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. . . After all the people had been baptized and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3.13-17, 21-22)
According to the liturgical calendar, the Christmas season ends today with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Admittedly, the season moves hurriedly by leaps and bounds, the movement from Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem to his baptism in the Jordan–a period covering several decades–presented on the calendar in a matter of a few weeks. It has the same speed as a sprinter dashing to the finish line.
Luke, following much the same script as Mark and Matthew, presents the baptism of Jesus as an event taking place at the Jordan River where John the Baptist is preaching, teaching, and urging people to change their ways. Of course, Luke deviates a bit here and there as he is prone to do, adding his own flavor and flourishes to the event. In fact, this is the most truncated of the three tellings of the story, basically contained in one short phrase, “Jesus also had been baptized.”
However, all three synoptic writers connect Jesus’ baptism to John’s preaching at the Jordan, although Luke does not spell out that Jesus was baptized by John, preferring to prioritize the one from the other even more soundly than his fellow writers by omitting a clear reference to John being the one to perform the baptism, although the assumption remains.
All the gospel writers want to present these differences between John and Jesus, intent on showing that not only is the torch passed from one to the other, but that Jesus is in a league all his own. Hence, Luke has John state, “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.”
For our purposes today, I would like to look closely at John’s description of the Messiah, found in his exhortation to the people, “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.” Clearly, it provides a vivid image of the Messiah for his listeners, presenting him as someone whose coming will result in a judgment upon the people. It is fire and brimstone at its best.
Earlier, John had told the people that they must produce good fruits as evidence of their change of heart, indicating that the time was short for them to turn around their lives, for, as he said, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” We can see that John very much likes the image of fire, a force that can cleanse or can destroy, depending on what is subjected to its flames.
Those who heed the warning can be cleansed by the fire, like gold in the furnace, but those who reject the message will be consumed by the flames, like rubble in a fire pit. It is a warning that will continue throughout the pages of the gospel, reminding listeners that if their lives show no signs of fruitfulness then they will be cast into the fire like any other useless item.
With such a powerful image, it is easy to overlook the other image that John uses, one that I actually prefer, that of the winnowing fan, something most of us have never seen. To understand the image, we need to take a moment to look at the early ways of gathering grain after the harvest. Once the sheaves of wheat had been cut, they were laid upon a hard surface so that oxen could pull a heavy sled over them to separate the grains of wheat from the stalks and husks.
Once that process had been completed, a winnowing fan was needed, an instrument much like our pitch fork, although larger. When using it, a farmer would scoop up the wheat and chaff, tossing it into the air, allowing the wind to blow away the useless chaff while the heavy grains of wheat would fall to the floor where they could be gathered and put into a bin.
At the time, everyone would have been familiar with a winnowing fan and would have immediately understood that Luke was using it to express the separation of that which is worthless from that which is worthwhile. Placed in the context of John’s exhortation and in light of Jesus’ subsequent call for conversion, it pointed to a separation of the good from the bad, the faithful from the unfaithful, the righteous from the unrighteous.
Overall, it is a good image, even if dated to an agrarian time unlike our own. However, even in modern times, we have seen the many ways that wind is a powerful force. And although machinery now does the removal of the kernels of wheat from the chaff, we are familiar enough with stalks of wheat to know that the useful stuff has to be separated from the useless stuff in order for flour to be made from the grains.
With that image in mind and with John’s call for bearing good fruit, we may want to look into our own lives, deciding and dividing the useful from the useless. In other words, if we were to take a winnowing fan to scoop up the days of our lives, what would fly away in the wind because it carries no weight and what would fall to the ground because it is weighty enough to be worth something.
This is neither a difficult nor a demanding project. Our lives, like stalks of wheat, are made up of some things that are worthwhile, defined as those actions and concerns that imitate the ways of Jesus, and other things that are worthless, understood as those deeds that we do that are far removed from the ways of Jesus. Most people’s lives have a combination of both because few of us are altogether good. Nor, for that matter, are we altogether bad.
