What Should We Do?

The crowds asked John the Baptist, “What should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.” Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ. John answered them all, saying, “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Exhorting them in many other ways, he preached good news to the people. (Luke 3.10-18)

As we know, the liturgical season of Advent is characterized by several themes. Perhaps at the forefront is the notion of expectation because, after all, the season anticipates the birth of Jesus the Son of Mary and the Savior of the world. As the Hebrew people waited in expectation for the Messiah who would put the world back on the right course, we now await his birth in Bethlehem in much the same way with longing and with hopefulness.

Another central theme to the liturgical season is the idea of repentance or, as we learned last week, changing our ways, a truer understanding of the word. When the Messiah comes, we want to greet him with pure hearts and good deeds, welcomed by him into his kingdom of justice and righteousness because we have been faithful to the ways of God, not rejected by him because we have fallen prey to the allures and entanglements of the world.

Of course, another theme found in the season, although buried underneath the layers of the other themes, is heartfelt joy, or as we hear in the scriptures “good news.” That is because it is good news that the world is to be reclaimed by its Creator, no longer subject to the tyrants and megalomaniacs of the world who feast while the poor starve and who sit in the lap of luxury while the destitute struggle to make ends meet.

Given these fundamental themes of the season of Advent, it makes perfect sense that John the Baptist should play such a pivotal and central role in the weeks before Christmas. He is the official spokesperson for the season, summoning us to the imminent coming of the Messiah, challenging us to be ready when he comes, insisting that we change course if we want to be among the elect instead of ending up like chaff that is burned in the fire.

As we also saw last week, the open question is whether or not we choose to listen carefully to John’s words during these days of preparation. It is much easier to dismiss his urgent call for change than it is to begin the gruesome work of changing our ways. We prefer to sit and to sip hot chocolate during the cold season than to open our eyes to the many ways that we need to change our attitudes and our lives if we are to be in conformity with the will of the Most High God. Hot cocoa goes down much easier than radical change.

If John the Baptist strikes us as out of place during the season as air waves are filled with joyful carols about jingles bells or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, it is because we want a direct flight to Christmas without the hassle of a lay-over at the Jordan River with John getting in our face, pointing out all the ways we have wandered far from the wishes of the Lord God who put us upon the earth to do his will, not our own wills.

In the tradition of all the great Hebrew prophets, John is a contrarian, meaning his point of view is the opposite of popular opinion and his preaching of right living contrasts sharply with our personal moral codes. In other words, John, like all true prophets, has a conscience, something many other people have lost along the way. As a result, he is an inconvenient truth-teller, one we rather dart around like we do the sidewalk preacher who shouts out warnings to us as we make our way to the office.

Interestingly, the very next verse that follows the selection we hear today tells us that “Herod the tetrarch who had been reproved by John . . . for all the evil things that Herod had done, added this to them all, and shut up John in prison” (3.19-20). It is the ever-present danger for prophets who speak for the Most High God. History has shown repeatedly that prophets do not live to a ripe old age.

The powerful of the world always seek to silence them by one way or another, muting their protests and stopping their finger-pointing, almost always throwing them into prisons or doing away with them like Herod did when he had John beheaded. Or as Henry II did centuries later with Thomas of Becket when he asked aloud, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest,” his question resulting in soldiers rushing off to plunge a sword into Thomas’ stomach.

Perhaps it is for this same reason that the Jewish people had not seen a prophet for over four-hundred years prior to John’s preaching at the Jordan. It was a long, dry spell without anyone braving the headwinds of the times to tell people the truth. Since the true prophet always speaks on behalf of God, perhaps the fault lies with the Maker of the heavens and the earth whose patience had worn thin with the ways of the world, seeing that the prophets of old that he had called to speak his word ended up on a pike or in a prison, the world little changed by their persistent challenge to get right with God. 

But as the evangelist tells us, “the word of God came to John in the wilderness,” his way of telling us that God had not given up all hope for humanity. He was going to give it another try, raising up John to preach repentance or change to the hard-hearted people of the day, hoping against hope that this time they might listen and heed the warning.

It is interesting to hear the people’s reactions to John’s preaching as told to us today in the passage from Luke’s gospel. The evangelist presents three groups of people who respond to John’s message with the same question, “What should we do?” The first to ask the question is simply called “the crowds,” meaning the ordinary people. John answers them, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none, and whoever has food should do likewise.”

There is something so commonsensible in the answer that John gives that it is almost overlooked. And, yet, it obviously was being ignored by the people or else John would not have told them that care for others, especially the less fortunate, is the bedrock and the bottom line of faithfulness to the Most High God who has a special love for the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner, those who have no one to help them. 

The next group that asks John what they should do was the tax collectors. As we heard, John tells them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” It was just another way of saying to stop cheating, stealing, and enriching themselves off the work and struggles of other people. Again, from the standpoint of common decency, there is nothing herculean in what John is asking of tax collectors. And yet, apparently it is a hurdle for hard nosed and heartless people who have lined their pockets through stealing from the poor.

The last group to ask the question was the soldiers. Again, John responds with a practical moral barometer when he answers, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.” He simply asks them to be fair and honest in dealing with others. As before, John would not have made these suggestions if they had been followed already. 

At first glance, it does not appear that John is asking the impossible of people. And yet apparently he is because the evangelist tells us that John “exhorted” them, meaning he had to strongly urge them to do these things. That very fact tells us how deep-rooted the depravity was in people’s lives. They struggled to do the basics of living rightly before God, namely lending a hand to the poor and the hungry, not cheating and scamming innocent people, and not using their power or position to take advantage of the powerless or the defenseless. 

However, before we shake our heads in disbelief at the apparent callousness of heart and shallowness of soul of the people who stood before John, we may want to take a closer look at ourselves, asking ourselves how well we do up against John’s exhortations. Of course, this requires an honesty and an openness that often elude us, our protective walls always raised up to shield us from hard truths that we don’t want to see about ourselves, our ability to deceive and delude ourselves almost impenetrable by any common means.

John, like any true prophet, knows how to crash through our defenses and how to disarm our self-delusions. We might try his approach, assuming we have the stomach for it. Unfortunately, the text that we have today begins one or two verses too late. The earlier verses read, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits that befit repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our Father’ . . . Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Now, that’s the real John speaking there. For some reason, those verses were excised from our text. It is safe to assume somebody wanted to sell his message by soft-pedaling the harshness of his words in favor of his sensible and humane recommendations to live good and decent lives. But the measure of a true prophet is found in exactly what John says in those introductory verses. He isn’t playing a game of patty cake with us. Instead, he hurls a large stone at us like the catapults that broke through the walls of castles, calling us vipers and telling us not to fool ourselves into believing we’re safe because of some religious heritage we claim. None of that matters, he says.

The only thing that matters, as he points out, is the fruit that we bear. “Bear fruits that befit repentance.” Simply stated, if we want to know if we’re truly on the right path, then we only have to look at the fruit that we bear, fruit that proves we are willing to change in order to align our lives with the ways of God. Fruit such as care and compassion for the poor and the needy, fruits such as honesty and integrity in all our dealings with others, fruits such as concern for and consciousness of the oppressed and the ostracized.

If our lives show little to none of those fruits, then we’re on the wrong path, going nowhere except down. As John, a prophet to the end, makes abundantly clear today, “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” It may not be the Christmas message we want to hear, but it certainly is the Christmas message that we need to hear. Which is why Luke calls it good news. We’re given a chance to get it right, saving our necks from the ax’s blade. 

–Jeremy Myers