Repentance [Advent 2 - Matthew 3:1-12]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Matthew 3:1-12
Repentance
The first religious
leader who appeared in John’s audience was likely caught off guard – by the attention
he received and the intensity of the rhetoric.
Like the person in the crowd singled out by a comedian: unaware, going
in, that he was about to be featured in the show. But the Gospel says that there were many
Pharisees and Sadducees who ventured to the banks of the Jordan. And that I find curious. After the first guy slunk away red-faced, humiliated,
each subsequent religious leader should have known better.
And still they came.
That either speaks to the overwhelmingly magnetic charisma possessed by
this desert prophet. Or perhaps to the limited
entertainment options of the 1st century. Or, maybe, something else entirely. The Gospel is not terribly clear on this point.
But the Gospel does say that those religious leaders, the clergy
folk, who stood on the shore, came to be baptized – just like everyone else in
the crowd. Only John did not treat them
like everyone else in the crowd. He paid
them very special attention, but not in, like, a good way – not the kind of
attention to which they were accustomed, or that they enjoyed. When he noticed Pharisees or Sadducees in the
congregation, he tailored his delivery; it became more colorful. And he always noticed them because they always
stood out. It was probably the
clothes. Religious professionals have
this habit of wearing distinctly odd clothing.
But despite the harsh treatment, still they came. And despite the predictability of the
message, they came. You see, John’s
message was clear – so was the purpose of his baptism. Both speech and splash supported the same
cause: repentance. If anyone in the audience
was there to hear about something else, they had come to the wrong man in the
wrong place. He wasn’t preparing a new
sermon each week; he wasn’t changing it up and reinventing himself every few
months; he wasn’t keeping it fresh. He
only played his greatest hits.
If you showed up at the river, you came to hear about repentance. At first glance, that does not sound like an
overly appealing topic. And yet, droves
of people came to hear John tell them, or in the case of the religious leaders,
yell at them, to repent.
We often think of
repentance as an admission of wrong-doing, like a confession or an
apology. And while that is not entirely
off-base, there is much more to repentance than simply saying, “I’m sorry.” The Greek word translated “repentance” in
this chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is metanoia. And that word has nothing to do with
begging one’s pardon. Instead it means
something more like turning away from an old way of life and being initiated
into something new. That is the
repentance of which John speaks. In the
context of his fiery message, John was challenging his listeners to abandon all
those things the Empire had conditioned them to value and adopt the ways of the
kingdom of heaven. Which is why John’s proclamation
is summarized in the Bible as, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come
near.” Or said another way: “Metanioa, your citizenship is in heaven.” John was not a self-help guru. This was not about unburdening one’s self or
clearing one’s conscience. Repentance
was a fresh start, a new life – like being born again, being born into a new reality.
And so getting into that water was a big decision. It wasn’t refreshing; it was terrifying. Those who entered did so knowing that things
would be carried away by the current – things that were important to them. That is why, I think, John was so antagonistic
to the religious leaders. Of everyone in
that crowd they had the most to lose – status, standing, security, and good
clothes. John wanted to be sure they
understood what was at stake. Before
they waded in they needed to count the cost.
The hard truth of John’s message is that a life dedicated to the
values that define the kingdom of heaven will not appeal to everyone. Not everyone will be willing to give up birthright
or baggage. We inherit traditions and biases and cultural assumptions. We are born into social status and economic
expectation. And those things can feel
essential, can feel as permanent as a tattoo on the soul.
John, for example, was the son of a priest. He was born into a life of status and
standing and security. He inherited a
good life. But God recruited him for a
very different role in the kingdom of heaven.
And so John traded it all for locusts and pruned skin. He traded a comfortable life for an early
death. The Pharisees and Sadducees
should have been his friends, his social circle; instead he spent his adult
life challenging them, angering many, convincing probably very few. John paid a steep price for the place in the
kingdom of heaven.
Now the good news is, not everyone is called to be a prophet –
and by prophet I don’t mean someone who bullies people on social media. We have a lot of those kind of prophets in
our world. But a true prophet, a prophet
like John the Baptist is rare. Rachel
Held Evans says, a prophet is “truth-teller who sees things as they really are –
past, present, and future – and who challenges their community to both accept that
reality and imagine a better one.”[1]
Walter Brueggemann writes, “It is the
vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on
conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one [the most powerful
people] want to urge as the only thinkable [future].”[2]
John was that kind of prophet. He was aware of the corrosive influence of
the Empire in which he and his people lived, the way in which the values – production
and consumption, violence and success – sucked the humanity out of people. And he could imagine a different kind of
world – a world that ran on love and mercy, justice and kindness. He proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of
heaven. But when one kingdom rises,
another falls and so also he was later killed for treason. The prophet’s work is subversive work, work that
always comes from the margins – not from the Temple but from the river bank on
the outskirts of town; true prophets don’t rack up hearts on twitter, mostly
they make people mad, so mad that folks often try to shout them down and shut
them down. In our society the prophetic vocation
is not typically the calling of the clergy; clergy are too institutional. It is the work of artists and poets and
comedians – those who can still imagine this world turned upside, those who can
still imagine beauty pushing through the cracks in the pavement.
In our Gospel story today there were great crowds but only
one prophet. So you are probably not
called to be a prophet. Instead you are more
likely called to accept the challenge of the prophet: to allow the chaff of
your life to be blown away by the wind of the Spirit. The call to repentance is a costly call; you
will lose something. But it will not
kill you.
It is scary to meet God on the threshing floor because it is
difficult for us to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff of our lives, to
discern between the things that really matter and those that don’t. Repentance is hard because it feels like we
might lose the very things that keep us alive.
But God only blows away the chaff.
The chaff is just the husk that surrounds the wheat. And it must be discarded if the wheat is to
emerge.
Like the cocoon left behind by the butterfly, we are called to
leave behind the old assumptions of this tired age. To store up our treasures in heaven, to
invest in things eternal. To imagine,
with the prophets, the world of God’s dreams.
We weren’t created to be consumers, to be cogs, to be content in this old
dispensation. We were created to live in
the kingdom of heaven – a kingdom that is coming ever nearer. A kingdom that is our destiny, that, in this
Advent season we are reminded, is the destiny of this world.
The prophet’s call is for us to live now as if the kingdom come is
the reality – because it is – even if it difficult to see God at work through
the pain and suffering that clouds our vision, the kingdom is breaking into our
lives and our world. The prophet’s call
is to metanioa. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come
near. Repentance is not making an
apology; repentance is making a fresh start, starting a new life – like being
born again – no longer crawling in the dirt but soaring on the wind. Repentance will cost you but it won’t kill
you. In fact, true repentance is what
will make you come alive.
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