advent 3 Year C

Zephaniah 3: 14-20 NRSV text
Isaiah 12: 2-6 NRSV text
Philippians 4: 4-7 NRSV text
Luke 3: 7-18 NRSV text

Luke 3: 18 gets my vote for the most ironic verse in the Bible. John the Baptist has just finished his sermon, which starts, “You brood of vipers! Who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” and concludes with “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!” And then verse 18: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people”!

Hmmm. Good news? Sounds like rather bad news to me. Or at least, it sounds like good ol’-fashioned hellfire and damnation preaching! But that’s because it is precisely that. It’s “old-fashioned”, not in the sense of being antiquated but in the sense of belonging to the Old Covenant. Luke presents John as the Elijah-figure – the last of the Old Testament prophets. He belongs to the Old Order which is overtaken by the New in Jesus. John proclaims the Day of the Lord – the Day of Judgment – and Jesus comes proclaiming the Kingdom of God – the dawn of God’s incomprehensible grace. John proclaims that Jesus will “baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (ie judgment), yet the baptism of the Holy Spirit with tongues of fire in Luke’s second book (Acts 2: 1-4) proves to be not judgment but the announcement of salvation for the whole world.

That’s the problem with our Lectionary readings this week. They’re beautiful readings. Both Zephaniah 3: 14-20 and Isaiah 12: 2-6 are salvation oracles. In both passages, Jerusalem is on the threshold of redemption and vindication. We’re clearly meant to read this week’s texts through the lens of continuity. It’s Advent, and Zephaniah, Isaiah and the Baptist are the prophetic messengers who announce the imminent dawn of God’s salvation – the fulfilment of God’s promises of salvation in Jesus.

The difficulty is that this runs directly contrary to Luke’s presentation of John the Baptist, where it is the elements of discontinuity between the Baptist and Jesus; between the New Covenant and the Old which are his concern. The Lectionary compilers want us to see the connections between Jesus and what has gone before via John; Luke wants us to see the radically new thing that God does in Jesus by the strong contrast between Jesus and the Baptist. You can explore this further in the study, Jesus & John the Baptist: the priority of grace over judgement. If you came directly to this post (rather than to the Home page, where I’ve featured it), you can get it here. In what follows, I presuppose its content.

John – Old Testament prophet of salvation (cf Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Isaiah 12: 2-6)
John has a message of preparation. He will be filled “with the spirit and power of Elijah” (1:17) “to give knowledge of salvation to [God’s] people by the forgiveness of their sins” (1:77). His job is to recall people to the covenant. Significantly, his ministry takes place in the wilderness – away from the Jerusalem temple. We are to see his mission in continuity with that of Jesus in this respect: it is a prophetic criticism of the temple cult. Like the prophets before him, John’s is a call directly from God. It is a corrective to a form of religion that has become disobedient and which merely reinforces what is wrong.

However, his message and emphasis is radically different. John calls the people to repentance in the face of the coming wrath and judgement of God. As the Elijah figure, he is the herald of a Messiah who will usher in “the great and terrible Day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5) – the final judgement and vindication of the faithful. In the face of this coming judgement, he calls the people to repent – to stop their unjust practices. He characteristically stresses the themes of care of the poor (“whoever has two coats”) and justice (“do not use your position to rob or extort”). It’s about fairness. This sense of fairness – justice – is at the heart of the covenant that Yahweh has made with Israel. This is what is meant to characterise the covenant community. Jesus’ message, however, is not about fairness but about grace. Whereas John warns his hearers that they will get what they deserve, Jesus promises his that they will get what they don’t deserve – grace.

John’s vision of salvation cannot be seen outside the Jewish expectations of a restored kingdom. It is thoroughly immersed in the hopes of his times – which themselves are shaped by the Davidic covenant. Both the prophetic readings for this week belong in the context of a Judah restored after exile. The Exile destroyed confidence in the promises Yahweh had made to David (2 Samuel 7: 1-17) of an independent state under a Davidic monarch, centred on the Temple. The prophetic promises of restoration were of a rebuilt city and temple, and a rebuilt covenant relationship with Yahweh. A faithful remnant would return, purified. The kingdom would be restored and Yahweh would be “enthroned” in their midst (see Zephaniah 3:15-17).

