Are you looking forward to Christmas – now there’s a sentence that can mean more than one thing!
Our link theme for the readings today is “Jesus who is to come”.
Last week in the morning we looked at Mark’s account of John the Baptist’s ministry, and today we look at the same events, through John’s eyes.
It’s all about looking forward, and being sure we’re ready for what’s coming. That’s why I said my opening question could have more than one meaning.
I will admit to having a certain sympathy with the humbug club, a group of self confessed grumpy old men from the Victory pub in Walton on the Naze, who are campaigning against Christmas.
“Against Christmas?” you exclaim, “how can the vicar be sympathetic to that”
Well, It’s because the Christmas these chaps are against is the one that starts just after Halloween (and don’t get me started on that) and is a purely commercial exercise. They are in favour of Christmas as being one day long, not three months.
You see I don’t look forward to that kind of Christmas, because it muddies the waters of the true meaning of the festival – not about material gifts and gastronomic excess, but about the gift of a child into poverty, who would live, die and rise again to redeem humanity.
Advent is about preparing for Christmas as in the 25th of December, the mass of Christ, the celebration of his birth but it is also about preparing ourselves for the second advent, the second coming, when there may not be another birth in a stable, but Jesus will return to earth one day. This is of course a good thing, and advent and Christmas are also about giving thanks and rejoicing in the wonderful provision our God has made for our salvation.
In 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul also tells us to rejoice, pray and give thanks. In all circumstances to hold fast to what is good and to avoid evil, so that we may be found to be blameless at 'the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ', which liturgically is now not very far off. So on Christmas day, will you be ready to worship, or just ready to curl up in front of the telly? Of course Paul is clear that the coming of Christ will be a final historical event, not a repeatable act of worship. We vicars struggle sometimes to put across Christmas in a fresh way each year; with the Second Advent, we won’t have that problem!
I think it is very important to look carefully at Paul’s instructions at the end of 1 Thessalonians, which are after all given in the light of the coming of the Lord. We need to be certain we have read this chapter properly for lots of reasons. Some are to do with the theology of the end of the world, but in the time we have today I can’t cover all of that, so let’s focus on verses 16 to 18.
I had a friend a few years ago whose faith was very strange. When she fell over and broke her ankle she said “thank you Lord for that”. I asked her what she was on about and she pointed me to 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 18, so I duly went and read it
“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus”.
The key word is the third one “in”; not “for”. My friend had a skewed vision of how God wanted her to behave; she thanked God that she had broken her ankle. What he was wanting her to do was to thank him for his saving grace, love and power, even though she had broken her ankle. This is no the same thing, is it?
Now obviously in retrospect we can often see that unfortunate circumstances are used by God to bring about the good things in our lives. For example if Ruth had not been off sick from work in 1992 I would never have met her and we wouldn’t be here today. I’m sure many of you can tell similar stories.
But if we’re thinking about advent, it’s not about what’s happening to us, it’s about what’s going to happen with God, and Paul wants his readers to be clear on what that is (hence the “thief in the night” stuff earlier in the chapter) and how they should prepare such that with the help of the Spirit they will be blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the gospel reading we continue the theme of authentic preparation for Jesus who is to come. John the Baptist is preparing the way, but now in John's version the story has been written in a completely fresh way. This is John the Baptist's only appearance in the fourth Gospel, save that the passage continues to verse 37 with the reference to Jesus being the Lamb of God, but that reference to the paschal lamb is about Easter rather than Christmas.
The Evangelist's theological statement about John in verses 6-8 is followed by a short narrative from verse 19 which expands a little on what we saw last week in Mark. Verse 19 looks aggressively anti-Jewish in style but the Greek word Ioudaioi can also be translated Judeans, which is more appropriate here as the priests and Levites in question come from Jerusalem, the capital of the province that the Romans called Judea. They would not actually have been sent by the Pharisees (v. 24) who were a lay group who had little political power, though much social influence.
When questioned, John came clean and said he was not the messiah (as he had disciples, there may have been people who thought he was). Nor was he Elijah, nor the prophet of Deuteronomy 18.15-19 who would be a successor to Moses. His only claim, through the words of Isaiah (40.3 again), is that he prepares the way for the messiah, the successor of Elijah and Moses. John, then, is very keen to make sure people get the right message about the messiah – that it’s Jesus who is to come, and not himself, and that the messiah will not be as people expect – the Lamb of God terminology we read later in the chapter can only have had sacrificial meaning for his original hearers.
The priests' question about why John baptises is odd. Why shouldn't he cleanse people with water in a ritual of repentance? Indeed if you go to Jerusalem today you will see many ancient ritual baths known as mikvahs – or to be more accurate, mikva’ot, in which Jews prepared themselves for a visit to the temple. In these, there is a sort of twin tub system whereby the worshipper walked down one set of steps immersing their body in water, before moving over to another compartment and climbing back out. So baptism, which just means, “dunking” in Greek, was not a new phenomenon; it’s just John’s was more specifically a baptism of repentance in the light of the arrival of God’s promised messiah. He also de-ritualised it by doing it in a river, not in a special bath.
This question of baptism was probably not a Jewish problem from around AD 28, so much as a Christian problem at the end of the first century: why should John baptise when – as we know – Christian baptism is the real baptism? Surprisingly there is no mention here of baptism in the Holy Spirit (cf. Mark 1.8) – we have to wait for John 3.1-10 for that – though John makes it clear that someone greater is about to come after him. And of course Jesus’ command to baptise in the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit re-aligned the parameters of baptism and made it a specifically Christian thing. Let’s not forget that some people in Acts 19 received the Holy Spirit after Paul prays for them and lays his hands on them, because they had only received the baptism of John.
So, Paul and John want their hearers to be ready for Christ’s coming; if we are more concerned about whether the tree, the turkey and the mince pies are ready, then we would do well to reconsider their words.
Not that we have anything to fear, but because God wants us to be ready, and as Paul says, “the one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it”.
