Repent

John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said,  ‘A voice of one crying out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’” John wore clothing made of camel’s hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. At that time Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins. When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3.1-12)

If we had any doubts about the differences between the Season of Advent that we find on our liturgical calendar and the pre-Christmas season that we find on our normal calendar, then they are dispelled today when we meet John the Baptist in our passage from Scripture on this Second Sunday of Advent. To say the least, he is a formidable character, next to no friendliness found in his voice, and dressed in tattered rags as he comes out of the wilderness to admonish the people.

Contrast that figure with our Santa Claus, the rotund, red-cheeked and red-festooned character with his friendly ho-ho welcome who is the quintessential symbol for the countdown to the days before Christmas on our regular calendar and we find ourselves living in two very different worlds at one and the same time, one located in the Judean wilderness, the other homebased in the North Pole, floating in the skies in a sled pulled by Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. 

Surrounded by the sights and sounds of Christmas as we know them, swimming in a sea of smiling shoppers as we search for the right gift, we feel ourselves suddenly snatched by an alien spaceship as we find ourselves listening today to John the Baptist who spews from his mouth ugly and harsh words, nothing in his speech having any semblance to the festivities of Christmas as we know it. Our reaction, like the words of Dorothy to her dog Toto in The Wizard of Oz, might be “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” 

Nevertheless, we are expected to somehow occupy both worlds for these few weeks, giving attention to each of them without neglecting either, so we take a moment today to make our acquaintance with John the Baptist, the poster child for the season of Advent, at least on the liturgical calendar. As we draw closer, we should be forewarned that he is more Scrooge than Santa, someone with little patience for Christmas carols or Black Friday specials.

Stated simply, he is a curmudgeon-like character, intentionally presented so by the evangelist Matthew, perhaps even a historically accurate presentation, all things considered. First and foremost, we need to know that John is introduced here by the evangelist as another Hebrew prophet, someone recognized at large as handpicked by the Almighty to speak on his behalf to the people of the world. 

The pages of the Hebrew scriptures have a good number of these men, but there had been a dry spell as of late, the last recognized prophet being Malachi who lived some four hundred years before John the Baptist. According to Jewish tradition, Malachi was supposed to be the last prophet before the start of the Messianic Age, at which point Elijah, another great prophet of the past, would appear to herald the new age . 

Borrowing from the tradition, the early Christian believers instead chose to see John the Baptist as the last Hebrew prophet, the one who would be the doorkeeper to the Messianic Age initiated by the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the long awaited Savior of the world. As such, the evangelists are wont to present him as an Elijah-like figure, someone who also dressed in rags and ate locusts.

As we might expect then, John the Baptist’s job is to prepare the world for the entrance of the Messiah, serving much the same role as a weather forecaster on TV, calling people to prepare for the climatic changes about to occur. Hence, his clarion call as we hear today is “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As John sees it, this is the only acceptable response to this tectonic shift of the earth’s plates that is about to happen.

We’re familiar with the word “repent,” a word in our lexicon that connotes a sense of regret or remorse for having done something wrong. But for the evangelist who employed the Greek word “metanoia” to capture the essence of John’s preaching, there is a much deeper and richer meaning. Most often, it is understood as a “turning around,” signifying a change in direction that a person is taking. 

While that explanation is much closer to the truth, it still lacks a sense of the depth of the turning around, perhaps a better way of looking at repent being a complete reorientation of one’s life. Or, as some scholars argue, repentance argues for a change not only in a person’s future, but also in a person’s past, perhaps summed up in the words, “I am no longer that person.” 

Of course, for such a radical reorientation to take place, it first requires a change in the way a person thinks. Seen in this way, repentance is not a matter of feeling bad about something we may have done, but more akin to thinking about things differently that leads us to live in the world in a totally new and different way. Seeing things in a different light, we now become someone other than who we were.

And why, we probably want to ask ourselves, should we expend the energy to become someone else? Most of us are satisfied, if not happy, with who we are, content with the way we see things, not especially interested in changing our minds on most anything from the foods we eat to the people we dislike. We’re comfortable with the way we think.