In time, the full flowering of this restoration promise became associated with the Messiah – a powerful Davidic warrior who would be the agent of Israel’s deliverance and restored independence. The nation that had been regarded as “lame and outcast” (Zephaniah 3:19) would be shamed no longer.

This is the context of John’s message of preparation. The people were to get ready for God’s Messiah because he was about to appear in the power of the Spirit to deliver Israel from her oppressors and to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

John’s mission is a “purification movement”. The “fire of the Spirit” with which the Messiah will come is a refining fire. It will burn up the dross and leave the pure, whole grain. It is the eschatological “sorting out”. The point is that it is restricted to Israel. John shares with the religious leaders of his day the conviction that the Messiah’s goal will be a restored Israel. Those who sing the songs of praise for God’s salvation (Isaiah 12: 2-6) will be the “faithful remnant”: those who have purified themselves in readiness for God’s advent in Jesus. That is why he cannot understand Jesus when he comes with a different message. He cannot understand a gracious Messiah who befriends the impure and the outcasts, rather than regarding them with prophetic indignation.

Jesus – a different sort of salvation
John baptised people. It was his trademark. It was a new prophetic symbolic action that signified the washing away of sin. It was about people “cleaning themselves up” for God so that God would find them faithful.

What blew John’s mind was the fact that Jesus came preaching the radical acceptance by God of those who made no attempt to clean themselves up. Jesus spent his time among the outcasts – those way beyond the pale. They were the “chaff” of John’s sermon – yet Jesus welcomed them and told them that God did, too! He told them, not that they were to be burned up, but that the Kingdom belonged to them!

The Kingdom of God that Jesus preached was not the Day of the Lord; not a restored Israel but a restored earth. It was a kingdom of people not bound together by covenant faithfulness to Yahweh but by God’s grace in Jesus – the grace of forgiveness. Luke, remember, has Jesus on the cross saying, “Father forgive them”. Calvary in Luke’s gospel is the new Temple. It is the new Holy of Holies – the place where the High Priest Jesus communes with God and asks for (and receives) forgiveness for the people.

That is not to say that there is no need for repentance as a response to the Good News that Jesus preaches. The point, though, is that repentance comes as a response to God’s grace! It is an act of gratitude, not fear. Calvin and Luther divided over the place of repentance. Calvin makes it a precondition for grace; Luther makes it a response to grace. These two great Reformers play out the difference between Jesus and John the Baptist. Calvin’s is a John the Baptist gospel; Luther’s is thoroughly Jesus on this one!

Appreciating John
It feels as though we’ve spent the time running John down on the very day we’re supposed to be thinking about him at Advent! Yet we need to take seriously the effort that Luke makes to differentiate so clearly between Jesus and John. The contrast isn’t between good and bad, but between new and old. John belongs to the Old Testament (literally). He creates the final threshold for the new thing that God is about to do in Jesus.

The point we need to make and realise is that there is no obvious and easy transition from the Old to the New. There is clear continuity – but there is also radical discontinuity. That there is continuity is clear from the way in which Luke frames the Infancy narrative. We are supposed to read John’s and Jesus’ conceptions and missions as part of the same thing that God is doing – part of the Gospel. Luke, too, has the Emmaus Road incident, in which the risen Jesus takes the distraught disciples through the Law and the Prophets, showing how he stands within the line of the Old.

But what Luke shows so clearly is that nothing can have prepared us for the amazing way in which God is revealed in Jesus. What God does in Jesus is wholly unpredictable – in the very literal sense of that word! We read the Old Testament with 20/20 hindsight. We have Nine Lessons & Carols services that only serve to emphasise the suggestion that Jesus came with a ready-made script from the Old Testament. He didn’t.

The grace of God that we find in Jesus is a new thing. It is startling – both wonderful and offensive at the same time. It baffled poor John! It made him question his insight and vocation. Yet John’s story reminds us of the truth contained in John Henry Newton’s powerful hymn: grace is amazing! Jesus smashes the Old Covenant and establishes a radically new one – a covenant whose only precondition is that we recognise grace for what it is (the unconditional gift of God) and embrace it with praise and thanksgiving.

Amen.