Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, my family decorates for Christmas. We get our tree, bring up the Christmas decorations, etc. This year, as the kids were putting up the ornaments, Phoebe picked up an ornament depicting the nativity, with Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Joseph, unfortunately, had his head broken off. To which Phoebe quickly said, “Well, I guess he’s now John the Baptist.”
As the story goes, John is eventually arrested and beheaded by King Herod. Happy Advent and Christmas everyone! We can see from this passage why John was not well-liked by those who held all of the power. First of all, he dressed weird and survived on locusts and honey. Not to mention, he lived out in the desert away from civilized Jerusalem and the surrounding towns. And John was not one to mince words. Calling people “Children of snakes,” or “brood of vipers” in other translations, isn’t necessarily going to endear you to anybody, much less those in the upper ruling classes who held all of the wealth and all of the power.
Yet, John the Baptist clearly had a following because those considered outcasts and a few of the elite class made the trek from Jerusalem to the river Jordan to be baptized by him. This is an interesting thing when we take a closer look at the location where our passage takes place. Jerusalem was the center of both religious and civic life. The temple, Israel’s place of worship, was located in Jerusalem. Government officials most likely lived and met together in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of everything. But things were changing.
We see how it’s changing in how and where God chooses to work through John the Baptist. As biblical scholar William Herzog observes: “In the ancient world, power was concentrated in central cities, where the temples and imperial buildings witnessed to the power of the current regime. In the center were located bureaucracies that collected tribute and other direct and indirect taxes. As a general rule, if people wanted to get something or get something done, they would travel to the city center. The margins came to the center, but not the other way around.”
Yet, in our passage, we see that the center has moved from the city to the margins. God’s prophet is literally shouting in the wilderness. He’s the one whom God has chosen to prepare the way for the beginning of Jesus’ official ministry. The fact that John is who God chose to speak through and to do so out in the sticks, shows that God is doing something new. God is choosing to work through people and places that most people would rather not go. This foreshadows the more drastic changes that are yet to come.
We also see foreshadowing in these changes, as John does not mince words with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Both of these groups could be seen as political interest groups for Israel, by promoting their holiness agenda by aligning themselves with those in the powerful and ruling classes. They definitely felt threatened by John’s growing number of followers because it diminished their influence.
And John, like an Old Testament prophet, cuts straight to the heart of the matter and calls them out on it. Before the Pharisees could defend themselves as devout Israelites who could claim Abraham as their Father, John shoots back with: “That doesn’t mean anything, because God is about to expand who can be in God’s family.” He foreshadows how, through Jesus Christ, one doesn’t have to be Jewish to be in the family of God.
But first, John calls them out on their lack of repentance. If they truly wanted to repent and turn to God, they’d start showing the fruits of transformation. Fruits such as serving their fellow Israelites, rather than aligning themselves with an oppressive empire to safeguard their own power and safety.
All of us are in danger of falling into the trap of preserving ourselves at the expense of others because we are all sinners. So, before we look down on the Pharisees and Sadducees for holding onto the appearance of being devout followers of God rather than actually being devout followers of God, we all need to be aware of our tendency to do the same. We tend to fall into this trap when our understanding of who Jesus is and how Jesus calls us to live is challenged.
That’s what is happening in this passage. No one, not the Pharisees, Sadducees, or the average Israelite, understands how God is about to change their entire understanding of faith and the world in general. Their world is about to be turned upside down. We see a foreshadowing of this in how God is moving the sphere of influence from the city center to out in the wilderness,
In the same way, how might God be moving us and our understanding of Jesus Christ to be more true to who Jesus is?
Part of this process will involve repentance for misunderstanding who Jesus is. Some see faith in Jesus as merely a vehicle for a blessed, happy life. To be a follower of Jesus does not guarantee that one’s life will be free of pain or hardship. Others view faith in Jesus as simply their ticket to heaven and fail to honor Jesus’ call in this life to love God, with all of their hearts, minds, and souls, as well as their neighbor and themselves. Others see following Jesus as tied to being a good American citizen.
In seminary, a classmate said that the Vietnamese immigrant family living in his neighborhood had a lot more work to do to become “good Christian Americans” because they weren’t doing a good job of keeping up their front yard. Having grown up as a child of immigrants myself, I wanted to say: “It’s probably because they have to work several jobs to keep food on the table, and they’re too tired to take care of the yard when they get home because of the long hours they worked.” But I was just too shocked in the moment to say anything in response to his gross misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian and his lack of empathy for his literal neighbors.
Those of us who hold these views need to repent of holding onto a false interpretation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Because such views aren’t centered on Jesus, but on us.
This was the entire point of John’s sermon in the wilderness. The quote on your bulletin summarizes it beautifully:
John’s wilderness sermon points beyond himself to God. The Church is not the gospel. The community of faith is not the savior. Preaching strives to point ever and always to Jesus. He should increase in every sermon, and the preacher, and even the church, should decrease.- Mark E. Yurs
Not that we as the church are not important to Jesus because we are. But all churches, including us here at First Pres, can fall into the trap of making the church more important than Jesus himself.
My hope this Advent season is that we would allow God to challenge us to examine our understanding, our theology, of Jesus Christ. Are we simply using Jesus as a means to an end when he is both our means and end? When we allow ourselves to dig deeper into the context of Jesus’ birth, we will find that there are all sorts of things we got wrong about Jesus and for which we need to repent.
But when we do so, the true meaning of Christmas will hit harder and most importantly, we will see and know Jesus himself more clearly. Then Jesus, not us, becomes our center.