But that will not pass the muster with John the Baptist. Nor will it make the grade with Jesus of Nazareth who will use the very same word “repent” to introduce his message to us in a short while, his first word also being “metanoia.” So exactly why do these two figures have a beef with the way we think, so much so that they would have us do a complete makeover? 

Well, the simple answer is we’re not living the way we should be living, meaning we’re not thinking the way we should be thinking about a good many things. As we see, John doesn’t mince words, calling the religious leaders of Judaism “offspring of vipers.” Ouch! He takes to task their way of thinking about things, telling them that their belief that they are children of Abraham won’t save them, nor will any baptism by itself spare them. The only thing that will save their hide will be a complete reorientation of their minds, bodies, and hearts.

Of course, that is an equally important message to us as well, comfortably ensconced as we are in our way of thinking and in our way of living, assuring ourselves that what we’re thinking and doing is the right stuff, so why all the kerfuffle. Well, John has a way of breaking down our defenses and reading our souls with a penetrating insight. As someone who knows the heart of God, as any good prophet does, he knows our hearts are hardened, little to nothing like the heart of God that is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity,” as God had defined himself to Moses in the desert.

It is important to see that John does not dilly-dally around about repentance, insisting that time is of the essence. We can feel the urgency when he says, “Even now the ax lies at the root of trees,” the image of the cutting down of “every tree that does not bear good fruit” enough to send a reasonable person into a panic, his words much like a category five hurricane warning, 

Why the rush to repent? Because, as John says, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As we will see in the months ahead, Matthew prefers the phrase “the kingdom of heaven” instead of “the kingdom of God,” probably a nod to his Jewish audience’s reluctance to use the name of God. Regardless, they mean the same, both phrases meant to convey the rule of God upon the earth. 

As John sees it and as Jesus will also see it, God’s reclamation of the world is imminent and if we want to be a part of his kingdom, then the only proper response is repentance. “His winnowing fan is in his hand,” John says when speaking of the coming of the Kingdom of heaven, “and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

This image of the separation of the wheat and chaff at the start of the gospel is little different than the separation of the sheep and the goats that Matthew saves for the close of his gospel, both images making it clear that those saved will be those whose lives have borne good fruit. John, like Jesus in his parable of the judgment of the nations, sees a culling of the good from the bad, a recognition that those whose lives have been oriented towards the ways of God will be saved, while those whose lives are oriented towards the ways of the world will be lost.

That John and his message appear here in the season of Advent is a no-brainer. From the perspective of Christian believers, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem inaugurates the reign of God upon the earth. So, these few weeks before Christmas are an annual reminder that if we want to be participants in the reign of God, then it is time for us to reorient ourselves away from the world and towards the ways of God. Anything less, and we will find ourselves in an unhappy place at the end, left behind like cheerleading contestants who didn’t make the cut. 

Obviously, John’s message doesn’t carry the cheerfulness of our Christmas cards, but it nonetheless intends a message that we need to hear, especially in this season of preparedness. Like the warning of a doctor about changing our ways to maintain our physical health, this doctor of the soul warns us on changing our ways if we want to secure our spiritual health. We may not want to hear it, but we need to hear it.

To repent is no easy process because changing our way of thinking to correspond to God’s way of thinking is both challenging and dangerous in a world that is far from God’s reign, especially when we remember that the kingdom of God is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the kings of this world were not. 

In other words, where God reigns, everything is changed. The world becomes a place of justice and peace, a place of tolerance and abundance for all, a place of unity and community. Advent calls us to live in that world, asking us to repent so that the reign of God might take hold in our hearts, requiring a change in our way of thinking that will change the way we live in this world, bringing us closer to that challenge put before Christian believers by the preacher John Chrysostom who once said, “Let us astound them by our way of life.” 

However, the bottom line is we are not going to astound anyone by our way of life unless we first heed John’s call to repentance. Hence, the need for us to listen to this voice in the wilderness, abrasive and offensive as we may find it.

–Jeremy Myers