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Sermon: The Third Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 3rd July 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 10 am
Readings: Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 Psalm 45:10-17 Romans 7:14-25 Matthew 11:15-19, 25-30
I wonder if Jesus was ever embarrassed by John the Baptist. It is maybe not a question that has occurred to you … but it has occurred to me when I’ve read about John the Baptist in the Gospels .
I don’t know what exposure you have had to hell fire and brimstone preachers. They are a dying breed – certainly the more colorful ones.
I remember when I was growing up, going along to hear a preacher by the name of Norm Harris. He was a fire and brimstone preacher. He wasn’t the world’s best preacher early on in his sermons, but by the time he had got worked up to the appeal, he had us quivering in our seats.
He was a scary preacher – but I’d be embarrassed if he was asked to preach at a church I was attending or if I had invited some newcomers to church to find he was preaching.
John the Baptist was a scary preacher. He certainly wasn’t afraid to use fear.
In the earlier chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, we read that people came flocking to hear him, but he didn’t mince his words. To the Pharisees and Sadducees who came for a peek, probably hoping to not draw too much attention to themselves, he singled them out with these words,
‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’
‘Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees and every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.’
It is a pretty gruesome image if you think about it – as is the image of the grim reaper that he goes on to use:
‘He [that is Jesus] will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’
You would have to say that John the Baptist was a fire, if not exactly brimstone, preacher.
Was Jesus embarrassed by him? There are one or two hints that he might have been.
John’s coming put some pressure on Jesus – to be this agent of fiery cleansing.
Possibly the closest thing we have to Jesus being embarrassed in the Gospels was his attempted silencing of people thought to be possessed of evil spirits, who, in the Gospels, addressed him loudly as the Son of God; kind of like ‘outing’ him before his time.
Jesus tried, not always successfully, to shut those voices down.
Was he embarrassed by what John was saying about him?
John and Jesus were cousins, according to Luke’s Gospel – perhaps second or third cousins. There is reason to think that they may have had little (or nothing) to do with each other in the years leading up to their baptismal encounter on the banks of the Jordon River.
There is sensible conjecture that John may have joined the Qumran community in hill country around the Dead Sea (where the Dead Sea scrolls were found back in 1947).
The people of that community, or communities (there were a number of them) believed that they living on the far edge of human history and that God was about to create a whole new future … and that their acts of piety and purification were preparing a way for God to come; were creating a highway for their God (picking up language from the Prophet Isaiah) .
John picks up that language himself in calling upon people to be ready for the harvest about to begin.
What did Jesus think about all this?
Was he comfortable or uncomfortable with what John was saying?
That’s not an easy question to answer. We weren’t there to ask him … but we do know what he did. We do know what Jesus goes on to do – after he was introduced to the world by John.
He does pretty much the opposite of what John said he’d do.
Within a few chapters of his baptism, Jesus is sitting on a hillside and teaching crowds of people to love their enemies … to make friends with those that John thought were about to be annihilated …
‘You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.’
Jesus doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to be God’s Terminator. He is definitely taking his time, with lots of hints that there is time … though not unlimited time.
He tells a parable about a wheat field sprinkled with weed seeds (by a malicious neighbor) and of the farmer telling his workmen to be patient, to let the weeds and the wheat grow up and mature together – not to try to pull out the weeds because of the risk of pulling out the wheat as well.
Jesus was acutely aware of the subtly of the distinction between wheat and weeds, with those thinking they were wheat proving to be weeds and visa versa.
And, as if to highlight this subtly, he chose to hang out with those considered to be weeds: tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers and sinners. And he was just as happy to accept invitations to eat with Pharisees and Sadducees – those who had earlier come under withering attack from John – and Jesus was going to have some hard words to say as well. But he ate with them. He reached out to them. He didn’t turn the blow torch onto them.
He kept blurring the distinction between those who were acceptable and those who weren’t. He turned insiders into outsiders and outsiders into insiders. He chose a despised Samaritan to be the hero of one of his parables.
When he was walking through Samaria on one occasion, the locals were rude and inhospitable to Jesus and his disciples … giving back some of the mistreatment they frequently received … and the disciples, perhaps with John’s preaching in mind , urge Jesus to burn them to death (to call down fire on them).
‘Come on Jesus! When are you going to do something like that?’
But Jesus was in no mood for such talk. He rebuked them saying,
‘You do not know to what spirit you belong, for the Son of man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.’
John the Baptist came as a proclaimer of judgement.
Jesus the Messiah came as a proclaimer of deliverance from judgement.
