Every year, on the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with a stark message: “Repent!” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2)
John is the cousin of Jesus, sometimes called the “forerunner.” He’s often depicted in art literally pointing the way to Christ. His prophetic ministry comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and it’s clear that many of John the Baptist’s followers soon became followers of Jesus as well. But John’s message in our gospel this morning, is hardly about Christ at all. He doesn’t mention Jesus by name, or say that he is the Messiah. He makes this vague reference to the “one who is more powerful than I” simply to increase the urgency of his message: if you don’t repent now, you’re going to be chaff, not wheat, when the Messiah comes. Like everything else he says, his messianic prophecy is another variation on a single, simple, theme: “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (3:2)
Except that simple theme of “repentance” is not that simple, because this is the Bible, and when we read the Bible, two thousand years later, things are almost never quite as simple as they seem.
In the modern American Christian tradition, when we hear this message of repentance, we often assume that John is addressing us as individuals. In our culture, we tend to think that “sin” means an individual moral failing. So it sounds like John’s message is that you and you and you should repent. John says to the crowds, I baptize you and you and you with water for repentance, so that you will be saved from your sin.
Depending on your exact spiritual orientation and your own beliefs, you may either love this or hate it. Some people find an emphasis on individual sin, repentance, and forgiveness to be incredibly life-giving. Other people can’t stand it. So if you love this idea that you as an individual need to repent, and if it draws you into a time of reflection and self-examination during Advent, then that’s wonderful; and I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it. And if you hate the idea that you, as an individual, need to repent, if it makes you shut down and write John off as yet another crazed street preacher, yet another Puritan consumed with “the haunting fear,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “that someone, somewhere may be happy” … then I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it.
Because when John the Baptist calls the people to “repent,” there’s a sense in which he’s addressing each individual. But there’s another, very real sense in which the call for repentance is not addressed to “you” and “you” and “you,” but to “you,” to us, to all of us, humankind as a whole.
The whole story, after all, is told in collective terms. Matthew doesn’t say that “many people from Jerusalem” came to him, but that “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea” came, and were baptized, confessing their sins. (3:5) And he actually doesn’t say “confessing their sins.” He says “confessing their sin,” in the singular; and our translators translate it “sins,” plural. It’s easy for preachers to make too much out of this sort of thing, but I think in this moment it’s important, because it fits with the story. It maintains that same focus on the collective. It suggests that what John the Baptist is out there preaching about is not only individual sin. It’s a collective, social state of sin.
Jesus and John lived in a society continually wracked by violent revolution, by attempts to establish or reestablish the kingdom of God on earth through the force of arms, by rebellions whose leaders often turned against one another as much as they did the Romans. Jesus tried to teach another way to establish God’s kingdom, a way of peace and love. And John was trying to tell the people that the kingdom of heaven had come near—not through their attempts to create it by force, but through the coming of one who was more powerful than he was, but whose power would turn out to be a paradox: whose moment of greatest strength would look like weakness, and whose greatest success would look like failure. The kingdom of heaven was coming near, not with the sword but on the Cross, and that made all the difference.
We, too, live in a world that’s full of violence. We live in a world very unlike Isaiah’s vision, a world in which we do still “hurt” and “destroy,” in ways small and large. (Isaiah 11:9) We do not live “in harmony with one another,” as Paul writes to the Romans. (Romans 15:5) We—as a society, as a species—need to repent. We need to turn away from the path of hatred and violence and turn toward the way of reconciliation and love.
But that doesn’t mean the burden is all on you.
My favorite thing about this passage from Isaiah—and the one thing to remember from this sermon, if you remember nothing else—is that peace is not a compromise between predators and prey. Peace is a world of vegetarian wolves. It’s not the armed peace of mutually-assured destruction we have in this world. It’s not that the wolves eat the lambs on Mondays, and the sheep eat the wolf pups on Wednesdays. No. The wolf and the lamb live together. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling, dwell in peace. The bears graze, and the lion eats straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-8) It’s the predators who need to repent, not the prey.
So what are we to do, we little lambs in a world full of wolves? Is it safe yet to stick our hands into the adder’s den? Maybe not. But we can recognize and cherish the power of the lamb. We can build communities of peace. We can live with one another as if the kingdom of heaven had not simply come near, but had already come. We can “welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed us.” (Rom. 15:7)
And we can recognize, as well, that there is within each one of us a little bit of wolf, and a little bit of lamb; a little bit of cow and a little bit of bear. We are not either chaff or wheat, but each one of us is a grain, consisting of both. The threshing process that John the Baptist foretells doesn’t happen between us, as if “you” and “you” were chaff and “you” and “you” were wheat. It happens within us, not only as a whole society but within each one of us as well. We all have wolves and bears within us who need to give up meat. We all have chaff that needs to be burned away.
It sometimes feels like there is nothing I can do about the violence and anger of this world, nothing I can do to bring us closer to Isaiah’s vision of peace. But I know that there’s a little bit of the wolf in my heart, too, that would sometimes rather growl at the lamb than lie down with it in peace. I pray that the Holy Spirit may come and thresh us all, to burn away the chaff that is within my heart and your heart and our world, allowing us to live with ourselves and one another in something a little more like peace. So “may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant [us all] to live in harmony with one another,” and “may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen. (Rom. 15:5, 13)