – except God doesn’t mind. He doesn’t flinch from us, withdrew, go off in a huff, get defensive, stand on his rights, try to big himself up. God simple meets us as a human being.

The most bizarre thing about how we meet Jesus is that we see our true selves – humanity as God means it to be - and we run away. John the Baptist asks us to face ourselves – our vulnerability, our provisionality, our need for God – and accept ourselves. To respond to God is to not flee from ourselves into some construct we have manufactured, but to face ourselves in Jesus.

And more startling still, we can do this, because God faces himself in us. This is implied in that motif from the creation story that God makes us in his own image: when God looks at human beings he looks at someone like himself. And even more in the incarnation, in God becoming a human being, Christ, God sees himself. And in every human being, God sees Christ.

To be our truest selves because in us God sees his truest self: this is the challenge of the alien and difficult John the Baptist. In recent weeks I’ve been reading poems by the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He talks about how God sees his truest self, Christ, in our truest self, in one of his sonnets:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.