John and his disciples fasted in preparation for the coming of God.
Jesus and his disciples partied to say, ‘He has come.’
SO different was Jesus to what John had expected that he sent his disciples to Jesus to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ (M 11:3)
Jesus was very different – which raises the question again, ‘Was Jesus embarrassed or uncomfortable about what John said about him way back at the beginning?’
We get embarrassed don’t we? I do, by some of my co-religionists, especially by those who forever want to pull the future into the present – whose sole focus is on the life to come, and on what God is going to do soon they hope … to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats.
When I was growing up, my dad would love to go off to conferences on the second coming of Jesus – and he himself would write papers on when we could expect Jesus to return, on the final few years (two lots of 3 ½ years, by his calculations) when all the awful plagues and calamities of the Book of Revelation would be sent hurtling down onto the earth – to finally wipe out the wicked.
And, naturally, with these events so soon to happen, there was no time or need to worry about global warming – or about our stewardship of the earth - or our responsibility to the world’s poor and oppressed and enslaved.
No time!
John the Baptist seems to have been a bit like my dad in thinking that the end of the world was imminent – and that there was no time to do anything but REPENT – and he expected Jesus to be the one to bring on this fiery end.
Was Jesus uncomfortable about this or embarrassed?
I don’t think he was … which might have something to say to us.
For a start, it was Jesus who came to John way back at the time of his baptism. He sought John out – not the other way around. He would have been aware of what John was saying.
Another reason to think that Jesus was not embarrassed or uncomfortable with
what John was preaching was that he adopted essentially the same message.
In Matthew 3, John the Baptist is described as appearing in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ‘Get ready’, in other words.
In Matthew 4, immediately after John is arrested (for having a go at Herod), verse 17 says, ‘From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ The same message: ‘Get ready.’
Jesus and John’s headline messages were identical. Where they differed was in the timing and the manner in which the kingdom of heaven was going to come near.
In my research for this sermon, I came across a passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls that could well have provided some inspiration for what John was preaching. It is a passage that looks forward to the coming of God to renew the world. It says,
And then God will purge by his truth all the deeds of men, refining for himself some of humankind in order to abolish every evil spirit from the midst of his flesh, and to cleanse him through a holy spirit from all wicked practices, sprinkling upon him a spirit of truth as purifying water (1 QS 4.2of.).
Here is the symbolism of baptism … and it is interesting because the cleansing spoken about comes by way of truth. There is destruction and refining spoken about, but it is the destruction of inner evil. It is about inner purification …
… which raises the question of what John was expecting. I think he did expect the end of the world, as he knew it. And he was wanting people to get ready.
But what he didn’t quite see was that Jesus would be ushering in the end by calling upon people to repent and be part of an end time way of living.
The kingdom of heaven was a way of being while still in this world; a way of being that would transform this world.
It wasn’t just a ticket for a life-raft to get off Titanic Earth – and to go straight to heaven.
It was a way of living and acting and being that would bring heaven-like reality to earth.
‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,’ is what Jesus prayed and is what we pray each week.
And that is why we should repent … to be part of this life-transforming way of living.
I do get embarrassed by my fellow Christians sometimes. Maybe you do too.
But I know that for me that is sometimes a cop-out – just an excuse to think I am better than others; a way of putting them down and making me feel good.
It is always easy to see and to point out the flaws in others. It is not so easy (or comfortable) to look at one’s own flaws.
Jesus and John were slightly at odds. They weren’t entirely on the same page, but Jesus doesn’t for that reason dismiss John or belittle John.
In fact, the very opposite: in verse 11 of chapter 11 of Matthew, he says of John, ‘among those born of women, no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist …’
Jesus is generous in his praise of John the Baptist, and, at the point where they differ, he simply corrects him or instructs him.
When John sends his disciples to ask Jesus, ‘Are you the one to come or should we look for another?’ Jesus sends back the message:
‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’
He is basically saying to John, ‘Don’t be embarrassed by me.’
We can learn from this, can’t we?
We do differ from each other as Christians. But where we do, the thing to do, or the thing we might do following the lead of Jesus, is to gently correct and to show a better way.
That is what Jesus does. Our passage finishes with those wonderfully comforting and inviting words of Jesus,
‘Come to me all you that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon me and learn from me: for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’
‘In the face of a judgment that will one day come, come to me.’
Those are good final words for us as we today seek to heed the message of John and Jesus to repent – to bring our lives into conformity with the gracious and challenging life of Jesus, with the values and lifestyle of the kingdom of heaven.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.