But, in the end, our principal concern is how much of what we do with our time is worth keeping and, on the other hand, how much of what we do is worthless, simply no more than fluff and filler that serves no real purpose when measured against the actions that define the faithful disciple of the Lord Jesus. Thrown into the air, what floats away, carried off by the wind, and what stays, unable to be caught up by the wind because it has weight?
Somewhat familiar with modern farming practices myself because of my background and location, I have watched farmers gauge the worthwhileness of a wheat crop by snapping the heads of ripened wheat from the stalk, rolling the head between the two palms of their hands until the grains are separated from the hulls, in this way allowing the farmer to look into the palm of his hand to count the number of kernels per head of wheat. Obviously, the greater the number the better the crop.
Were we to do the same, that is, to take the days of our lives, rubbing them into the palms of our hands to separate the important stuff from the unimportant stuff, what would we see? How many grains would we find in our hands when we have separated the good from the bad? Or, stated in biblical terms, how much good fruit have we produced with our lives upon the earth?
The beauty of scripture is that it is rarely theoretical. Quite the contrary. It is practical to the umpteenth degree. You can’t get more practical than John the Baptist’s words to the crowds, exhorting them to “produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance,” cautioning them to not fool themselves into believing they are exempted from the judgment of God simply because they are children of Abraham.
The bottom line is neither religious affiliation nor name tags that put us into a prestigious group will save us from the unquenchable fires. Only the good fruit that our lives produce will prove that we truly have made a positive response to the call of Jesus. Until and unless we walk the way of Jesus, imitating his actions and attitudes, we’re producing little more than chaff, lightweight stuff that is lifted up by the wind and blown away in a gust or two.
Because we are celebrating the Baptism of the Lord today, it benefits us to understand that our baptism in and of itself does not give us a get out of jail free card. Just the opposite. Through our own baptisms, we have promised the Almighty that we will follow in the footsteps of his Beloved Son, forming and informing our lives in such a way that we also become over the course of our lives beloved sons and daughters of the same God.
So, a failure to align our lives in accord with the life of Jesus proves that we are frauds, people who make claims that are false. We have broken our promises, instead choosing to fill our lives with the things of this world rather than the things of the world to come, following gods made of wood and stone rather than the one true God, going the wrong direction in life rather than changing course so that we are moving steadily towards the Kingdom of God.
Fundamentally, our baptism is a pledge and a promise that we will spend our days in service to the words and to the ways of Jesus, the Beloved Son of the Most High God. Using John the Baptist’s words, we will bear good fruit, our lives a faithful imitation of the love, the mercy, and the generosity that the Beloved Son showed to others while he was upon the earth.
Like any good fruit, the fruits of our lives can be measured. They either fill a bushel basket or they leave it half-filled or partially filled. And like kernels of wheat, they have weight, meaning they are worthwhile. If there are no kernels to count, then our days have been spent in creating straw, picked up by the wind and removed from sight with little to no effort.
Some five years ago, a retired computer technician met a young clerk at a 7-Eleven store. He complimented her on the way she had handled an unhappy customer. In the process of talking with her, he learned that she had dropped out of college because someone had stolen her laptop when she was taking online classes.
Wanting to help her, the retired man refurbished a laptop he had and gave it to her for free. As a result, she was able to complete her associate’s degree in business. That began a project that the man chose to call “The Tech Fairy,” a spin-off of the Tooth Fairy name. He collected broken laptops and outdated computers, repairing them and giving them away to those in need.
Over the past five years, the man has given away more than 300 computers to students and to families. Now seventy-six years old, the man continues with his project. Explaining why he does it, he says, “I’ve got the skill. I’ve got the time. I’ve got the resources. So, who wouldn’t do it? For me to spend my time productively to the benefit of others is my reward.”
Well said. Hearing his story, it is easy enough to see the winnowing fan that the man holds in his hand, the abundant grains of wheat falling to the floor, ready to be scooped up to be placed in the bin of good deeds, his life producing good fruit as evidence of his conviction that the ways of Jesus are well worth imitating, even in a world regularly going in the opposite direction. Now, we must decide how productive our own lives are, asking ourselves if we have produced a plentiful harvest, or if we have simply produced a bunch of chaff.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 