I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to use this space this week to offer a few comments on our Gospel reading that may be helpful to hear in advance, for two reasons: 1) my sermon will be focusing on the epistle this week, and 2) John the Baptist’s words in the Gospel are quite harsh and (at least in my opinion) often misunderstood.

(Here’s a link to the whole Gospel reading, if you want the full context before reading on.)

You may have heard of the “praise sandwich” sometimes taught to aspiring managers or teachers; when offering feedback, they’re told, begin and end with the positive and stick the “constructive criticism” in the middle. In this week’s gospel, John offers more of a “hellfire sandwich.”

The passage is split into three paragraphs. In the first, John shouts at the crowds of people coming out to be baptized by him in the Jordan: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? … Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” In the third, John returns to his fiery theme: “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand… to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

And then, strangely, the text ends: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

It’s easy to hear these words and think that John is declaring that humanity will be divided into two parts: the good and the bad, the saved and the damned; the branches that bear good fruit and the branches that are pruned and burned; the wheat gathered into the granary and the chaff burned with unquenchable fire. Not many of us in the year 2021 in a pluralistic-and-mostly-irreligious city like Boston are very comfortable with this. In the abstract, it’s troubling: how could a good God burn people with unquenchable fire? But when we make it concrete, it’s even worse: why would John say this about my friend, my neighbor, my family member who doesn’t believe the same things I do? This isn’t “good news” at all!

I want to make one observation, though, about the image of the wheat and the chaff, the granary and the unquenchable fire, that leads me, at least, into quite a different understanding of this passage. (NB: As a city kid I sometimes get myself into trouble with agrarian metaphors; send me an email if I get this one wrong!)

“Wheat” and “chaff” are not two different kinds of plants that grow in a field together, which the farmer must sort out, one from another, destroying those of one kind and saving the others. Instead, they’re two pieces of the same thing. The “chaff” is the light husk that protects the “kernel” of the grain, the “wheat” proper. Even “whole wheat” flour is simply using that whole kernel; the chaff has to go. (And before the invention of modern threshing machines, this was done using a “winnowing fork”: the farmer could use what was essentially a large shovel to break the chaff apart from the wheat and then throw the harvested grain up into the air, causing the lighter chaff to fly away and the heavier kernels to fall to the ground.)

So I invite you to consider: What would it mean if the dividing line between the wheat and the chaff ran not between people, but within people? What would it mean if John’s point was not “Alice is wheat and Greg is chaff, Alice will be saved and Greg will be burned” but that each of us is like a grain of wheat covered with chaff, that each of us needs to be husked, that each of us has things that need to be broken apart and sifted out? (and, yes, maybe burned like the yard waste they are!)

In fact this reading then makes sense of the middle of John’s “fire sandwich,” in which he gives practical advice to individuals on how to repent, how to reform their lives. If you’re a tax collector, don’t take a little more than you’re owed to pad your salary. If you’re a soldier, don’t plunder from the locals. If you have two coats, share one; if you have extra food, share some. John doesn’t condemn a single one of those who come to him to fiery damnation: he identifies the chaff in their lives, and invites them to burn it.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, this image transforms a gospel of condemnation and destruction into a gospel that is really gospel, really “good news.” Because I know that I have chaff that needs to be thrown away; and now John tells me that one whose sandals he’s not even worthy to untie is coming with his winnowing fork in his hand, to burn the chaffiest bits of me up, and to gather my best wheat into his granary. Oh, Lord, you can’t come soon enough!

Greg