John the Baptist: Witness
Luke 3:7-18
Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you/ As yet but knock, breathe,
Shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend/
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
We have a relative whose Christmas card arrives every year at about this time. It’s always the same. We think he loves us, but . . . it’s a severe love. Well, I have his card here; judge for yourselves.
Dear Rick and Tracy, and family: You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Happy holidays! Love, John.
Each year we ask ourselves, must we have Cousin John every Christmas? Can’t we skip a year? Is he really family? The answer is always Yes, but why?
Why? Because of all the ways we have of preparing for Christmas (and we have a lot), John’s method is the best.
Our Gospel for today is a continuation of last Sunday’s reading. You may remember, John is holding a revival on the banks of the Jordan River. “Revival” is not a word often found in our vocabulary. Of course, we Lutherans occasionally sing,
“On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry/
announces that the Lord is nigh.”
But I wonder how many Lutherans would actually show up for a revival? You have one of two very different motives for going out there. One is fascination with an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon—call it curiosity. The other is desperation, a desperation to be cleansed and to find a new life.
When my mother was twelve she was baptized at a revival. She was a lonely little girl who was home alone most evenings. Her mother was dead, and her father worked nights. One night she went down the street to a Baptist church where they were holding a revival. There was plenty of water, maybe not the Jordan, but enough, and after some hesitation she went forward and was baptized. She was not a great sinner, but it helped with the loneliness.
Huge crowds of sophisticated urbanites are flocking down from Jerusalem to be baptized, some curious, some desperate. Among them is John’s relative, cousin, Jesus. Jesus wades into the water with John and submits to John’s baptism of repentance. John may have been the first person to see God in the face of Jesus.
John was a great prophet—Jesus once called him the greatest—but he wasn’t much of a politician. You know how politicians are. They never tire of telling their constituents how great and indispensable they are to the nation. But in all four gospels, John launches his public ministry by announcing who he is not and what he cannot do. I am not the Messiah. I am not the answer to the nation’s longing. I am not the answer to your prayers. I am not good enough to shine the Messiah’s shoes. I am not the one you paid to see. I am only the opening act. I am the announcer, not the star. “It ain’t me you’re looking for.”
John is our truth teller. In the Fourth Gospel he repeatedly refers to himself as a witness to the truth. In our warped culture of untruth, half-truths, misinformation, disinformation, counterfactuals, and conspiracy theories (which, by the way, are not theories at all, but lies), we are dying for lack of truth. John is the standard bearer of the truth. The needle on his compass always points to the truth. For this reason alone, we can never get beyond John the Baptist. This Advent Cousin John makes a modest if minimal demand: Just tell the truth. We can’t tell the truth about everything because we don’t know enough. But we do know enough to tell the truth about Jesus, who he is, what he has done, what he means in our life, and about what he really stands for in the world. For example, is it really God’s own truth that we have the right to exercise our personal autonomy and do as we please, no matter who is harmed, maimed or slaughtered? We ought to take cover whenever the words “God-given” preface this or that political claim.
There is a simplicity about the prophetic message that cuts through the mean and empty talk of our lives: Many of us have been trained to revel in the complexity of things: How many of our sentences begin, “It’s complicated.” It’s complicated. Have you ever heard a prophet say that? Many years ago, Martin Luther King asked his opponents in Alabama a simple question: Who is your God? The Catholic activist Dorothy Day reflected: “If I have achieved anything in my life it is because I wasn’t embarrassed to talk about God.” That’s our Cousin John in a nutshell.
John’s critique of his fellow Jews is in essence a critique of any religious group, including ours, that rests on the comforts of its own righteousness. We have Abraham as our ancestor, say the Jews. We have St. Paul for our patron saint, say the Christians. We have Luther, say the Lutherans. We have Wesley, say the Methodists. Calvin, say the Calvinists. We have Washington, Jefferson, Madison (slaveholders all), say we Americans. We have what President Biden has called “the essential goodness of the American people.” We have our own good hearts, and we rest our case—on ourselves. Here we stand with one foot resting on our own goodness, and the other on our “heritage.” Like a person with one foot on a banana peel—and the other foot on a banana peel.
There are two things going on between John the Baptist and us: one is a hard truth; and one is a beautiful truth. The hard thing is, he wants us to change. The prophet tells the people the secrets of their own heart that they do not want to hear. Change—repent. Change is especially hard any time at any age, but especially in a season we are trying to keep the same. Change is for the New Year, not for Christmas. Because in each of us, there is this fear that if we lose the Christmas as we have always celebrated it—if we don’t have the baked ham and the pudding, if the ones we love are not in their proper place around the table, if a light snow isn’t falling and Bing Crosby isn’t crooning—then maybe we’ve lost it.
But, of course, everything is never in its proper place, and yet nothing is lost. The people we love may be alive in the presence of God, while we feebly struggle below—and this is true in the losses those in our own community have suffered, and yet Christmas still comes. We don’t have to preserve Christmas, as a scene under a glass dome, like the one that sat on the piano in your grandmother’s house. It’s just the reverse: the Incarnation of the Son of God was not meant for perfect people who dwell in unchanging situations, but for those of us in shambles.
Fifty years ago, I served a country church out on the prairie of southern Illinois. We had two sisters in the congregation who had lived (just the two of them) in a ramshackle farm house filled with too much furniture and knick-knacks from late in the Roosevelt administration (Teddy Roosevelt) and surrounded by high weeds and rusting junk. After we moved to another parish, I remember their first Christmas card with its handwritten message, “Christ comes, even to this mess.”
It’s interesting that in the Gospel of Matthew’s version of this same story, the ones John calls a “brood of vipers” are the Pharisees and the Sadducees, religious leaders who opposed both John and Jesus, whereas in our Gospel he calls the people who came out to be baptized a “brood of vipers.” With all due respect to Luke, I’m voting with Matthew on this one. I don’t think the people who came out into the wilderness to be baptized were a brood of vipers. I think they were like us. I think they wanted to be clean. I think they were feeling their way toward renewal and a fresh start.
This brings me to the beautiful thing about John. In the last analysis, he has nothing to offer us but Jesus. He is not the founder of a new philosophy or religion. He offers no advice. He offers only Jesus. Perhaps that’s why Luke calls John’s message “good news,” for it includes the hard thing of change and the beautiful thing of God’s gracious acceptance.
John the Baptist is like the people we love who are now with God. They will never die. They have become eternal by virtue of their new lives in the presence of God. The painter Matthias Gruenewald has captured the eternal John the Baptist in his gorgeous Isenheim Altarpiece, located originally in a hospital chapel in Colmar, France. It is a painting of the crucifixion. It is a crucifixion tableau. Jesus’s mother and other figures are gathered at the foot of the cross. John the Baptist is there too. With arm outstretched he is pointing toward Jesus, as if to say, “He is still the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
There are two problems with that painting, as I a non-expert see it. One is, it is unhistorical. John was already dead by the time Jesus was crucified. But to the artist, John’s witness is eternal and therefore essential to the Christian story. He is alive. Secondly, the painting is anatomically incorrect! The extended arm is too long, as is the finger with which he points at Jesus. The finger is a needle. But there he stands, arm extended, pointing that boney finger like the needle of a compass, forever, at the crucified one. To any who would reduce the Savior to some principle of good cheer or good will, that boney finger says, “Worship him.”
Philosophers, pundits, and politicians come and go. John remains—not as a figure painted on a canvass, but as a beloved, if difficult, member of our family. We need him this Advent as never before—to tell the truth about ourselves, to tell us the secrets of our heart, and to give us only Jesus. He should come more often.